Why am I against prison management? "First, there are there are long-standing general criticisms of quantitative performance targets as being meaningless as a result of their technical flaws and because the work of complex social institutions cannot be credibly reduced to performance measures. Prison managers I have interviewed are not slavishly uncritical of managerial measurement and indeed many were conscious of their limitations including that they do not always reflect what is important; they are inflexible, not always reflecting the context, and; these measures did not take account of quality. More theoretically, Richard Sparks argued that:
‘…managerialism — with its reliance on abstract systems and categories — will typically not be too interested in the more ‘dense’ social relations, and the sensitivity to local historical traditions and past events, implied by the concept of ‘a sense of place’.’
In other words, rigid, centrally generated measures do not meaningfully capture the lived experience and realities of life in a particular prison. It is for this reason that former Chief Inspector of Prisons, Dame Anne Owers, described the creation of ‘virtual prison’ that is ‘the one that exists in the governor’s office, at headquarters, in the minister’s red boxes — as compared with the ‘actual prison’ being operated on the ground’. In other words, these measures are lacking in significance, value and meaning.
A second, and chronic problem of managerialism is that of gaming the system. This describes both a process whereby those subjected to a system of management resort to varying strategies and practices, including illegitimate ones, in order to meet the targets, without concern for the underlying intention of the measures. Gaming can be particularly induced by systems that incorporate a degree of self-interest either through financial rewards or the use of competitive performance tables. There were clearly examples in the sites I conducted research where performance information was submitted that was not accurate. For example, purposeful activity figures were submitted on a standardised form without reflecting the real time spent working; official start and finish times would be recorded rather than actual times and interruptions would not be captured.
Other examples included offending behaviour programme completions being carried between accounting years in order to meet targets; there were criticisms of inaccurate recording of accidents and serious assaults in some prisons; it was stated that prisoners were moved around the prison at the end of each month in order to meet overcrowding targets (i.e. they were moved out of doubled cells); staff who had left one prison were still counted as part of the control and restraint team; and the dates on late complaint forms were amended so that they appeared to have been submitted on time. These practices were widely carried out and accepted. It was generally viewed that such practices were necessary in order to ensure that the official performance of the prison as expressed in targets was maintained. This distortion and inaccuracy has been has been described as a chronic feature of managerial practices in prisons, and is a recognised feature of contemporary performance measurement across organisations. .... Gaming is not just a few bad apples, it is a chronic feature of the system of managerialism, a system that creates a world in which the requirement to comply and meet targets is stronger that normative values such as honesty, transparency and integrity.
The third concern is that managerial approaches create moral blindness, a term that refers to a lack of awareness or insensitivity to the moral dimensions of one’s life, work and relations with others. Zygmunt Bauman has argued that the conditions of the contemporary world, including managerial practices, have promoted moral blindness by placing economic calculus above moral concern. In a study of criminal justice managers in the early 1990s, Andrew Rutherford described three dominant credos: punitive (a strongly held dislike of prisoners and desire to see them punished); liberal humanitarian (empathy for offenders and victims, desire to respect their rights and offer opportunities for rehabilitation, and; expedient managerialism (concerned with disposing of the task at hand as efficiently as possible). Rutherford suggested that expedient managerialism was growing in influence, and subsequent research on prison managers has confirmed its progress towards ideological domination.
Liebling and Crewe have described that from 2007 onwards, intensified by the pressures of austerity, economy and efficiency were prioritized above any moral mission. They described this as an era of ‘managerialism-minus’, characterised as combining ‘economic rationalism’ with ‘punitive minimalism’ offering a no frills form of imprisonment. This shift was apparently accepted and implemented without resistance from managers, despite any personal misgivings they felt. This illustrates how managerialism can lead to moral ambivalence, a culture of corporate passivity and compliance. As Hannah Arendt has so chillingly illustrated, such everyday willingness to comply is banal and morally dangerous.
Fourth, despite the claims of ideological advocates, managerialism has not proven to be a panacea. Indeed, it is possible to point to significant failures than show that it is ineffective. In his 2013 Perrie Lecture, the then Chief Inspector of Prisons, Nick Hardwick drew the lessons from the inquiry into the failure of Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, conducted by Robert Francis. In this report, Francis concluded that ‘patients were routinely neglected by a Trust that was preoccupied with cost cutting, targets and processes and which lost sight of its fundamental responsibility to provide safe care’. Hardwick drew a parallel with the deteriorating conditions in prisons at that time. It is not hard to find further examples in the following years.
Evidence presented to the Justice Select Committee, in their 2017-18 inquiry into the damning inspection report at HMP Liverpool showed that monitoring and reporting systems singularly failed to highlight the problems in the prison at that time. Self-reports by the prison over-estimated their progress and external management checks failed to pick up this gap. The processes of monitoring created a virtual prison distant from the reality. This is not an isolated example, it is an illustration of a chronic problem of managerialism and compliance cultures. In his evidence to the select committee, Michael Spurr described:
‘Governors across the system have been coping with a huge amount of challenge. In one sense, they and their staff — Liverpool was the same — were in coping mode. They were saying ‘we will make this work’.
This desire to quietly comply or have the appearance of doing so, no matter what the demands, is a feature of managerialism.
The over-reliance on measurement combined with the blind faith of complaint managers creates virtual prisons, or what Onora O’Neill has described as a ‘fantasy of total control’. In fact they offer no guarantees of success instead they potentially offer a dangerous illusion.
The fifth concern is that performance measures obscure and entrench inequality. The problems of inequality in prisons, for both staff and prisoners, have been consistently highlighted. In my research, many people argued that systems of measurement and monitoring meant that there was a level playing field in which everyone had an equal opportunity. Such a view is, at best limited. While monitoring is an important element of any strategy for change, overreliance upon this can obscure the deeper culture and structures of inequality. In my research on managers, many, particularly women and people from minority groups, have described the experience of resistance from others, being overlooked or being unable to access informal sponsorship from more senior colleagues. They have also described how this has made it more difficult to achieve targets, or the privilege of such support has made it easier for others to do so. From this perspective measurement did not create a level playing field, but instead obscured the reality behind the numbers."
- Jamie Bennett, "Against Prison Management: Perrie Lectures 2019," Prison Service Journal no. 247 (January 2020): 5-7.
[I also read Bennett's longer book on the same subject this year, but this lecture does a good job of capturing the main contours of the argument. I'm fully in favour of drawing lessons from critical voices of incarceration, even when coming from someone who ran a prison, especially when broader conclusions are easy enough to draw.]
