The Gazette 1983

APRIL 1983

GAZETTE

possible for us to professionalise the role of the traditional prison officer — custodian by giving him a positive role in the development of personal and sociable relationships with prisoners. This role, because it is presently crucial should be recognised as central and much more important than the now outmoded notion of rehabilitation. One does not have to be a professional psychologist to work out why this role is so vital. An y o ne with a history of poor self image rejection, ego deflation, who is a member of the lowest social stratum is likely to be sensitive to slights whether real or imagined. If those who are in charge of him are hostile or disparaging the values and morals they are supposed to represent can hardly seem any more attractive than their proponents. The likelier thing is of course that such hostility will actively promote closer identification with criminals, fellow inmates and criminal values. Wh e r e as friendliness, humaneness, a concerted and deliberate concern to preserve the prisoners dignity, privacy and esteem, while unlikely to cause instant conversion to an upright way of life, will at the very least not be a push in the direction of frustration and resentment which may ultimately compound criminality. The kind of personality such an approach calls for may be different from the kind of person recruited traditionally into the system and again it might not. Apart from educational qualifications I have no idea what attributes officers are expected to have and develop. It is up to the officers themselves to ensure that recruitment procedures protect the mo ve towards increased professionalism and that things like height, weight, hearing, educational level etc., do not play a more important role in selection than personality, aptitude, ability to win voluntary cooperation, skill in interpersonal relationships. It seems to me that officers can settle for being eclipsed by the other professionals who are increasingly moving into the area of prisoner care — they can take a back seat and remain largely custodians, for as long as that role lasts, and is not superceded by even more rehabilitators and treatment personnel, or they can capitalise on the vital and crucial role they play within the penal system, by deciding now how best that role should be developed for themselves as a profession, for the prisoners in their charge and for the wider society we all live in. •

If there are those prison officers who believe that they should not be there, they are in the wrong job. The sentence of imprisonment is society's sanction and the full expression of its indignation after that, those in charge of the job of running the prison are primarily concerned with the care of human beings who represent only the tip of the iceberg of deviance and dishonesty. I believe like Sir Rupert Cross that for too long we have been engaged in the wrong debate on prisons. The argument about rehabilitation has obscured other more important considerations, among them the effect on prisoners of the interpersonal contact between officer and prisoner. Prison Officer as reformer F e w people doubt that the prison experience can be demoralising, dehumanising, institutionalising, labelling. If we cannot reform the least we can do in a Christian, civilised community is ensure that we do not deform — that we do not via imprisonment lead to the further alienation and demoralising of the offender. This is where the debate should now centre — this is where the prison officers should now be making their enquiries — how can they do their job in a human way, in a spirit of concern and caring rather than paternalism or vindictiveness, so that the person who is released when his sentence is up goes back to the community at the very least no worse than when he c ame in. The task role for the future is to decide who should go to prison and how they should be treated while they are there. I was ama z ed in talking to many ex-prisoners how much emphasis they placed on the importance of human relationships within prison. The presence or absence of close rapport with officers, the warmth or coldness of the relationship with officers was always the dominant topic of conversation. Yet this is an area which has been almost totally neglected by theorists and policy makers. Prison officers are human beings too. Th ey are more than lockers and unlockers of doors. Their attitudes can dictate the success or failure of any correctional programme — because fundamentally they are the implementers of policy on the ground. If the regime and structure is authoritarian or rigid, then the most caring and humane of officers will find huge obstacles to the development of relationships with prisoners and despite his overtures the overall effect of prison will be a brutalising, oppressive and demoralising one. If we look at our own system particularly at St. Pats and Mountjoy one wonders how any experience can be salutory which confines people to cells for up to eighteen hours a day — on their own — people who are often illiterate and used to a high degree of social intercourse; what an appalling waste of time and resources considering that the prisoners are matched almost man to man by officers. Wh y must prison be such an incredibly lonely and debilitating experience? The resentment and frustration the prisoner must feel will inevitably be taken out on the one he most closely identifies with responsibility for those deprivations — the officers. That in turn must deeply prejudice the interaction between the two. It is interesting to note that in the surveys of prisoners' attitudes to prison staff, almost invariably friendliness and fairness were characterised as being important but that these were not regarded as meaning that the officers concerned were permissive or lenient. Friendliness need not prejudice control. It ought to be

•Reprinted by kind permission from Prison Officers Association Magazine 1982.

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