Evaluating voluntary sector involvement in mass incarceration: The case of Samaritan prisoner volunteers

Introduction

Criminal justice researchers should pay more attention to the increasing involvement of volunteers and voluntary organisations in criminal justice institutions, ¹ evaluating in what respects this is a positive and/or negative development. Nuanced assessment of voluntary sector criminal justice participation requires explicit normative criteria with defence of the values underpinning the assessment (Bennett, 2017). There are many potential benefits of voluntary sector and civil society action in criminal justice (e.g. Akashi, 2018). Dzur’s democratic optimism (2012) would emphasise the hope and possibility of public involvement directing state institutions to greater democracy and the public good. Alternatively, Wacquant’s critical pessimism (2010) would regard public involvement as a mere duping of citizens by states captured by for-profit sectors. Our account provides a middle way between these approaches: public involvement has potential to trigger much-needed reform, but current operating methods and contexts preclude this.

Evaluating one case of voluntary organisation involvement in criminal justice, the Samaritans Prison Listener Scheme, we demonstrate that it should not be welcomed without reservation. Despite this Scheme’s humanitarian motivation and substantive contributions to ameliorating prisoner distress, it can deflect attention from essential deep reform of the scale and conditions of imprisonment. Viewing this case through the lens of normative political theory, we then develop an original five-dimensional framework of criteria to facilitate nuanced assessment of voluntary sector criminal justice participation. These criteria are: (i) does it resist harmful excesses and capture, making criminal justice institutions more compliant with non-negotiable humanitarian obligations?; (ii) does it benefit individual volunteers?; (iii) does it assist the state in serving the public good?; (iv) does it increase democratically valuable forms of public participation in state institutions?; and (v) does it bring the shortcomings of those institutions to light and motivate reform? Samaritans are by no means the only voluntary organisation to have prioritised service delivery over advocacy, in criminal justice (Tomczak and Buck, 2019b) and beyond (Stroup and Wong, 2017). We do not suggest that Samaritans should be withdrawn, but seek to articulate the compromised nature of their work and the conflicting demands under which all voluntary organisations and citizen volunteers participate in imprisonment.

Although we focus on imprisonment, mass incarceration has occurred in parallel with mass supervision in the community (McNeill and Beyens, 2013; Miller, 2014; Phelps, 2017), and volunteers and voluntary organisations are implicated across criminal justice institutions globally (Tomczak, 2017; Tomczak and Buck, 2019a). Our analysis has implications for other forms of voluntary sector and citizen involvement in criminal justice across jurisdictions. It is also pertinent for other sectors increasingly reliant on volunteering, inter alia health and social care (Naylor et al., 2013) and public museums (Goodlad and McIvor, 2005). Extrapolating our framework is not straightforward; however, consideration of organisational and institutional differences, varying penal-welfare cultures and conditions, and geo-political, socio-cultural and legal intricacies is required (e.g. Pratt and Eriksson, 2013).

Citizen involvement in mass incarceration

Recently, the US and the UK have both dramatically increased the scale of imprisonment. The USA and the UK have seen pronounced penal surges brought about through neoliberal socioeconomic policies (Wacquant, 2010) and the redefinition of social problems as problems of crime and justice (Rodger, 2008). The social welfare and penal policies used to manage precarious populations employ deterrence, surveillance and graduated sanctions to modify conduct (Miller, 2014). Amidst weakened welfare provisions, prisons are increasingly used to ‘invisibilize problem populations—by forcing them off the public aid rolls… and holding them under lock’ (Wacquant, 2010: 199). The US has developed into a global outlier in mass imprisonment, becoming four to five times more punitive (in terms of incarceration rates per 1000 crimes) between 1975 and 2000 (Wacquant, 2010). England and Wales’ prison population has risen by 70% in the last 30 years, maintaining the highest imprisonment rate in Western Europe (along with Scotland), in the context of static or falling crime rates (Prison Reform Trust, 2018).

Mass incarceration evokes images of a repressive state, with criminal justice as a closed, inaccessible niche concealing the dirty work of dealing with those who will not or cannot play by the rules (Christie, 1977; Dzur, 2014). However, mass incarceration has occurred alongside – and arguably through – increasing citizen involvement in criminal justice (Miller, 2014). Governments around the world are shifting from state-dominated criminal justice to models where responsibility, costs and risks are shared by public, private and voluntary organisations (Garland, 2001; Ransley and Mazerolle, 2017). The roles of private/for-profit criminal justice work have received substantive articulation and nuanced analysis, ² but the voluntary/non-profit sector has garnered less attention. Yet, it is significant in criminal justice around the world: including the UK, Nordic countries, France, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil and Uganda. Although voluntary organisations and volunteers have a long history of criminal justice involvement, the sector’s recent growth is one of the defining global shifts in ‘offender management’.

The voluntary sector is the USA’s primary provider of prisoner re-entry programming, managing ‘more people, more poor people, and more poor people of color’ than the world’s largest prison system (Miller, 2014: 307). In England and Wales, the criminal justice voluntary sector workforce is larger than that of the public prison and probation services combined, and the criminal justice system could not function without its voluntary sector and volunteer staff (Tomczak and Buck, 2019b). Mass incarceration and supervision are thus directly enacted by citizens to some extent and not purely imposed by a repressive state on its subjects. Given the many negative direct and collateral consequences of criminalisation (e.g. Hoskins, 2019), we urgently require normative evaluation of ‘civilian’ involvement in criminal justice.

Scholars have been generally reluctant to engage in explicit normative assessment of criminal justice developments (Bennett, 2017). Yet, failure to fully explain in which respects we should accept, welcome and deplore large-scale citizen involvement in punishment impedes analysis and meaningful reform attempts. Citizen association is intimately connected to democracy (Tocqueville, 1835) and informs the ideal of participatory democracy/rule by participation, which in turn offers potential to resocialise an authoritarian penal welfare state that is resituating towards the market (Powell, 2009). But, does greater public involvement in criminal justice provide ‘a cultural restraint against more punitive policies’ (Crawford, 2004: 696) and return it to democratic control? Or does it at best paper over cracks, shoring up mass incarceration and supervision? These questions require urgent and nuanced attention: we need to find forms of public input that can tame and reform bloated penal systems (Gottschalk, 2006). We therefore develop our assessment of the Scheme into a normative framework with explicit dimensions through which increased public involvement in criminal justice can be evaluated. Our dimensions of assessment are based on an articulated – though of course contestable – conception of the ways in which greater public involvement might, in certain contexts and/or in certain forms, be a positive development.

Our case study involves volunteer Samaritans in the community answering phone calls from prisoners in distress or at risk of suicide, and training and supporting prisoner volunteers to become Listeners for their peers. This is a valuable case study: it is ostensibly a welcome humanitarian intervention, but nuanced assessment reveals how it deflects attention from severe shortcomings of the penal system and allows them to remain unaddressed. Moreover, the Scheme is not competitively commissioned, and, while many problems with charitable intervention are now ascribed to this funding mechanism (Butler et al., 2017; Tomczak, 2017), this valid and important commissioning debate can obscure broader dilemmas around voluntary sector involvement in punishment, that our case study and explicit criteria highlight.

Suicide in (neoliberal) prisons

Prisons are perennially problematic, crisis-prone institutions. Whitty (2011: 127) notes ‘the traditional demands of running (over-crowded, financially stretched) prisons’. Imprisonment is a stressor that can induce psychological disturbance amongst those with no prior disorder (Liebling, 2007: 433). Imprisonment diminishes subsequent life chances for both prisoners and their families (Besemer et al., 2018; Wildeman, 2012). Imprisonment can lead to death. Prison suicide ³ is the most common cause of death for prisoners globally (Awenat et al., 2018), with suicide rates amongst prisoners consistently exceeding those in the general population across jurisdictions (Fazel et al., 2017). Prison suicide reduction has been designated a priority activity by the World Health Organisation (2007) and England and Wales’ Ministry of Justice (MoJ, 2016).

In England and Wales, the surge in prisoner numbers has more recently been followed by staffing ‘efficiencies’ in public prisons, which correlate with increased suicide. Justice Secretary Chris Grayling’s 2012 benchmarking generated the largest staff reductions in the service’s history, leaving fewer staff managing more prisoners and a lower proportion of experienced staff (Peacock et al., 2018; Prison Reform Trust, 2018). Prison suicides increased from 2012, rising 69% between April 2013 and 2014 (MoJ, 2014). Between 2012 and 2016, suicide rates more than doubled (MoJ, 2017) ‘after a period of change for the prison workforce as a result of making efficiencies. […] Frontline operational staff reduced from 29,660 on 31 March 2012 to 23,080 on 31 March 2016’ (MoJ, 2016: 41). The year 2016 saw a record high of 122 prison suicides (MoJ, 2017). This has been followed by consecutive record incidents of self-harm in 2017 (with an 11% increase from 2016) (MoJ, 2018), 2018 (with a further 23% increase from 2017) (MoJ, 2019) and 2019 (with a further 16% increase from 2018 (MoJ, 2020).

In March 2018, the Justice Secretary’s reform proposals acknowledged prisoners’ ‘existing mental health conditions and long-term issues with alcohol and drug abuse’, which he proposed to address by ‘investing more in mental health awareness training for staff’ and by increasing ‘our grant to the Samaritans to fund the continued delivery of a peer support scheme called “Listeners” which supports prisoner mental health’. ⁴ This is apparently sensible. The Listener Scheme is widely celebrated, has been heralded as a ‘beacon of international good practice’ and won many awards. Then Her Majesty's Prison (HMP) and Probation Service Chief Executive, Michael Spurr, described the Scheme’s significance:

Our partnership with Samaritans remain absolutely fundamental to our strategy for reducing self harm. Over the last 20 years, Listeners have saved many, many lives – providing vital support to individuals in genuine turmoil and distress. [ … ] It is a beacon of international good practice and an invaluable resource which makes a difference and saves lives. (Samaritans, 2011: 3)

Samaritans’ development

In the 1950s, London vicar Chad Varah established a phone line and drop in sessions offering a confidential space to talk about and alleviate ‘taboo’ suicidal feelings (Jaffe, 2012). Additional volunteers became the first Samaritans in 1953. The organisation quickly spread across the UK. Through lobbying government, Samaritans contributed to the 1961 decriminalisation of suicide. During the 1980s, local Samaritans branches engaged ad hoc with prisons until Samaritans’ General Office established a prison outreach team in 1988. The Listener Scheme was established at HMP Swansea in 1991, following two suicides including Philip Knight, a 15-year-old remand prisoner who was then the youngest person to die in custody, having been charged with stealing a handbag. Swansea’s governor trialled a peer-befriending scheme led by Samaritans. There were 70 Listener Schemes in England and Wales by 1995. The first Scottish scheme was established in 1994, with Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland following in 2002. In 2010, there were 145 prison Listener Schemes, and there are now around 1700 Listeners across the UK and Republic of Ireland prisons. Statutory grant funding in 2016–2017 totalled £500,000 from England and Wales’ National Offender Management Service; £24,000 from the Scottish Prison Service; £8000 from the Northern Irish Prison Service and £4000 from the Irish Prison Service (Samaritans, 2017b: 2, 45).

Data

This article was developed from broader research examining responses to prison suicide in England and Wales between 2015 and 2018. This project included extensive document analysis of (i) over 100 prison suicide fatal incident reports (publicly available through the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman website) and (ii) Coroners’ Reports to Prevent Future Deaths (publicly available through the Courts and Tribunals Judiciary website). These reports are underexploited by scholars but provide extensive, albeit mediated and delayed accounts of prisoner deaths and prisons over time. These data sources deserve further exploration as a useful means of understanding and challenging extended failings in both individual prisons and prison systems. Fifteen semi-structured interviews with public and voluntary sector prison oversight bodies were also undertaken during 2016–2017, facilitating rich discussion of themes emerging from the document analysis (Tomczak, 2018). The Samaritans’ Scheme was not part of the interview schedule but was referred to independently by multiple participants. Grey and academic literature about the Samaritans’ Scheme was subsequently reviewed, using internet and Google Scholar searches.

All documents and interview transcripts were thematically coded and analysed in Word, using ethnographic content analysis (ECA). Unlike positivist document analysis, ECA conceptualises document analysis as fieldwork and includes reflection upon document production processes. ECA entails discovery of analytical themes and sustained reflexivity about the research process. Reflexive and recursive movement between concept development–sampling–data collection–data coding–data analysis–interpretation provides a systematic approach, whilst retaining flexibility to (re)develop analytical categories (Altheide and Schneider, 2013). Based on this thematic analysis, we now evaluate the Scheme’s potential implications as a form of public participation in criminal justice.

Preventing suicides and changing prison culture

Prisons’ focus on security, punishment and the suspicion with which prisoners are regarded (Liebling, 2004) too often override humanitarian obligations to help those in serious need (Bennett, 2017). Imprisonment involves the state forcibly removing a person’s capacity for independent existence, and therefore creates a special responsibility for meeting that person’s basic needs including safety, security and a reasonable opportunity to make one’s life worth living (Fabre, 2000). Some prison suicides are the exercise of settled, rational choice by individuals authoring their own existence – but too many are avoidable wastes of life. Listeners provide an important way to reduce distress and suicide by giving prisoners an opportunity to reflect and be supported by another who is willing to listen and take them seriously. There are clear humanitarian grounds for applauding the Samaritans’ emotional support work inside and outside prisons.

Timothy (voluntary sector prison reformer) asserted that the Listeners’ ‘peer support through times of distress, has become an institutional part of the way prisons deal with self-inflicted death’. Listeners appeared without prompting in multiple interviews, substantiating their significance in addressing suicide and distress:

Jeremy (public sector prison monitor): ‘The Listener scheme really helps [ … ] There are a number of key things that we know from experience work, Listeners, plenty of activity, good staff supervision, good mental health, good first night processes, good drug treatment. If you do those things [ … ] suicides will decrease’.

There is also potential to improve prison culture more widely by broadly encouraging compassion. Brian noted potential positive effects on prison cultures (thinking about others, supporting others, compassionate role modelling):

Brian (public sector prison monitor): ‘It is a piece about compassion. […] I think there is a wider thing about the Samaritans […] which is about role modelling, if you show your staff that this is what you are interested in and you make it important for the staff to deliver the Listener service […] then staff start to understand that compassion […] is a good thing’.

Taking back control?

Just as the Scheme can save lives and improve the culture of prisons, public participation in governance can also empower and upskill its volunteers (Dzur, 2012: 69–71). Listening can stimulate changes amongst prisoner volunteers and improve staff perceptions of prisoners: ‘becoming a Listener helps prisoners to “do time”, as a “generative” prisoner’, rather than just passing time inside (Jaffe, 2012: 354). Interview participants Timothy and Brian described multiple benefits for Listeners (having something to aspire to, developing skills):

Timothy (voluntary sector prison monitor): ‘It has much broader impact in terms of […] prisoners having something to aspire to […] become a Listener, prisoners having a sense that they have a positive role to play […], staff learning that prisoners can be depended on to help each other’.

Furthermore, part of the promise of public participation in criminal justice is increasing lay control over key decision-making levers, thus promoting transparency and accountability. Although Samaritans’ funding leaves them relatively autonomous, our research shows that they tend to fit compliantly into the command-and-control structure of the prison system. Whilst they do respond to policy consultations, there are very limited means through which they seek to influence policies or decisions pertaining to the scale and conditions of imprisonment (but see Samaritans, 2017a, 2019). The problem is structural: even grant-funded voluntary organisations self-censor in order to maintain their access to prisons and their beneficiary group (Helminen, 2016). As such, although understandably, voluntary organisations like the Samaritans thus perpetuate the long-standing scenario where prison both creates the problems and defines the possible solutions (Zamble and Porporino, 1988: 99). Issues fundamental to the concerns and survival of prisoners and Listeners inside are therefore shared at best locally, and are rarely influential with decision makers. This limits humanitarian impacts but also suggests that the Scheme cannot be credibly seen as ‘people power’ within prison walls. Interview participant Jeremy alluded to this:

Jeremy (public sector prison monitor): ‘I think a very key thing for prisons, I am really surprised that people don’t make more use of Listeners to identify what could be done, what more needs to be done in a particular prison. So if I were in a particular prison that […] had a higher than a comparator’s suicide rate, I would be talking to my prisoners about why that was and what we do about it, and I don’t think enough is done about that’

Volunteering generally poses risks of job substitution (see e.g. Bullock and Millie, 2017 on volunteer Special police Constables), but Listening supplements (sparse) statutory prisoner support through, e.g. Chaplaincy and Psychology. Listeners are not paid and do not receive any direct benefit for their role. ¹⁰ However, it is possible that Listeners’ presence, dependent on volunteer work inside and out, deflects attention from the low level of prison staffing and high vacancy rates throughout prison and healthcare staffing (Tomczak, 2018). It is on one hand gratifying that prisoners and citizen Samaritans nationwide will invest their time to support prisoners in despair, but questionable whether this resource is being reasonably or optimally expended.

The Alinsky dilemma

The UK government’s Prison Safety and Reform White Paper identified ‘four purposes that prisons need to deliver well:

protect the public;

(MoJ, 2016: 20) Listeners can be conceptualised as making prisons more safe, and promoting prosocial attitudes and life skills among prisoners who get involved in the Scheme. However, even if we accept the purposes above, and assume that society requires criminal justice institutions in some form, most penal theorists doubt that imprisonment levels seen in the US and the UK can be justified (Bennett, 2008; Cochrane, 2017; Duff, 2001; Tonry, 2006; von Hirsch, 1993). Mass incarceration is a product of states using penal institutions for purposes that far exceed justifiable ends. This means that Samaritans may be assisting the state in perpetrating unjustifiable injustices and harms. Listeners are not just offering distinctive responses to particularly acute need: they operate in a suicidogenic environment, which is most damaging to the most vulnerable, who are often ‘subject to the worst stresses in prison’, being most likely to be isolated, without activity and without contact from home (Liebling, 1992: 234). Moreover, there are now around 1700 prisoner Listeners across 142 prisons in the UK and Ireland (Samaritans, 2017b: 2), serving a prison population of approximately 96,300. ¹¹ The extent to which Listeners can support prisoner distress, develop pro-social capabilities or affect prison culture should be considered against these statistics.

Although suicide rates have fluctuated considerably over time, prison has always been deadly (Liebling, 2007). Prisoners import vulnerabilities, but these vulnerabilities are often worsened by imprisonment (Haney, 2006; Zamble and Porporino, 1988). That imprisonment increases risk of suicide, particularly for the most vulnerable cannot be justified as a part of deserved punishment. Rather than assisting public good, therefore, perhaps Samaritans should be seen as upholding an institution that contains unprecedented numbers of severely mentally ill people (Rosenbaum and Simon, 2015; Tomczak, 2018) ¹² and places often vulnerable individuals in suicidogenic conditions, helping politicians stave off demands for reform and deflecting attention from causal issues of context, poverty and social injustice?

Indeed, we must consider whether the Scheme is one factor that allows mass incarceration and supervision to continue unimpeded. The Scheme’s inception in 1991 followed the then youngest death in custody. Fifteen-year-old Philip Knight was sent to the adult HMP Swansea because:

nowhere else could be found for him. There was no adequately secure place available at the time. […] On the day he committed suicide, he had gone to court for sentencing. He and the prison authorities expected […] that he would be sent to suitable secure accommodation for young people aged 15 or 16. However, he was sent back to prison because no suitable accommodation could be found. ¹³

Taking it for granted that prisoner distress and suicide is not a desirable outcome and that prisoners are not the disposable detritus of modern society, Listening offers clear benefits. It helps criminal justice institutions meet humanitarian obligations (supports individuals in distress and prevents loss of life) and provides opportunities for prisoner volunteers. But these benefits are offset by problems. In its current form and context, Listeners neither represent a democratically valuable form of ‘people power’ within criminal justice, nor encourage states to move towards a less bloated level of imprisonment. Indeed, Samaritans are used in political rhetoric to abrogate political responsibility for prison suicide. Samaritans do not currently protest against or raise awareness of dramatically expanded imprisonment – rather they accept its terms to try to make things better, which serves to keep drastic shortcomings invisible and allows politicians to stave off impetus for root-and-branch reform. This raises the spectre of complicity (Lepora and Goodin, 2013). Samaritans undertake policy and influencing work, ¹⁴ but traditionally around relatively narrow policy questions (Powell, 2009), with limited (public) tackling of structural injustices within the community and prison (Carlton, 2018) until very recently (Samaritans, 2017a, 2019). However, stating these critiques does not address prison suicide. The classic Alinsky dilemma is instructive here:

A man is walking by the riverside when he notices a body floating down stream. A fisherman leaps into the river, pulls the body ashore, gives mouth to mouth resuscitation, saving the man’s life. A few minutes later the same thing happens, then again and again. Eventually yet another body floats by. This time the fisherman completely ignores the drowning man and starts running upstream along the bank. […] ‘This time’, replies the fisherman, ‘I’m going upstream to find out who the hell is pushing these poor folks in’. (Cohen, 1985: 236)

Samaritans do, to some extent, resist neoliberalism’s systematic devaluation of the poor and connect prison critiques to struggles beyond the prison. Samaritans publicly support prisoners, seeing their distress and lives as worthy and deserving of support. These are small contributions to subverting public discourses, which is a fundamental precursor for longer term dismantling and transformation (Carlton, 2018: 296). Samaritans are responding to an urgent moral demand, but the cost of doing so without adequately ‘finding out who the hell is pushing these poor folks in’ and holding them to account is a kind of complicity in an oversized, deathly system that perpetuates the distress Samaritans seek to ameliorate.

Developing a normative framework

For some, the prison can never serve any defensible conception of the public good (e.g. Scott, 2008). We are assuming that minimalist imprisonment (Loader, 2010) can serve goals of justice and security, and that the excesses are not inherent in criminal justice institutions. We therefore take it that greater public input into criminal justice could – at least in certain circumstances and certain forms – be something to be welcomed on multiple grounds (Bennett, 2016; Dzur, 2012). Drawing on our case study to articulate what citizen input might be good for, we can then establish a set of explicit normative criteria that can be applied, with appropriate contextual caveats, to assess citizen and voluntary sector input in public services.

Through the Samaritans Scheme, we have explored the value and drawbacks of citizen input. First, we saw that citizens collaborating with public institution decision making can valuably increase democratic control of public institutions. This might be welcomed, on the grounds that democratic forms of government combine the need for governance with respect for the rights of the governed to determine the course of their lives. However, we also saw that Samaritans’ Scheme fits into prisons’ command-and-control structure and thus does not increase people power. Second, public input could ‘humanise’ or improve the quality of decision making and service delivery in public institutions. Even when run by dedicated and motivated staff, institutions can become captured and deflected from the public good (Loader and White, 2017). Citizen input valuably resist such capture by, e.g. electioneering politicians; professional in-group loyalty; or a totalising agenda of efficiency. Where lay citizens can influence what institutions do and how, they can make it more likely that the institution works for the public good in at least three ways: (a) influencing policy and questioning decisions that appear to stem from capture; (b) treating service users as individuals in their own right; and (c) highlighting shortcomings that workers, managers and policy makers are prepared to overlook. Samaritans’ Scheme appears strongest with respect to (b), improving the care that prisons offer and strengthening humanitarian provision. But it apparently does not function as a significant source of resistance to agendas that deflect criminal justice institutions from serving a genuine public good. Third, greater public input might encourage citizens to develop important skills and a greater sense of responsibility, and a capable and motivated citizenry is essential if governments and institutions are to be held to account and directed towards the public good. We have seen that Listener volunteers can benefit in important ways. But we also saw that the Scheme’s context severely constrains these benefits.

On the basis of our case study, we can suggest five normative criteria for evaluating citizen involvement in criminal justice:

Does it prevent harmful excesses and resist capture, making criminal justice institutions more compliant with non-negotiable humanitarian obligations such as a basic respect for welfare and autonomy?

Our framework facilitates nuanced judgements of the respects in which we should regard a particular form of citizen involvement, in a given context, as a positive. This framework could be generalised to facilitate normative assessment of citizen involvement in other public services. Where there is a plurality of dimensions, however, citizen involvement might do well along one dimension and badly along others, as we found in this case. In order to create an overall judgement about Samaritans’ input and recommend as a way forward on the basis of our study, we must evaluate amongst the dimensions to arrive at an all-things-considered judgement. Whilst acknowledging the Scheme’s clear humanitarian benefits, in its current form and context, it is not a democratically valuable form of citizen participation and it invisibilises severe prison shortcomings, enabling that system to continue to fail to meet its humanitarian obligations and serve a defensible conception of the public good. Should the Samaritans’ Scheme be retained in order to save many from suicide – or should Samaritans withdraw their cooperation in order that the deficiencies of the system, and the need for urgent reform – be made clear (if at the cost of significantly increased rates of suicide)?

How could Samaritans, and voluntary organisations more broadly, do more?

Our evaluation suggests Listeners make valuable contributions, but too often tackle the symptoms whilst overlooking causes of prisoner distress. Alternatives include demanding greater powers to influence decision-making or withdrawing from prisons. Withdrawal might see prison suicide rising to intolerable levels and forcing decision-makers to take action, although recent sustained political inaction in the face of record levels of prison suicide and self-harm (Tomczak, 2018) indicate this strategy might fail, with more lives lost and suffering of prisoners (with few other resources to draw upon) amplified. Samaritans’ contribution to safety, security and order in prisons – ‘can you imagine making it through a night now without the Listeners?’ – potentially provides a strong negotiating position, and making continued participation conditional on a stronger decision-making role could be beneficial. For example, the Justice Secretary could be made accountable to and required to engage with governance boards including Listeners.

Returning to the Justice Secretary’s speech of March 2018, acknowledging prisoner’s existing mental health conditions and chronic alcohol and drug abuse, perhaps the voluntary sector should continue to support prisoners directly but simultaneously collectively draw political and public attention to the significance of poverty and social deprivation (Harriss, 2001). A radical humanist approach would raise awareness/consciousness of prisoners’ subjective conditions within an inequitable society. A radical structuralist approach would seek to critically examine and change societal structures to distribute resources and opportunities more fairly (Tomczak and Buck, 2019b). Carlton (2018) would advocate a hybrid: reshaping public and institutional attitudes regarding the discriminatory harms of imprisonment, and disrupting and dismantling the expanded carceral state in pursuit of broader social change. (Permanently) invisibilising problem populations in severely understaffed prisons is part of neoliberalism’s systematic devaluation of the poor (Tyler, 2013). Samaritans would be well-placed to resist this invisibilising, as an organisation operating within and beyond the prison which could seek allegiances and organise with others.

Conclusion

Supporting prisoners and humanising them publicly is an important, but partial contribution to pain reduction. Citizen participation may bring humanity to prisons, but in doing so help to legitimise mass incarceration – by reinforcing the legitimacy of current bloated levels of incarceration, insofar as well-meaning people are prepared to work in it – and reducing the urgency of demands for substantive reform. Our findings reflect ‘ambiguous evidence’ regarding citizen criminal justice involvement, which we agree ‘highlights the need for greater public policy attention to the normative principles, purposes and practical implications of community involvement’ (Crawford, 2004: 701). Voluntary sector criminal justice involvement will always be at risk of deflecting attention from problems of poverty and social justice, and obscuring the need for political action (Harriss, 2001: 12). Normative attention is required by administrative executives, but it is also necessary for voluntary organisations themselves to clarify their choices and values (Cohen, 1985: 238) and attempt collective action where public services are found wanting.