Prison staff in the public and private sector

The privatisation of prisons has been described as the ‘penal experiment of the century’, and as ‘one of the most important [recent] developments in penal administration’ (Harding 2001: 269) but, with a few exceptions, relatively little formal or independent evaluation of its problems and successes has been conducted to date (see James et al. 1997; Moyle 1995; Liebling, assisted by Arnold 2004). The two main motivations for privatisation in the UK — increased value for money and improvements to prison staff culture — make it clear that prison staff constitute one of two key experimental variables in this largely sociologically undocumented penal development. The other key variable is management approach and innovation. ¹