Moral and Philosophical Problems of Long-Term Imprisonment

The manner in which the prison service of this country meet the challenge of containing long-term prisoners in conditions that combine security and humanity will have a lasting effect on the service as a whole. ²

I’ve been in prison for six years. I don’t know what the point of prison is. I can figure it out for myself, but I haven’t actually been told listen, you’ve been sent to prison, the terms of prison is this. I have never been told that. And I think that … that’s lacking from the Prime Minister to the Justice Secretary, Governors, officers, society and inmates … What’s happened is that I think prison is about rehabilitation. Your officer will think, ‘no, it’s about punishment. You have to have a miserable face’. And then another officer will think, ‘but actually it’s about giving somebody a second chance’ and they’ll be a lot more helpful. In the middle you’ve got a lack of purpose about what the proper role of prison is. And then that permeates everything. It affects every single relationship. ³

Considerable policy as well as scholarly interest in the treatment of long-term prisoners in conditions of high security existed throughout the 1970s to the 1990s in England and Wales and in Scotland, often precipitated by major events, such as: major disturbances and rooftop protests in the 1970s and 1980s; maltreatment of ‘hard core’ challenging prisoners, whose anger and hostility was often followed by violent retaliation; and escapes (in the case of England and Wales) in the 1990s. ⁴ It has been a major theme of official discourse on the treatment of long-term prisoners since the mid-1980s that ‘a viable life’ and the preservation of dignity are important principles to adhere to in policy and practice. Prison chaplaincies internationally have contributed significantly to this debate. ⁵ The abolition of the death penalty in 1965, as well as an increase in violent crime, including large-scale robberies in which weapons were carried, led to an anticipated increase in the number of prisoners serving very long prison terms and official concerns about what the appropriate conditions for these men might be. ⁶ Following extensive deliberations, it was agreed that high-security, long-term imprisonment should be sparingly used, humanely operated and sociologically informed. ⁷ In order not to brutalise prisoners further, it should be based on the principles of self-respect, choice, variety, movement, high staffing levels, ‘good governance’, and changing prisoners’ lives for the better. ⁸ Contact between staff and prisoners was vital:

The more the officer is able to get to know the prisoner as a human being, and not, as one prisoner put it, to regard him only as ‘a face, a cipher, or someone to be shouted for’ and the more he is concerned with several different aspects of a prisoner’s life, the more likely is the prisoner to cease to have a stereotypical and hostile view of the officer. This helps to break down the barrier between staff and inmates and gives greater opportunities for the influences of staff to be brought to bear. The less stereotyped the view that a prisoner has of the staff, and they of him, the more likely it is that they will be alert to recognise changes of attitude and personality in the prisoner and the more likely that their perceptions of a prisoner’s values and attitudes will be correct. ⁹

The lack of any such calamitous events since between 1997 and 2008, some major improvements in official performance, tighter management ‘grip’, changes in focus, and some tailored alternatives for especially difficult prisoners, ¹⁰ led to high-security prisons moving off the policy agenda and away from high-profile public scrutiny from the late 1990s until around 2008. If there had been a time when, for complex historical and cultural reasons, staff had been unsure of their entitlement to enter and search some prisoners’ cells, those ‘liberal’ days were well and truly over. A new ‘professionalism’ among staff working in high-security prisons became a basic expectation following a series of policy and resource improvements after the escapes from Whitemoor and Parkhurst in 1994−95.

However, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 2001 in New York and 7/7 2005 in the UK, and the introduction of new and longer sentences for violent crimes (the Imprisonment for Public Protection sentence, in particular, but also lengthening tariffs and automatic life sentences in general) from 2003 onwards, precipitated significant changes in the population mix in high-security prisons, as well as new challenges in the management difficulties they posed. Some old questions, of dignity, humanity, purpose and survival, returned to centre stage with a new urgency. ¹¹ New questions of faith, ideology, recognition and political struggle emerged too. Speculative accounts of ‘extremism’, ‘radicalisation’ and ‘conversion to Islam’ began to appear in the British press ¹² , in think-tank reports, ¹³ and in Inspectorate Reports. ¹⁴ Evidence was available that ‘inappropriate’ prisoners were leading Friday prayers in some prisons, and that the leader of the failed 21 July 2005 London bombing, for example, had converted to Islam in prison, before ‘graduating to terrorism via various radical London mosques and camps in Afghanistan’ after his release. ¹⁵ Prisoners were increasingly exposed to violent reprisals if they resisted efforts to recruit and convert the vulnerable. These complex and confounded issues of faith identity, belief, and risk did not seem captured conceptually by the standard penological terminology of ‘order’, ‘control’ or ‘security’. ¹⁶ They were also problems of trust.

The above account is informed by a Home Office-funded research project conducted by the author and two colleagues (Helen Arnold and Christina Straub) between 2010 and 2012. The research consisted of a repeat of an exploratory study carried out at HMP Whitemoor 12 years earlier, in 1998−99, by Alison Liebling and David Price (An Exploration of Staff-Prisoner Relationships at HMP Whitemoor). The original study explored the nature and quality of staff−prisoner relationships and the work and role of prison officers, and led to a deep understanding of the complex role staff−prisoner relationships play in prison life, the experiences of long-term prisoners held in conditions of maximum security, the peacekeeping work of prison officers, and the use of discretion in accomplishing order in prison on a day-to-day basis. It identified outstanding prison officer work and described the characteristics of role model officers working at their best. It drew on the method of Appreciative Inquiry, for the first time in a prison, and resulted in the publication of the book, The Prison Officer, by Alison Liebling and David Price. ¹⁷

The aim of the repeat study was to re-investigate the nature and quality of staff−prisoner relationships at Whitemoor in this new context, exploring how life for prisoners, the work of prison officers, and the nature of staff−prisoner relationships had changed, using the original study as a baseline. The study also explored the nature of relationships between prisoners. The context had changed in three significant ways:

The population in 2009 consisted of 40 per cent Muslim prisoners, some of whom had converted to the Muslim faith whilst in prison. Many of these prisoners felt under constant scrutiny.

There were major concerns, both inside the prison and externally, about the behaviour, power base and intentions of apparently extremist prisoners, as well as about the growing influence of so-called ‘Muslim gangs’ in the high-security estate.

The sentences being served were significantly longer, and more likely to be indeterminate (resulting in complex and lengthy routes out), and for ‘joint enterprise’ charges, where accountability was disputed or indirect. There was considerably more emphasis on risk and risk assessment.

Lower levels of trust, uncertainties of role and identity, a perception of time spent in prison as more punishing than rehabilitative, and a reorganisation of the information flow about prisoners off the wings and into Security Information Reports, had left both prisoners and staff feeling uncomfortable. Divisions and conflicts between prisoners, and some distancing from staff, had impacted negatively on perceptions of safety, as well as on the ‘presentation of self’. Prisoners were guarded and inauthentic around each other and around staff. Access to courses and activities, especially those regarded as ‘creative’ or (worse) ‘entertaining’, had been severely curtailed, in a changing political climate. Complex and changing dynamics between prisoners had undermined the traditional prisoner hierarchy, and faith identities (which were not always related to religious belief) were now shaping prisoner social life and culture in new, and sometimes dangerous, ways. Anxieties about extremism and radicalisation were altering both the flow of power and the perception of risk in prison. Prisoners could play on the anxieties of staff (so that formerly powerful organised criminals joked that they were ‘thinking of becoming Muslim, just to wind the staff up’ ¹⁸ ). Conditions in the prison made participation in Islamic practices the most ‘available’ option for those looking for belonging, meaning, ‘brotherhood’, trust and friendship. The reasons for attendance at Friday prayers, or conversion to Islam, were many and complex.

The ‘problem of faith’, including the proper policing of faith-based claims, was a new concern for all, as faith now posed a risk, acted as a temptation, offered a source of power, and presented a source of meaning for prisoners, in an otherwise bleak environment. A lack of attention being paid to hope and identity in high-security settings was identified as a major difficulty for prisoners and those managing or working in high-security prisons. Prisoners experienced their often unexpected, or unexpectedly long sentences, together with the restrictions placed by the prison on finding available ways through these sentences, as a kind of ‘existential crisis’. They felt deep frustration and felt ‘stuck’ and invisible in the prison. They argued that there was a lack of clarity about the purpose of long-term imprisonment. Considerable drift away from the ‘Radzinowicz ideal’ of ‘combining security with humanity’ had taken place in the wake of new social and criminal justice conditions. ¹⁹

A new governor and newly energised chaplaincy team were seeking ways of opening up a dialogue and building better relationships between staff and prisoners, as well as faith groups, towards the end of the research period. A Working Group was established in NOMS to take the learning from this project forward, including a review of regimes in long-term prisons, of categorisation decisions, of the role of faith and chaplaincies in prison, and of organisational culture or development. That work is continuing. But the dynamics identified were recognisable in other high-security prisons, and whatever inroads could be made in relation to inter-father understanding, long and arduous sentences were difficult to make manageable by an organisation facing financial cuts and political challenge.

What we observed between the first study and the return to Whitemoor in 2010 was a fundamental shift in the treatment and perception of human beings by other human beings, including of prisoners by each other. The ‘central existential category’ of ‘the other’ had shifted, so that, far from relating to the human capacities of prisoners (admittedly, an ideal or aspiration, but a more than symbolic one, in practice), staff and prisoners (as well as senior managers and specialists) treated many prisoners primarily as ‘sites of physical danger’. This starting position impacted on all aspects of their interaction, adding distance, fear and self-restraint to the already heady mix of prisoners surviving long-term imprisonment. It structured experience, shaped the interpretation of action, and closed down opportunities for growth, justice or freedom. Prisoners’ files, and the official decision-making based upon them, increasingly reflected this disturbing preoccupation with risk and danger. Prisoners observed that their only unconstrained conversations were with us, the research team. In every other context, they felt judged, and presumed risky, or observed. Prisoners complained bitterly of their subjection to the operations of a system that seemed increasingly disconnected from their own personal experience or their genuine predicament.

Whilst prisoners certainly posed risks, and many challenged their responsibility, the blurred lines of individual moral guilt and redemption were bluntly traced over in what political philosopher John Dunn has called ‘unblurred encounters’ and accounts. ²⁰ Narratives were simplified or distorted, and once committed to paper, were irreversible. Throwaway comments appeared years later in assessment processes, however misunderstood they may have been at the time. Prisoners felt tormented by their constructed identities. Some prisoners capitulated, agreeing to ‘jump through any hoop’ just to get out—any course, any admission of guilt, any label—whilst struggling to explain to their families why a different story was emerging from ‘the truth’ they had been told. These clashes between ‘my truth’ and the system’s requirements were painful and confusing. Prisoners became ever more cynical and distrusting, and their behaviour increasingly and narrowly instrumental or strategic. They were experts in manoeuvre—and yet outflanked by an unfathomable system that had all the power.

Moral philosopher Jonathan Jacobs has suggested that certain forms of imprisonment damage rather than repair moral character, undermining the very basis of civil society. This process of de-moralisation is unwise, and impossible to justify:

There are reasons to conclude that the prison experience often undermines the civil disposition or impedes the formation of one. In prison there is very little experience of rule-governed activity apart from the requirements of compliance for the sake of order … Thus, prison is often a context in which there is rule-governed activity with no telos (apart from maintaining order) and, in addition, the enforcement of rules can appear inscrutable or uneven in ways that aggravate demoralization. That, in turn, undermines prisoners’ regard for the legitimacy of the rules and their enforcement. ²¹

Richard Lippke has likewise argued that forms of imprisonment that are ‘deeply hostile to the nurture and exercise of those skills and dispositions constitutive of responsible citizenship’ are unjustifiable. ²² Prisoners at Whitemoor described precisely this kind of de-moralising process. It was caused by a lack of legitimacy, a lack of hope, and by fear and violence—in themselves a result of breakdowns in trust. As one prisoner reflected, once he moved on elsewhere:

I remember being there … on the edge of a precipice. You lose all hope. Your inner self changes. You start to think, what does anything matter? It was about 4 years before I left (Whitemoor), around 2003, about 8 years in … It builds up—your efforts to be good are not being recognised. You think, ‘I’ve tried, you’re not giving me a chance’. You hit a wall where nothing matters. Suddenly, you are capable of anything. You’d betray anyone … You lose your moral compass. It’s a sort of giving up. You sort of know you can either step back or forward. Intellectually, I knew where I was. My (Catholic) faith said, don’t do it. I wouldn’t give in to it. I didn’t want to become what I could see myself becoming. You see so much nastiness in prison—you have to develop a strategy not to become cynical and bitter and angry. When I got to x prison [a Category C prison], I felt cared for. That’s not there in YOs [Young Offender Institutions] or in Whitemoor. (Ex-Whitemoor prisoner, interviewed in a Category D resettlement prison)

Prisoners asserted their personhood to us emotionally in interviews:

We’re human beings at the end of the day, we’re people. OK, some of us have done some very bad things, some of us have done some not quite so bad things, but that doesn’t make us … we’re still, you know, we still love and feel and have the same emotions as everybody else. (Prisoner)

Words like ‘love’ and ‘trust’ came up continually in interviews and more informal conversations. The need for both was felt, and was expressed powerfully. Prisoners composed lyrics about love, and its absence or loss, in the music workshop, and coined phrases that became like refrains (‘there’s no love in the concrete’ …). The Chaplaincy, at times, was an exception. As one prison Chaplain put it, ‘I had a responsibility to be aware of the humanity of everyone and to demonstrate God’s love wherever and whenever I could’. Ministers of religion, and the volunteers they brought into prison with them, were also, however, sites of risk, as their closeness to prisoners, as well as the content of their religious beliefs, had become matters of concern. The prison had transformed from a place where ‘relationships were key’ to one where relationships were risky. The very word ‘trust’ was regarded with some alarm.

That trust can exist in the prison environment has been demonstrated before. As Sparks et al. note:

[Staff and prisoners] share the same physical and social space. They cannot sustain a state of submerged warfare all the time. They develop familiarities. They banter. There are acts of concern and kindness. It is a situation marked by contradictions.’ ²³

Sparks et al. have also drawn attention to:

[The importance of …] ‘paying attention both to procedural and relational dimensions of prisons regimes; in other words, to the recognition of prisoners in terms both of their citizenship and their ordinary humanity’. ²⁴

The lack of love, trust, activity and ordinary humanity was striking. One mixed-race prisoner from a Christian background in our interview sample described finding it difficult not to convert to Islam, because of the temptations, even though he knew this would be ‘inauthentic’, at least to begin with:

Respondent:

I don’t think a lot of people trust anyone in here, really. The best way to be able to feel that you can trust anyone in here is to be a Muslim.

Interviewer:

Really?

R:

Then you’ll have … then you’ll be able to … at least feel like you can trust people. Because it’s so … like I said, it so unites and is tight and the way that … like, the teachings … I don’t know if that’s the right word … The teachings … of this Qur’an are it promotes that kind of stuff, trusting each other and … So if you … and that’s what I’m saying … this is why they’re all … it’s always going to be here now, because it’s … like I said, it’s a proper temptation. It is. Because when you look at it … from the outside, it’s like the best thing in here, really … apart from the fact that it probably won’t let you go home …

I:

Yeah [both chuckle].

R:

If you’re here now and you’ve got a life sentence and you’ve given up … That is the best thing.

I:

But that makes it … that is really powerful … it’s a kind of basic human need to feel trust somewhere.

R:

Yeah. And it is. It’s the only place in the prison where there’s lots of things. It’s… to me, I’d say it’s the only place in the prison where there’s love, where there’s trust, where there’s real friendships, where there’s any of them type of things. Loyalty, anything like that.

I:

But that means the Governor’s problem is making sure those things exist elsewhere.

R:

And that’s what I was saying to you. There’s no reward for us. There’s no … we … you’re just left out on your own … So you will always … see that as a kind of temptation. (Prisoner)

The longing for love, for better staff−prisoner relationships, and more humanity, was expressed on both sides:

I:

If you had one wish for staff−prisoner relationships what would it be?

R:

That the smallest fear could disappear for an hour, yeah sort of almost like the old Paul McCartney’s Pipes of Peace video, sort of Christmas, down tools, or weapons in the war, sort of thing and let’s just sit down and be human again for a minute and see if that changes anything. (Officer)

Humanity ‘seeped in’, ‘when no-one was looking’, but it was difficult to find in a climate in which staff and prisoners no longer knew or recognised each other. Culturally, spiritually and emotionally, they inhabited different worlds.

This became a critical theme in our analysis. Prisoners felt unrecognised. Whether because they were Black and minority ethnic, or mixed race (55% of the population at Whitemoor), because they were Muslim (40%) or because they were White and non-Muslim but serving long sentences for ‘street-life’ offences involving drugs and guns, they experienced a ‘failure in comprehension’ ²⁵ and a brutality in the environment that ruled out a flow of trust in any direction. The ‘street-level epistemology’ ²⁶ of staff was insufficient. Non-recognition or misrecognition was experienced, just as Axel Honneth has described, as a harm or injustice which in turn can lead to a greater struggle for recognition and self-preservation. ²⁷ The prison seemed to create rather than repair dangerousness, in ways that penal scholars have observed before. ²⁸ Without ‘audience recognition’, power-holder bids for legitimacy were doomed to failure. ²⁹

Being ‘mis’-recognised as only risky and dangerous (as a ‘risk’ rather than a person), and not as complex individuals with many intentions, emotions, aspirations, talents and motives, felt like an existential threat—a challenge to one’s identity. It generated feelings of outrage and indignation. Risk-thinking denied prisoners both agency and humanity, figuratively pronouncing them beyond hope:

Everything you do, there is something criminal behind it. There’s nothing seen as altruistic, just kindness. There’s no such thing as being kind or being … just, you know, a human being to someone else. (Prisoner) ³⁰

I do think a lot of the rules and procedures are overkill and you’re actually killing the human spirit through that. A simple strip search is horrendous to somebody outside. You imagine doing it every day for ten, twenty years … it would finish you off as an individual. (Prisoner) ³¹

Contemporary long-term imprisonment has become an issue of ‘profound socio-political complexity’. From its unclear purpose (‘settlement’?), to the re-entry of ‘punishment’ as a major part of its purpose in official discourse, to the growth in both numbers and sentence lengths, and the changing composition of the population, to the neglect of hope and personhood, high-security prisons have become harder places in which to find meaning and humanity. The new problem of faith, the problem of declining trust, and the effects of cost cutting have somehow generated a new place for ideology and politics in prison, of a sometimes charged and unhealthy kind. Urgent attention should be paid to possibilities for personal development, or human flourishing, and to fairer routes out, for those who can show credible trustworthiness. There should be opportunities created for this to show up, even in the unlikeliest of circumstances.

In our deliberations with officials about the Whitemoor report, we proposed the use of Onora O’Neill’s term ‘Intelligent trust’, ³² together with a return to more individual personal development work, and increased opportunities in education, including the arts, and other creative and meaningful activities. We suggested the use of a more ‘theological’ (or moral) language and imagination, more inter-faith dialogue, and closer relationships between prisoners and staff. Some US prisons encourage prisoner-led Islamic studies programmes; the right kind of spiritual leadership and mentoring by well-informed and devout prisoners should not be closed off in a moral panic about extremism. There are many matters outside of prison, in the community, relating to youth culture, employment, exclusion and prejudice, as well as in international politics, that might account for some of the changes we have seen in the high-security prison over a relatively short period of time.

The problem of trust in high-security prisons did not begin post 9/11. It arguably has its origins in the escapes from Whitemoor and Parkhurst in 1994−95, when IRA prisoners exposed the dangers of Radzinowicz’s model of ‘a liberal regime within a security perimeter’ by slowly eroding a series of seemingly trivial micro-practices (such as limiting and searching property, restricting movement, gathering intelligence, questioning motives) upon which, it turned out, security in prison depends. The risk of trust is betrayal, and naivety. It can be faked (‘How come he shot at me, I was playing scrabble with him yesterday?’). But the fragile ‘guarded trust’ model implied (and, thereafter, carefully operationalised and professionally modified) by the Radzinowicz Report lost its credibility in much higher places after 2001 and (perhaps especially) 2005. Trust can be lazy, or unguarded. But perceiving only risk, and whilst doing so, wanting only to punish, brings about grave dangers, including increasing those risks we seek to reduce. As we concluded in our 2012 report, drawing on some of the work on American supermax prisons by (for example) Lorna Rhodes ³³ :

The changing form and nature of high-security prisons represents a ‘struggle over the nature of personhood’ and the tension between ‘bare life’, and ‘political life’ (or citizenship). There is a logic underlying contemporary penal practice at the deep end of the system which is neo-liberal, risk averse, exclusionary, racialised (or religiously divided), cost constrained, and in contradiction to both rehabilitation and legitimacy. ³⁴

This is a long way from the spirit of either Radzinowicz or the Control Review Committee, who argued that:

At the end of the day, nothing else that we can say will be as important as the general proposition that relations between staff and prisoners are at the heart of the whole prison system and that control and security flow from getting that relationship right. ³⁵

As a result of our reflections about this study, and dialogue with the field, we found an opportunity to pursue our research questions further, in a more creative and generative way. A proposal to the ESRC’s Transforming Social Science scheme was successful, and in 2013 we embarked upon a new study, Locating and Building Trust in High Risk Prison Settings, in two rather different high-security prisons. ³⁶ We are exploring what creates, sustains, damages or destroys trust, and where it can be found, even in high-security prisons. That work is under way. Our aspiration, via Appreciative Inquiry, a more theologically informed research team, and some sociological imagination and patience, is to open up trust more fully as a key to understanding social order and self-realisation, in the long-term prison, but perhaps also more generally. As a chaplain at Whitemoor said to us, ‘it’s our theology of the person’ that enables us to stay in dialogue with prisoners. That theology—or conception of the person, incorporating generosity, forgiveness, spirituality and courage—was present in the deliberations that established our modern high-security prisons. With or without faith, it requires reinserting in contemporary ideology and practice.