Significant Change is Likely in our Prisons. The Question is, Change in What Direction?
| DOI | 10.1177/0264550503502005 |
| Published date | 01 June 2003 |
| Author | Roger Houchin |
| Date | 01 June 2003 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
05 PRB 50-2 Houchin (JB/D) 30/4/03 1:25 pm Page 142
Comment
Probation Journal
The Journal of Community and Criminal Justice
Copyright © 2003 NAPO Vol 50(2): 142–148
[0264-5505(200306)50:2;142–148;033764]
www.napo.org.uk
www.sagepublications.com
Significant change is likely in our prisons.
The question is, change in what direction?
Roger Houchin, Glasgow Caledonian University
Abstract The June 2002 edition of Probation Journal was a special issue on
‘Prisons, Prisoners and Resettlement’. It contained a number of articles address-
ing the theme of prison reform and obstacles to change in the prison system. This
article develops some of that discussion and argues that radical change in the
prison system may be closer than is generally thought.
Keywords complexity, corrections, human rights, incapacitation, organizational
change, prisons
Introduction
Of the articles in the June 2002 special issue of Probation Journal, it was those
by Pat Carlen (2002), Vivien Stern (2002) and Alison Liebling (2002) that
most interested me. Each of these articles conveys a sense of the prison system’s
ambivalence towards any reform that ameliorates the prisoner’s condition. Each
portrays the system as comfortable, working within a conception of the prison task
as operational and routine. I will discuss in more detail the consideration which
each of these articles gives to inhibitors of reform, and will suggest that radical
change could be more likely now than it has been since the inception of the
modern prison. Referring briefly to the insights of Mike Nellis’s (2002) article on
the US prison and parole system, I will go on to suggest that unless an un-
ambiguous commitment is given to a meaningful and achievable purpose for the
system, its increasing instability in the face of situational stressors will leave it
vulnerable to unpredictable transformation.
Inhibitors to reform
Carlen argues that each attempt to introduce reform in women’s prisons has been
compromised by what she terms ‘carceral clawback’, a persistent tendency of the
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Houchin ● Significant change in our prisons
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prison system to subordinate other objectives to the perceived requirements of
control and security. Implicit in Stern’s discussion of citizenship is the conclusion
that despite the progress that has been made in the recognition of fundamental
rights of prisoners, their status in the UK still has many of the characteristics of the
outcast. Liebling, meanwhile, describes research she is undertaking to assess the
success of management initiatives intended to improve the cultural climate of prob-
lematic English prisons. She notes that the reforming agenda outlined in the Woolf
Report had, until these recent initiatives, been sidelined by managerial preoccu-
pation with the operational response to a succession of crises. The inhibitor to good
performance in Liebling’s analysis has been operational crisis. The inhibitor to
legitimacy for Stern has been an underlying value ambivalence. The inhibitors to
reform for Carlen have been protection of interest and expediency. There are
strong resonances between the pieces and none claims that their attributions are
exclusive.
To an extent, it is unsurprising that an institution as complex as a prison system
absorbs, reinterprets and modifies reform initiatives and brings them into
conformity with its established patterns of operation. Like all complex systems, the
prison organization has established more or less stable sets of interdependency
between its various parts. A consequence of that network of interdependencies is
that attempts to bring about change in one area of the system come into conflict
with patterns of operation in other parts. It is not unusual that the reaction of a
complex system to an attempt to change it results in the established patterns of
operation persisting and the change initiative being neutralized.
However, we should not expect this status quo to remain indefinitely, and I shall
discuss this in more detail later. Before that, I will focus on the coherence of
organizational purpose in British prisons and will argue that such purpose in prison
reform has been unclear; consequently, individual reform initiatives have been
introduced without the support of a deeper, more generalized validation and in
my view, it is this predominantly that has led to the ineffectiveness of initiatives for
change.
Does the prison system have a purpose?
In considering this...
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