Penology Lecture 3 --> Running a Prison
- Created by: EmilyEther
- Created on: 13-10-20 12:32
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- Running a Prison
- Prison Managerialism
- The need to manipulate prison life to turn it into a 'positive and optimistic' environment
- Need humanity, punitiveness and expedient managerialism
- Movement towards hierarchical structures
- Monitoring staff through target setting and info technology, HR
- Developments:
- Changes in organizational structures and practices
- Normative changes that provide ways of thinking about legitimizing organizational practice
- Shaping the agency of workers
- Some reluctant PMs have been required to change
- 4 Types of Ideal Governors
- General Managers --> focus on performance and adopt an approach based upon their operational experience
- Chief Officers --> work their way through the ranks, academic background
- Liberal Idealists --> morality of imprisonment, academic background
- Conforming Mavericks --> innovative practices whilst achieving the majority of conventional targets
- Changes to PM
- Increasingly hierarchical divisions of labour
- 'Blasé' professionals less concerned about moral aspects of imprisonment
- Individual Agency
- POs do not blindly accept rules and follow them
- Act of 'balancing'
- Key Performance Targets (KPTs)
- Decency and Health -> suicide and self-harm
- Organisational Efficiency and Effectiveness -> completion of staff appraisals, timely responses to prisoner complaints etc
- Regimes -> prposeful activity and the attaintment of prisoner qualifications
- Safety -> assaults and accidents
- Security -> escapes, breach of temporary release and completion of searchers
- Placing on a 'league table'
- 'Get a kicking' if they do not meet the targets
- Extreme distraught if a target is not met
- Limiations of KPTs:
- Targets did not always reflect what was important inside a prison
- Described as 'inflexible'
- Measures concerned with quantity not quality
- Deliberate gaming and manipulation of figures
- Measuring the Quality of Prison Life (MQPL)
- Taken into account when reviewing individual prisons
- Some managers take pirsoner's POVs with a 'pinch of salt'
- Some prisoners have 'an axe to grind' and say bad things deliberately
- Not much acted upon when criticism comes back from the MQPL report
- Prison Managerialism
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