ABSTRACT
The policy of Incentives and Earned Privileges (IEP) brought the issue of discretion to the attention of those interested in prison work in England and Wales. The IEP policy essentially required governors of every establishment to draw up and introduce a system of encouraging and rewarding ‘good’ behaviour by prisoners and deterring ‘bad’ behaviour. It was based on the use of three levels of privileges: basic, standard and enhanced. It was a popular policy
within establishments, but it was poorly and speedily implemented, with no training, in about 30 establishments in mid-1995, and extended progressively to the rest by early 1996, with limited opportunity to learn from and apply early experience of the policy’s operation. Staff could now allocate prisoners to basic, standard or enhanced levels of privileges, based on their behaviour (that is, staff judgement about their behaviour based on each establishment’s local IEP scheme). The Cambridge Institute of Criminology was invited to carry out a two-year evaluation of the operation and effects of this new policy (Liebling et al. 1997). In one of the five prisons we studied over the two years of the evaluation, very different numbers of prisoners were allocated to the basic level of privileges on different wings. Our study was both a before and after (outcomes) study, and a ‘process’ study of how the policy was implemented. During the process part of our work, we noted these variations in the ‘resort to basic’, particularly in one of our establishments. We looked more closely. Differences between prisoners could not account for these variations. Using our before and after data, we were able to link this finding about the disproportionate use of ‘basic’ to aspects of life on each wing. What we found was that staff, on the wing where relationships with prisoners were poor, resorted to the formal procedures at their disposal far sooner than staff on wings where reasonable relationships were found. They were less likely to warn prisoners first, to engage with them about their behaviour or to intervene in situations brewing on the wing. Instead, they retreated more into their offices and used formal disciplinary and quasi-disciplinary tools to manage prisoner behaviour. Linked to this distance between staff and prisoners were higher levels of fear among prisoners, more trade and higher stakes. The wing where this ‘standoff’ pattern was most marked subsequently went on to experience a major disturbance towards the end of our research (Liebling 1999). Staff were rigorously resisted by prisoners because they used too much power of the wrong sort.
