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GOVERNANCE, PERFORMANCE, AND CAPACITY STRESS: THE CHRONIC CASE OF PRISON CROWDING

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Date01 September 2014
Published date01 September 2014
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12109
766 REVIEWS
GOVERNANCE, PERFORMANCE, AND CAPACITY STRESS: THE CHRONIC CASE
OF PRISON CROWDING
Simon Bastow
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 296 pp., $95.00 (hb), ISBN 9781137289155
‘The forces are far greater than you can inuence’ (p. 225). This is not a quote from a
thrilling movie, but a statement of a former senior ofcial in the UK Prison Service. He
refers to forces that cause prisons to operate under constant pressure. The UK has been
dealing with prison crowding problems since 1877, but still lacks an appropriate solu-
tion. Strikingly,the prison system has been sustained over this long period of time, coping
with crowding problems. Simon Bastow explains in his book Governance, Performance, and
Capacity Stress what exactly sustains the British prison system even though it is constantly
under pressure.
This book presents a new concept: chronic capacity stress (CCS) – the chronic stress on
the capacity of a policy system to live up to external expectations. CCS is both the symptom
and the cause of malfunction in the overall governance of the prison system. The adaptive
behaviour of actors, forging their autonomy and dealing with system constraints, plays a
key role in the persistence of capacity problems. Actors seek a balance between coping with
capacity problems, benign resistance to modernize, and a fatalistic perception that change
Public Administration Vol.92, No. 3, 2014 (761–768)
© 2014 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.

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