ABSTRACT
It is difficult to define what corrections officers do, let alone assess how well they have done it. Nevertheless, it is clear that the direct work product that these officers produce is not security, control or safety but personal interactions between themselves and prisoners. The affective nature of these interactions directly influences the level of tension between officers and prisoners and indirectly influences the safety, security and control within the prison. (Gilbert 1997: 53)
In the control of prisoners, officers shall seek to influence them through their own example and leadership, and to enlist their willing co-operation. (Prison Rule 6(2))
At the end of the day, nothing else that we can say will be as important as the general proposition that relations between staff and prisoners are at the heart of the whole prison system and that control and security flow from getting that relationship right. Prisons cannot be run by coercion: they depend on staff having a firm, confident and humane approach that enables them to maintain close contact with prisoners without abrasive confrontation. (Home Office 1984: para. 16)
It is a well-established maxim that staff-prisoner relationships matter. The impact of staff-prisoner relationships and of staff behaviour more generally on the quality of a regime is crucial:
Whatever statements of the policy may promise, it is the local staff who are ultimately responsible for putting policy into effect. Introducing changes in programme activity may be an essential first step in changing the nature of a regime but the way in which staff supervise new activities will be a major determinant of the trainee’s [sic] experience. (Thornton et al. 1984: para. 3.3)
In his review of prison regimes, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, Judge Tumim found that:
the prison officer needs to be skilled in specific areas of prison work, and there is considerable job satisfaction to be gained from this. One of the problems facing prison staff over the years has been a lack of clear job specifications or an appreciation of the skills needed for prison work … Despite the development of management techniques which emphasise the diversity of prison work, we found few examples of prison staff working flexibly or with a high expectation of the job. (HMCIP 1993a: paras 8.2(1) and 8.7)
Despite the centrality of staff-prisoner relationships to the running of prisons (Home Office 1984; Sparks et al. 1996), few satisfactory analyses of the nature of the staff-prisoner relationship have been conducted.1 There has been wide recognition of the significance of staff-prisoner relationships to order (see, for example, Home Office 1984; Ditchfield 1990; Sparks et al. 1996), to justice (Home Office 1991), to security (Home Office 1995) and to constructive regimes (Dunbar 1985). However, it is likely that different models of the staff-prisoner relationship are implicit in these different visions. A lack of clarity about what the ‘right’ relationship might be and how this might be achieved has become particularly evident in the light of recent reports exposing the dangers of conditioning, the under-enforcement of rules relating to security and the effects of under-management on staff behaviour (see, for example, Home Office 1994, 1995). Staffprisoner relationships can go wrong in several different ways – they can be too close, too flexible, too distant and too rigid (see Sparks et al. 1996). As Lucas demonstrates in relation to justice (Lucas 1980), it is easier to identify wrong relationships (injustice) than to specify right relationships (justice). There is a need for clearer thinking about what ‘a right relationship’ is.
