ABSTRACT
The final phase of prison administration during the ‘Troubles’, between the 1980s and the Belfast Agreement (1998), saw the development of policies that were intended to normalize relations between the prison authorities and political prisoners. As we have seen, this was advanced by four interconnecting developments: the management of the abnormal conditions of political imprisonment through the application of managerial and technocratic solutions; a programme of prison building and reforms (HMP Maghaberry opened during this time); placing a greater emphasis on public accountability and transparency, including greater operational efficiency and cost consciousness; and encouraging inmate participation. Yet, whilst these initiatives were
officially represented as a framework for achieving the ‘end of conflict’ in the prisons, they were far from being politically neutral or lacking in administrative intrigue. Rather, the implementation of prison reforms came to reflect a different paradigm in which ‘strategic plans, aims, and objectives became expressions of the battleground upon which the prison authorities chose either to resist or engage constructively with prisoners … they did not remove the underlying struggles’ (McEvoy 2001: 280, emphasis added). Nevertheless, McEvoy’s point is that the managerialist approach to ‘normalization’ was not devoid of progressive changes that contributed to the relatively bloodless resolution of conflict in prison in the 1990s. However, very few of these new initiatives brought a significant material improvement to women’s prison regimes. Furthermore, it is clear from the very terms of these objectives that women prisoners did not feature in the grand design of prison policy as meriting specific arrangements that would make issues such as pre-release training, compassionate leave, parole and other conditions relevant to their needs. Neither were they imagined to be active participants in the processes of direct or constructive engagement between prisoners and the administration.
