‘Trying to make it matter’: The challenges of assimilating a resettlement culture into a ‘local’ prison
| Author | Matthew Cracknell |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/17488958211037469 |
| Published date | 01 April 2023 |
| Date | 01 April 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/17488958211037469
Criminology & Criminal Justice
2023, Vol. 23(2) 165 –182
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/17488958211037469
journals.sagepub.com/home/crj
‘Trying to make it matter’:
The challenges of assimilating
a resettlement culture
into a ‘local’ prison
Matthew Cracknell
Middlesex University, UK
Abstract
As part of the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms, 70 ‘local’ prisons in England and Wales
were re-designated as resettlement prisons, in order to provide additional through-the-gate
support to individuals serving short sentences. Drawing on staff and prisoner interviews in
one case study resettlement prison, this article considers what challenges were involved with
implementing a resettlement culture in a local prison. Findings first outline factors inhibiting
the resettlement status of the prison; these include a tension between attempts to implement
a more expansive resettlement remit into the prison, while also fulfilling more long-standing
core institutional duties; the size and churn of the prison population; wide-scale apathy caused
by change fatigue; and government austerity policies which caused significant difficulties in the
day-to-day staffing of the prison. This article then turns to practitioner responses to the re-
designation, finding that practitioners interpreted resettlement in two limited ways: top-down
managerial attempts to instil a wider resettlement culture into the prison, and resistance
from prison officers who felt unwilling or unable to expand their roles beyond custodial and
security concerns. This article concludes by outlining how this set of inter-related barriers
frustrated staff and prisoners alike, eroding a sense of hope and purpose and impeding true
cultural change.
Keywords
Austerity, resettlement, prison cultures, prison policy, through the gate, transforming
rehabilitation
Corresponding author:
Matthew Cracknell, Department of Criminology and Sociology, School of Law, Middlesex University, The
Burroughs, Hendon, London NW4 4BT, UK.
Email: m.cracknell@mdx.ac.uk
1037469CRJ0010.1177/17488958211037469Criminology & Criminal JusticeCracknell
research-article2021
Article
166 Criminology & Criminal Justice 23(2)
Introduction: Local prisons under transforming
rehabilitation
Spearheaded by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government, Transforming
Rehabilitation (TR) oversaw the part-privatisation of the probation service, splitting pro-
bation trusts into two, forming community rehabilitation companies (CRCs), run by a
mix of private providers and a public sector National Probation Service (Ministry of
Justice (MoJ), 2013b). The architect of TR – Justice Minister Christopher Graylin g –
also introduced the Offender Rehabilitation Act (ORA) 2014, which aimed to provide
statutory post-release support to a long-neglected cohort; individuals serving short
sentences1 (MoJ, 2014). Although considerable focus has been placed on how these
reforms have played out in the community, TR has also impacted prisons – and in par-
ticular on category B ‘local’ prisons.
Auty and Liebling (2020) describe category B ‘local’ prisons2 as closed facilities that
hold adult males either on remand or post-conviction, before dispersing them to other
prisons to serve the majority of their sentences (p. 9). They are prisons that receive their
‘local’ status from their role in serving the local Crown and Magistrates Courts. However,
the launch of TR not only reconfigured the probation service, it also oversaw widespread
alterations to the prison service and transformed the holding roles of category B prisons
to engender a more expansive resettlement focus.
In 2013, the government announced that 70 of the 123 prisons in England and Wales
were to be re-designated as ‘resettlement prisons’. The aims of this re-designation
involve prisoners ‘working towards their rehabilitation’ from the moment they are
imprisoned. They should be provided with a needs assessment upon reception to prison
and then provided with a ‘tailored package of supervision and support’ to help them to
desist from offending (MoJ, 2013a: paragraph 8). Individuals serving short sentences
should spend their prison sentence within a resettlement prison close to their release
address, in order to ensure they are released back into the communities they reside in.
Furthermore, ‘Through-the-gate’ resettlement services have also been introduced into
resettlement prisons, delivered by CRC practitioners, who are tasked with identifying
prisoners’ resettlement needs and then referring to relevant services, with the aim to
ensure continuity of support as each individual transitions from prison back into the
community.
There is no universally agreed definition of resettlement – or what is termed re-entry
in the United States. However, Maguire and Raynor (2017) describe resettlement as a
multi-stage case management process that should begin before someone is released, and
should pay equal attention to the practical problems an individual faces, alongside their
thinking and attitudes. However, the government’s TR reforms primarily interprets reset-
tlement as a practical process, designed to reduce high reoffending rates of the short
sentence population, and the resultant costs to society (MoJ, 2013b), ignoring the impor-
tance of addressing thinking and attitudes.
This is not the first attempt to provide resettlement services for individuals serving
short prison sentences. Indeed, New Labour funded the ‘Pathfinder’ project, which pro-
vided post-release support to individuals serving short prison sentences on a voluntary
basis in seven pilot areas between 1999 and 2003 (Clancy et al., 2006). As part of the
To continue reading
Request your trial