The impact of performance management culture on prison-based Therapeutic Communities
| Author | Guy Shefer |
| Published date | 01 July 2012 |
| Date | 01 July 2012 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1477370812448032 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
2012
Article
European Journal of Criminology
9(4) 407 –424
The impact of performance
© The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/1477370812448032
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prison-based Therapeutic
Communities
Guy Shefer
University of Bedfordshire, UK
Abstract
Based on a focused ethnographic study, this paper demonstrates how performance measurement
culture affects the programme integrity of two English prison-based Therapeutic Communities.
The study reveals how completion targets limited staff discretion in both programmes, although
the two handled these pressures through different strategies. The paper analyses the factors that
shaped these strategies and their consequences. It is argued that, whatever the reasons behind the
recent flourishing of rehabilitation programmes in prison, their day-to-day monitoring reflects a
highly managerialistic approach. Although the promotion of an entirely ‘target-less’ rehabilitation
environment may not be realistic, the paper suggests that over-reliance on completion targets can
be highly damaging to the fidelity of the implementation of such programmes.
Keywords
audit, managerialism, performance management culture, prison, Therapeutic Communities
Introduction
One of the more surprising parallel trends to have characterized the English prison
system over the past 20 years is the increasing ascendancy of performance measurement
culture and other managerialistic pressures side by side with the rediscovery of
rehabilitation. Although there is continuing debate about the extent to which these two
trends are consistent or in conflict with each other, existing research tells us little about
the impact of managerialism or performance measurement culture on the approaches
used to monitor, fund and supervise rehabilitation programmes.
Corresponding author:
Guy Shefer, Tilda Goldberg Centre for Social Work and Social Care, University of Bedfordshire, Luton,
Bedfordshire, LU1 3JU, UK.
Email: guy.shefer@cantab.net
408
European Journal of Criminology 9(4)
The present article seeks to address this gap by exploring the interrelationship between
the performance measurement culture and the ever-expanding rehabilitative enterprise.
It shows what happens when prison-based programmes are required to operate within a
highly managerialistic environment and to adjust to the demands of performance meas-
urement culture. More specifically, the article discusses the impact of audit procedures
and completion rate targets upon two rehabilitative programmes operating in two English
prisons. The article investigates the ways in which managerialistic pressures affect pro-
gramme managers, shape their rule-enforcement policies and dictate – in ways not
always intended by the monitoring bodies – the level of programme integrity.1
The new penology and the rediscovery of rehabilitation
Twenty years ago, Feeley and Simon (1992) identified the emergence of a new set of
penal discourses, objectives and techniques, which they referred to as ‘the new penology’.
According to these authors, ‘the new penology’ was preoccupied with actuarial
considerations and with notions of probability and risk. It deployed new techniques that
targeted offenders as an aggregate rather than as individuals and represented a decline in
the significance of reducing recidivism as a focus of criminal justice systems. The new
penology, they argued, prioritized the control of internal systems rather than rehabilitative
qualities: ‘the task is managerial, not transformative’ (Feeley and Simon, 1992: 452).
In the context of the criminal justice system in England and Wales, and particularly its
prison system, the two decades that followed the publication of their article corroborated
Feeley and Simon’s analysis of the increasing centrality of actuarial considerations as
well as other aspects of what is now widely termed ‘managerialism’. Likewise, notions
of risk and the emphasis on public protection became the dominant tone in Prison Service
rhetoric and the driving force behind many Prison Service policies (Crewe, 2009;
Garland, 2001). However, the accuracy of the prediction that criminal justice systems
would lose interest in recidivism is harder to assess, especially given the considerable
expansion of rehabilitative interventions in the English and Welsh prison system since
the mid 1990s. This expansion of interventions, and the ‘What Works’ framework devel-
oped to verify their effectiveness, followed some promising results of meta-analyses
assessing the effectiveness of such programmes (in particular, Andrews et al., 1990;
Lipsey, 1992), which created a new wave of optimism regarding prison-based interven-
tions. As a result, an unprecedented number of prisoners are currently engaged in various
forms of rehabilitative programme. During 2007–8, more than 18,000 prisoners in
England and Wales took part in some form of rehabilitative intervention, including
offending behaviour programmes, drug treatment schemes and courses for sex offenders
(Prison Service, 2008).
Given Feeley and Simon’s comment about the focus on the managerial rather than the
transformative, the rediscovery of rehabilitation in the past two decades appears incon-
sistent with their ‘new penology’ thesis (Robinson, 2002). Over the years, some attempts
to reconcile the renewed interest in rehabilitative programmes with the main ideas of
new penology were made. Garland (2001: 175) suggested that the rediscovery of reha-
bilitation is to be explained by the growing concern about risk, resulting in a new kind of
rehabilitative intervention: ‘Instead of emphasizing rehabilitative methods that meet the
Shefer
409
offender’s needs, the system emphasizes effective controls that minimize costs and max-
imize security.’ Hence, according to Garland, the preoccupation with risk is the main
force behind the renewed interest in rehabilitation whereas in the previous era of ‘penal
welfarism’ the re-educative purposes of imprisonment were more evident. Others, how-
ever, have contested these risk-based explanations and insist that there are other reasons,
including more traditional welfare considerations, for the renaissance of rehabilitation.
O’Malley, for example, argued that ‘an amalgam of persisting welfare, disciplinary and
regulatory sanctions either is left more or less intact, or represents a field where there is
considerable overlap between the allied rationalities’ (O’Malley, 1999: 189). Similar
views have been expressed by Robinson (2002) and Hannah-Moffat (2005).
But whatever the reasons for the expansion of the rehabilitative enterprise, whether
they are risk based and managerialistic or focused more on individual welfare, the fact is
that they operate in a highly managerialistic environment that places great emphasis on
measurable risk reduction (Liebling, 2004). As noted, the aim of this article is to
demonstrate how managerialism influences the delivery and management of specific
rehabilitation programmes: Therapeutic Communities.
Prison-based Therapeutic Communities
The two programmes from which the data for this study were collected are both known
as ‘Therapeutic Communities’ (TCs), although each follows a different model: one
follows the Democratic TC model, the other the Addictions TC model (also known as the
concept-based, hierarchical or American model).
Democratic Therapeutic Communities
For the past five decades, prison-based Democratic TCs in the UK have been associated
with and inspired by HMP Grendon, which has operated this unique regime in all its
wings since its opening in 1962. Grendon’s TCs combine intensive therapy in small
groups with a degree of self-management by prisoners of their everyday lives (Genders
and Player, 1995). One of the consequences of the rediscovery of rehabilitation in the
early 1990s was the establishment of Democratic TCs in prisons other than Grendon.
Four additional English prisons currently host a Democratic TC programme. In most of
them this regime is operated on only one wing within an otherwise ‘ordinary prison’.
Addictions Therapeutic Communities
Side by side with the establishment of Democratic TCs in prisons other than Grendon,
since the mid-1990s several Addictions TCs have been opened in different prisons. There
are currently five prisons that host such programmes. In all of these prisons, the Addictions
TC programme is delivered on only one wing within an otherwise ordinary prison.
There is very little contact between the two Therapeutic Community models and their
monitoring bodies within the prison system of England and Wales. At the time of the
study, the Addictions TCs were monitored by the National Drug Programme Delivery
410
European Journal of Criminology 9(4)
Unit (NDPDU), while the Democratic TCs were monitored by the Dangerous and Severe
Personality Disorder (DSPD) and Therapeutic Community Unit. This separate existence
in one prison system of two programmes with the same name but with different manage-
ment bodies and some differences in practices and ideologies is a consequence of their
independent historical development. The Democratic model was originally developed in
the UK during and after the Second World War by mental health professionals, and it is
aimed at people with various mental...
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