‘Trying to make it matter’: The challenges of assimilating a resettlement culture into a ‘local’ prison

Matthew Cracknell

doi:10.1177/17488958211037469

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.

Highlights

Local prisons under transforming rehabilitationSpearheaded by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government, Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) oversaw the part-privatisation of the probation service, splitting probation 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 above literature underlines the ‘ever-present tension within imprisonment and prison officer work’ (Maycock et al, 2020: 362) between maintaining security within the prison and promoting rehabilitation. This inherent tension is explored within this article, capturing the perspectives of frontline staff, in order to understand how the re-designation of the prison operated in practice and how staff understood their roles within the resettlement prison
This article draws upon one specific empirical chapter of the thesis, which is concerned with understanding the challenges of implementing a resettlement culture in a local prison and how the resettlement prison operates in practice

Summary

Introduction

Spearheaded by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government, Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) oversaw the part-privatisation of the probation service, splitting probation 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). Numerous penological research studies have attempted to uncover how prison officers understand their roles and responsibilities, predominately underlining that officers do not view resettlement and rehabilitation practices as their primary concern and that this should be tasked to other departments whose main objectives cover rehabilitative support (Bullock and Bunce, 2020; Crewe, 2011; Lin, 2002) Developing this theme, Lerman and Page’s (2012) comparative study of prison officers in two American states finds that officers are generally supportive of rehabilitative programmes, but only to the extent that these programmes have a clear utility that contributes towards the effective running of the establishment and these programmes do not alter or challenge officers’ core custodial remit. This inherent tension is explored within this article, capturing the perspectives of frontline staff, in order to understand how the re-designation of the prison operated in practice and how staff understood their roles within the resettlement prison

Methods

Findings

Discussion and conclusion