ABSTRACT
Our purpose in raising the question of the Ombudsman and the prison system at this time is twofold. First, and most obviously, the Woolf report has put the idea of justice in our prisons at the top of the reform agenda, and some changes to secure the better redress of prisoners’ grievances are clearly on their way. Discussion of these changes at a forum such as this is thus desirable. But second, and arguably more important, is our anxiety that Ombudsman studies in the United Kingdom may have been less sympathetic to the plight of prisoners than is reasonably justified. This is not to say that their special vulnerability to administrative injustice is never mentioned, though sometimes this has been the case, but more that this sensibility is often limited by the suggestion that as a group of citizens - and we use the term citizens deliberately - they are more prone to complain than others; that they clog up complaints procedures because they have too much time on their hands, or that they somehow enjoy the attention which complaints attract.30 Such an attitude, in our view, not only does less than justice to most prisoners, it also serves to block more reasoned argument about the limits of existing procedures and how they might be changed.
