The Gazette 1983

APRIL 1983

GAZETTE

The Purpose of Prisons? Address to the Annual Conference of the Association of Prison Officers, Green Isle Hotel, 27th May, 1982 * by Mary McAleese, Lecturer in Criminology U.C.D.

I T E A CH Criminology and Penology which is all about crime control and criminals, without necessarily ever meeting a criminal, a policeman, or a prison officer. You deaf with criminals without necessarily ever reading a book on Criminology or Penology. Indeed you may have fairly cynical or sceptical views on the need for academic criminologists or theorists at all. T o some extent I could understand such antipathy for when I began to review what criminologists and penologists had to say about prison officers, I discovered two things. The first is that despite the mountain of Penological material examining the minutiae of the prison system, very little academic attention has been paid to what must be one of the most crucial areas of prison life — the role of the prison officer. The second discovery I made was that where academic penologists had decided to look at the custodial officers, then what they had to say of them was far from flattering. In an article published in 1945 by Joseph Fishman which describes in lurid detail the life of a prison officer the headline reads T h e Meanest job in the World'. Gordon Hawkins, himself a former prison governor, devotes a chapter of his book "The Prison" to his former colleagues. He titles the chapter on prison officers T h e other prisoners'. Donald Clemmer in his celebrated account of The Prison Community claimed that prison officers had three major preoccupations —none of which had much to do with prisoners or penal theory. Their first preoccupation was when do we eat —the second — when do we quit and the third when do we get paid? How accurately those preoccupations reflect the main areas of interest of Irish prison officers today, you are better qualified to judge than I am. But it is a fact that over the past few years the Association of Prison Officers has been more often in the public limelight because of disputes over pay, overtime, rostering etc, than over idealogical conflicts about the role of prison in contemporary society. It does surprise me that at a time when prisons are in crisis throughout the Western World, at a time when many observers are demanding the development of alternatives to imprisonment and the reduction of numbers being sentenced to imprisonment on the grounds that it is an expensive, demoralising and dehumanising failure which compounds criminality rather than reducing it — why are those people closest to the implementation of penal policy so seemingly disinterested in the debate? Recently I met a sociologist who was investigating labour relations m an Irish semi-state body which regularly throws this country into chaos in pursuit of wages claims, arguments over demarcation and overtime. He patiently explained to me that his research into the causes of this persistent industrial unrest showed that the real issues were not about money at all, but that there was a profound deeprooted dissatisfaction with the job itself—public image of the job was poor — the body they worked for was the butt of

regular jibes, their work lacked status, they were expected to perform miracles with outmoded equipment etc., but instead of investigating these areas of unease and unrest and making them part of, if not central to their negotiations with management, their resentment about these things remained untapped, inarticulate and was translated into wages and demarcation claims. That conversation made me wonder just how much that same kind of dissatisfaction was there within the prison service itself and how could it be tapped to promote the development of a better more coherent and more successful prison system than we presently have. If I was a prison officer who did have a developed sense of duty and commitment to the job of caring for prisoners I think I would feel that society was dealing me a less than fair hand. There is a public stereotype of a prison officer as a uniformed locker and unlocker of doors whose job it is to inflict punishment on prisoners, to repress them, to bring it home to them that they are bad and the rest of us are good. The prison officer is chosen to do society's dirty work — he's probably well enough paid for it in terms of money, but in terms of status there is considerable public ambivalence. The prison officer is expected to deal with problems he was never trained to deal with and then he is censured by the media for what is identified as his or the system's failure to solve the problem. For example he or rather the prison is expected to punish people and rehabilitate them simultaneously. The P.O. is expected to take an illiterate adult who has never held a steady job in his life, who comes from an area where there is chronic unemployment and teach him to read, equip him with vocational skills, convince him of the error of his ways and find him ajob, send him out into the world again a paragon of virtue. He is usually expected to accomplish all this in less than six months. He is given heroin addicts, drunks, vagrants, prostitutes, beggars, psychopaths, sociopaths, vandals, thugs, murderers, rapists and once they are safely delivered into his hands, society breathes a sigh of relief that the problem is now being taken care of and no one thinks to ask, how well equipped is the prison or its personnel to handle this particular problem. Are their other and better ways of handling it. The prison is there, it can't say no — this is not our problem — we can't cope, it has no power of veto, no way of saying — this person is not suitable to what we have to offer — we are the wrong place. The hospitals can decide who they will treat, the psychiatric hospitals can say, this patient does not suit us, the special schools can say, this guy is too disruptive we don't want him, so they all end up in the one place which is obliged to keep open house — the prison! Wh en crime rates soar and the public demand stiffer sentencing in the unguided belief that the longer and harsher the sentence the more it will deter the criminal, the courts respond by increasing penalties, sending more 93