House of Commons - Role of the Prison Officer

Role of the Prison Officer - Justice Committee Contents

3 Management of prison officers

Relationship with senior management

127. Historically, the relationship between the uniformed prison officer and management has been assessed as poor. In his 1991 report Lord Woolf, later Lord Chief Justice, described 'dissension, division and distrust' between all levels of Prison Service staff.[143] Professor Andrew Coyle told us that poor relationships with management and poor public perceptions of their role are widespread:

Prison staff often regard themselves as the forgotten members of the criminal justice system. They do not have the public profile of judges, prosecutors or members of the police service. Even in the United Kingdom until very recently there was a reluctance on the part of some prison staff to let neighbours or friends know where they worked. It was almost as though some of the guilt of prisoners rubbed off onto the prison staff. This ambivalence on the part of prison staff about the value of their work was exacerbated by their symbiotic relationship with governors and senior management.[144]

128. The Prison Officers Association (POA) is one of the few unions unable to ballot its members for strike action. In 1994 a statutory bar was imposed, preventing them seeking strike action. The ban was repealed in 2005, a move initiated by the Government apparently in an attempt to improve industrial relations. It was replaced by a voluntary no-strike agreement. In August 2007, approximately 20,000 officers in public sector prisons went on strike for twenty-four hours following the breakdown of pay negotiations between the POA and the Ministry of Justice. The POA stated that it had withdrawn from the no-strike agreement following the failed talks, as it had threatened to do in June 2007 (although the Prison Service was not given notification of the strike to avoid the chance that the Ministry of Justice would obtain an injunction). News outlets reported that some striking officers temporarily suspended industrial action to face exceptional circumstances in their jails, for example at HMP Liverpool where officers dealt with three prisoners who had climbed onto the roof, and in high-security HMP Frankland where staff returned to work because of the perceived danger posed by prisoners.[145]

129. The Prison Service Staff Engagement Survey for 2008 found that 67% of prison officers were satisfied with the job they did, while other prison staff had a satisfaction rate of 79%. According to figures from the Ministry of Justice, the average number of days the Prison Service lost to staff sickness in 2007 was 11.7. This compared to 6.5 days lost at Ministry of Justice headquarters and a national average of 2.5 days.[146] According to research by the TUC, high sick rates are associated with low morale in the workplace.[147]Research carried out for IPSOS MORI in 2007 found that 44% of prison officers would speak critically about the criminal justice system as a whole while only 10% would speak highly of it.[148]

PRISON CULTURE

130. Professor Alison Liebling commented that the practicalities of the relationship between prison officers and senior management have been forced to change over the past decade as power has shifted from the uniformed prison officer up to management as the Prison Service has introduced more target setting and performance indicators.

131. In a written submission, Victoria Gadd, of the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University, told us that a theme of the research she had undertaken on prison officer opinions of their work was changing perceptions of the job:

It was common for us [the research team] to hear from uniformed officers that prison work 'just isn't the same job now'. By this they meant that "honest, decent prison work", "real prison work", achieved interpersonally on the landings and in the prison yards, has given way to paperwork, "making sure the right box is ticked at the right time" and "number crunching."[149]

She also noted that dissatisfaction correlated strongly with length of service.

132. A number of contributors to the e-consultation complained that key performance indicators (KPIs) and key performance targets (KPTs) did not reflect the reality of the work carried out in prisons:

The idea that prison officers still have any role to play in rehabilitation is a myth. Staff spend half of their time filling out pointless checklists just to tick boxes in order to make it look as though we are doing something. In reality with the endemic drug problems, overcrowding and the general chaos caused by the widespread mentally ill we do little more than warehouse prisoners during the periods between their criminal activity.[150]

Another contributor believed that the focus on KPTs and KPIs itself limited or damaged opportunities for rehabilitative work:

prisons are drowning under a growing raft of targets, KPTs KPIs inspections and audits, with too little time spent on engaging with, and challenging offenders, it seems more and more the case that as long as the right boxes are ticked, nobody cares what happens, it is a case of "never mind the quality feel the width", hence we have situations in other walks of life such as social services and hospitals where the process totally subsumes the outcomes. I am merely a prison officer with nearly 29 years of experience and I despair of the future.[151]

One prison officer believed training had been reduced to a tickbox exercise through the use of targets:

Each training package that is presented is reduced to the very basic requirement and the time-base for presentation is reduced to enable a box to be ticked and not to facilitate … learning. The service has opted to train on the cheap which in the long run is a false economy, invest in your staff and they will invest in you.[152]

133. The turnover of prison officers within the Prison Service is low, 4.7% in 2007-08; the rate of resignation was 2.3%.[153]In comparison, in private sector prisons the annual resignation rate is 16%.[154] However, as the Howard League for Penal Reform noted, low turnover of prison officers in the public sector is not necessarily a result of satisfaction with their role but may reflect a lack of opportunity for officers with lower skill levels to find comparable well-paid employment elsewhere.[155] There is also the tendency to locate prisons in rural areas which may lack other employment opportunities.

RECRUITMENT AND MANAGEMENT

134. The Prison Governors Association told us that relationships between prison officers and management may "get off on the wrong foot" due to the lack of an interview in which the recruit had an opportunity to ask questions and, as a result, many arrived with false expectations.[156]

Phil Wheatley, Director-General of NOMS, defended the recruitment process:

I was recruited by the much-heralded interview where people worked out whether they liked the cut of your jib. It did not produce a particularly exciting group of prison officers, as I remember it. Actually, assessing people carefully to see whether they show the right sort of attitudes, whether they can cope with aggression, whether they can reflect back in a way that you would like with people who are fairly difficult, whether they have a degree of resilience, is a much better way of selecting, and I think to run an assessment centre for our staff and punctiliously follow that to make sure you have an objective assessment method is actually something that Parliament should be recognising and praising.[157]

135. While we endorse the use of an objective recruitment process we are concerned at the suggestion that prison officer recruits are so poorly informed during that process that they begin work with unrealistic expectations. A reflective interview, discussing the exercises undertaken, does not give recruits an opportunity to ask questions. We recommend that all recruits are given interviews with the governors of their prospective establishments before taking up their role. While we accept that this will impact on governors' limited time, the evidence we have heard suggests that, if it improves staff-management relations, it will pay dividends in the future.

Workforce Modernisation Programme

136. The generally poor relationship with senior management has been exacerbated by the reduction in staff numbers implicit in Workforce Modernisation and the prison building programme. The key concern over Workforce Modernisation expressed by prison officers in the e-consultation and during our visit to the Sheppey cluster, apart from the lack of information about its implications, was that it would lead to fewer people to do their job safely.

137. The Ministry of Justice's proposed Workforce Modernisation programme was rejected by the Prison Officers Association in February 2009. In a press release the POA stated that the turnout for the ballot had been 86%, the highest in the union's 70 year history. Of 25,097 voting papers issued, 97.23% were returned, 84.2% of which rejected the proposed deal. The Prison Governors Association (PGA) also rejected the Workforce Modernisation proposals.

138. In a statement to the House, on 27 April 2009, the Secretary of State for Justice announced that NOMS were going ahead with a consultation over a reduced package of proposals. The changes would not affect staff currently in post but, it appears, will be applied to all officers who join the Prison Service after 1 September 2009.

139. Both the POA and the PGA have condemned the proposals as a de-skilling of the prison officer role simply to reduce costs. The original Workforce Modernisation Programme was intended to create a new, flatter, managerial structure.[158] The current structure is as follows:

Governing Governor
Governor (grades 2-5)
Principal Officer
Senior Officer
Prison Officer
Operational Support Grades

It would have been replaced by the following:

Governing Governor
Senior Manager/ Manager
Senior Officer/Team Leader
Officer Residential/Officer Operations
Operational Support Assistant

140. The PGA had particular concerns over the impact on training of the Workforce Modernisation proposals:

The proposals seek to recruit all prison officers initially as Operational Support Assistants (OSA). Elementary Training will be offered for this role which will last for two weeks. When vacancies arise, [Operational Support Officers] can compete for posts as Officers Operations (OO). They will undertake a six-week course incorporating many of the elements of the current Prison Officer Entry Level Training (POELT) course: Again when vacancies permit officer [Officers Operations] will be able to apply for vacancies as officer offender manager (OOM) and will undertake one further week's training.[159]

141. The revised proposals appear to have dropped one of the most controversial reforms, the removal of line management duties from senior officers, on which a contributor to the e-consultation commented: "Senior officers felt undermined and betrayed and the concept of removing first line management from the uniformed disciplined side was ill-considered and would have deeply affected morale."[160] The principal officer role (the highest grade in uniform) is to be abolished. Management team costs are to be "reduced incrementally" by 19% "over a number of years."

142. The POA's earlier conclusions on the Workforce Modernisation programme appear to remain valid. It described the proposals as: "a missed opportunity to look at the functions of each individual prison to ensure they are fit for the challenges that our society faces today and in the future. This could have ensured that we had the most cost-effective prisons delivering the best quality service in respect of addressing offending behaviour and reducing re-offending." The POA concluded: "Unfortunately NOMS and the Prisons Board were only interested in saving money and not looking outside of the box. The negotiations, or lack of them, demonstrated to the POA that short term monetary gain was the only thing on the agenda."[161]

143. During the Committee's visit to Sheppey, a number of officers told Members and Committee staff that their concerns over Workforce Modernisation had not been over the pay offer but over the potential impact on staffing levels especially when combined with the claimed benefits of new prisons. Technological developments, such as cameras and automatic locks, might assist in keeping prisoners secure but could not intervene to prevent a prisoner hurting him or herself or others or prevent potential unrest escalating out of control. A contributor to the e-consultation noted:

What should be realised is that prison officers know they are not immune to change nor are they resistant to it. What we are very good at is knowing when a cut is a cut too far. Prison officers know that to run a prison properly, it needs numbers and it needs resources. Lack of staff means lack of control.[162]

The handling of the Workforce Modernisation proposals appears to have engendered a profound cynicism in many officers. A contributor to the e-consultation summed up his or her feelings:

"Workforce modernisation" is not about modernisation, it is about cutting operational staff and cutting pay and conditions of service to save an arbitrary figure of £500 million seemingly plucked from the air without thought as to the realities of the further damage it would wreak on the Prison Service. Modernisation has been ongoing since Fresh Start in 1989 with private prisons, operational support grades brought in, courts, escorts, catering, healthcare etc civilianised to name but some. In reality many prisons are 'pared to the bone' as far as experienced frontline disciplinary staff are concerned, and [there] are no longer any pools of staff to call on in emergencies. "Workforce modernisation" seeks to "put the final nail in the coffin" by a further massacre of the rank structure and experienced staff. Now [the proposals have been] rejected, our lamentable "management" can claim that prison staff are standing in the way of "modernisation." If we tell a prisoner a lie we have to be accountable and would lose all trust and credibility and held in contempt. Why does our management feel we should react any differently?

144. There is clearly pressure on the prison officer profession at the top and the bottom, with training and minimum entry age being reduced and experienced senior frontline staff grades being cut. Reducing expertise at both ends of the Prison Service seems to be a serious strategic error.

145. The implications for staffing and management of the Workforce Modernisation programme run counter to much of the evidence we have heard on building a strong, effective Prison Service. Technology cannot replace the "pro-social modelling," positive example, engagement and the challenging of prisoners which are the most valuable parts of the prison officer role. We believe that Workforce Modernisation, as currently proposed, represents a missed opportunity to develop a Prison Service which is appropriate for the twenty-first century.

The culture of individual prisons

146. Professor Alison Liebling told us:

…staff culture…is…one of the key variables in determining to what extent you can change a prison or make it do the sorts of things you want it to…prisons with the same function can have a very benign and quite malleable staff group and another prison can have a totally resistant type of staff group, so it varies; it is not uniform. The problem, however, is the culture seems to arise as an adaptation to the demands of the work, so it is almost like a defence for staff, they do become cynical, anti management, sometimes they do not like prisoners, but that often happens for reasons you can almost identify in a particular establishment.[163]

147. The Chief Inspector agreed that staff culture was a crucial to a prisoner's rehabilitation prospects. She went on to tell us that a good culture involved both good discipline, of staff as well as prisoners, real engagement between the different levels of staff: "where the right kind of behaviours are encouraged and the wrong kind of behaviours are picked up pretty quickly, where the right kind of things are rewarded, where managers really know what is going on in the prison and are prepared to deal with it."[164]

148. The empirical academic research supports this view. Victoria Gadd, of the Cambridge University Institute of Criminology, shadowed two senior management teams, who had been identified as effective and successful, as well as looking at staff quality-of-life surveys, convening focus groups and holding informal conversations with staff. She concluded that:

"…effective [senior management teams] motivate and encourage their workforce by providing clear leadership (the governor is pivotal in this role), with a clear management vision, message, focus and goals, and by leading by example. The …[senior management teams] show a united front at all times in public and exhibit strength in their unity. They set out clear expectations about what is and is not acceptable and manage this boundary firmly. They aim to get all staff 'on board' with the management message, goals and vision and do so through the use of genuine staff support and recognition, but also via performance management of those who are 'off message' and not 'whole team' players. Discrimination and exploitation of others (staff and prisoners) is not tolerated and is managed forcefully. These managers are not afraid to challenge staff and do so using the correct procedure and protocol."

149. The research paper went on to note that a governor joining a prison with high rates of sickness absence brought about a considerable change by a policy of tackling, and if necessary sacking, malingerers while providing strong support to the genuinely ill and ensuring rewards for those who had little or no time away. The research also noted that long-term commitment by management is required to improve staff satisfaction and motivation.[165] Such long term commitment is frequently not available. The Prison Reform Trust reported that, in the five years to March 2002, 44 prisons, just under a third of the total, had had four or more governors or acting governors in charge, and that the average overall tenure for governing governors was one year and nine months.

150. A noted theme in research into staff dissatisfaction is a lack of engagement and consultation by local management:

Many staff reported feeling that their managers are over concerned with targets and performance and are not concerned with what must be accomplished on the ground to achieve them. This could leave staff feeling isolated, unsupported and disillusioned.[166]

Professor Coyle noted this as a relatively recent change in the role of the prison governor and said that what had changed was:

…the role of the prison governor as leader of men and women, and the balance between that role and the role of being a good manager is quite a delicate one and one needs to have both of them in balance. I suspect that in some areas what is now called "managerialism" has taken over; actually ticking the boxes has become much more important than leading and directing.[167]

151. A negative culture can have serious implications both for prison officers, prisoners and security. Bobby Cummines, Chief Executive of UNLOCK, told the Committee that a negative culture could prevent prison officers who were focused on rehabilitation from making the difference they sought:

It is really hard for a prison officer who really cares and wants to do his work to do it because he lives in a small community, a prison community with other prison officers. That showed at Feltham [in the Mubarek inquiry] with the POA that if you did not fit in with the clique who were the heavy boys then you had a hard time, you were seen to be too caring for prisoners and seen as the "welfare screw", which was a stigma, and that made it very hard.[168]

152. A negative culture can lead to a sense of disengagement or hopelessness amongst officers making rehabilitative work a low priority. Jason Grant, who has spent time in custody, told us: "When prison officers meet those types of people who have got long criminal records, who have been in and out, they treat you as, "Okay, well, you're going to be a career criminal for the rest of your life anyway, we don't really care" and I [as a prisoner] am keeping them in a job anyway and they treat you as such."[169] Bobby Cummines agreed:

There was one prison officer…who said to me, "What's the point of you doing this because your criminal record will never be spent and you'll never get a job". He felt de-motivated because I had done such a long sentence that under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act I could never be rehabilitated…[170]

153. The damage caused by a lack of support from prison management can have severe ramifications, including a dependence on alcohol. Charlie Ryder, who has spent time in custody, commented:

There is a clear problem with alcoholism and drug addiction and for vulnerable people, for myself having experienced alcoholism, I saw it in terms of how it was treated [when officers were aware of alcoholism in prisoners], in terms of how people looked physically, at times I could even smell alcohol. I could tell it in terms of the red face, the aggression, the short temper, all those things that I had grown up with. I had gone from experiencing alcoholism with my dad to alcoholism amongst prison officers and I feel that the Prison Service is in complete denial about the effects of alcoholism.[171]

Bobby Cummines told us: "[prison officers] are in a culture where if you report bad behaviour of [another] prison officer you can be isolated from the whole of that community. There must be somewhere where prison officers can safely notify the necessary authority that bad practice is going on and it does not just carry on."[172]

154. There was a consensus among the ex-prisoners who gave evidence to us that the perceived attitudes of society towards crime could be damaging, both for the willingness of prison officers to engage in rehabilitative work and for NOMS as a whole to consider non-conventional ways to reduce re-offending. Jason Grant told us that:

Personally, I do not think they [prison officers] take it [rehabilitation] seriously at all, or maybe it is a thing where because society likes to criminalise the criminals and punish people, because they [prison officers] are in that role, they have a caretaker role, they see it as they have to punish first. Maybe rehabilitation is coming from up top with the managers and governors but it is not connecting with the people who work at that level.[173]

Charlie Ryder told us that:

I think tabloid newspapers and television programmes are clearly having an impact on how prison officers are seen. There is a real fear around some of the tabloid headlines and also how politicians have responded to some of those, even making some policies on the back of tabloid headlines. These things are definitely a key factor within the role of a prison officer. If you want them to be doing creative interventions I feel there is a real fear now for prison officers about being able to do these things. [174]

155. Dr Sarah Tait, of the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University, described, in a written submission, the impact on officers who experienced a lack of support from management:

Officers who demonstrated apathy, withdrawal, or bitterness about their work had experienced a lack of care—personal support or expressions and practical demonstrations of concern for their wellbeing—from figures of authority following traumatic incidents (mostly prisoner suicide and self-harm). Providing adequate ongoing support and strong leadership to prison staff, placing staff wellbeing at the forefront of management concerns, and remaining vigilant and attentive to the trauma experienced by many, is vital.[175]

Dr Tait noted that these officers could become aggressive towards prisoners.

Fighting a negative culture

156. The need for a positive culture to allow officers to tackle the problems of the prisoners is clearly vital to the Prison Service's frontline role in reducing re-offending. Professor Alison Liebling identified the difficulties in uprooting an entrenched negative culture:

Leeds prison was in a study…We saw no improvement for years and then suddenly…it looked like there was finally a shift, and we were talking amongst ourselves about how there were some highly skilled managers in that establishment trying really hard and everybody was focused on the same endgame, but nothing happened. We have seen it in other prisons too. It was almost that you had to extinguish negative behaviours before you could start trying to introduce positive ones, and it was a really long and complicated process.[176]

157. Professor Andrew Coyle has direct experience of "turning around" a "failing" prison. In 1991 Professor Coyle became Governor of HMP Brixton, a large inner-city prison that had recently seen the escape of two members of the Provisional IRA. He told the Committee: "When I went to be Governor of Brixton Prison I was sent for by the Home Secretary and was told, "I have only got one instruction for you, Governor. There must be no more escapes.""[177] This focus on security at the cost of all other considerations led, in Professor Coyle's view, to a negative view of achievement: "In many ways success in the Prison Service is still measured by absence of failure: make sure nothing goes wrong."[178]

158. To fundamentally uproot the negative culture in a prison, Professor Coyle told us that there needed to be an increase in trust, not only within individual prisons but throughout NOMS:

There is a culture where the worst thing is to do something wrong rather than to do something that is right.…At the various levels of the Prison Service going from the ministers, through the senior civil servants, down through prison governors to prison officers, there is a tendency not to trust the people who are below, and the experience of the best run prisons, I think, is where trust exists, where we allow people to make mistakes on occasion, provided it is within the parameters, and the task of management is to make sure that those parameters are there. The parameter, for example, in a high security prison would be: there must be no escape at all—that is not negotiable—and the prison staff will find a way to deliver. That parameter might not be the same in an open prison.[179]

159. Achieving a secure prison estate from which escapes never, or very rarely, happen is not only important in terms of public confidence but also in terms of staff and prisoners alike regarding the prison as a "settled community." However, the aim must be "security for a purpose" and we conclude that the Ministry of Justice's emphasis on security in isolation is a mistake, and reinforces negative cultures within prisons.

160. More training and more investment in staff will produce only limited results if staff are not equipped and trusted by their superiors to carry out their jobs with professionalism and dedication, and unless there is clarity on the purpose of security rather than treating "no escapes" as a public relations objective in itself.

161. We have heard evidence from a number of witnesses on the importance and impact of strong leadership in individual prisons. However, some prisons will always be challenging due to their size and population and even the best governing governors may struggle with the demands of the role. In oral evidence Professor Liebling told us:

Governors who are very good get exhausted, especially by very difficult prisons, so there is a limit to how long you can expect somebody to work in a prison like Wandsworth. A three or four year stint seems to be about the best compromise if the governor is well suited to the prison, and then succession planning. I wonder why governors do not seem to be able to almost bring on their own successor, a dep[uty] or somebody else. It is complicated and I do not know how these decisions are made, but it is not a simple case of just keeping people in the same place.[180]

162. Leadership is crucial to achieving and maintaining a positive culture in a prison. Without a culture in which both officers and prisoners feel change is not only possible but encouraged, prisoners are simply warehoused and will almost certainly return to a criminal lifestyle on release. While this inquiry did not receive detailed evidence on the role of governors, the failure of Workforce Modernisation to consider the role of the prison officer means it is highly unlikely the role of the governor has been sympathetically scrutinised.

163. The rapid turnover of governing governors allows negative cultures to become entrenched. We recommend the Ministry of Justice examine the reasons for the turnover with the aim of achieving much greater stability.

164. Stephen Shaw, Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, has responsibility for investigating all deaths, and some near deaths, in custody in England and Wales. As part of the investigation he and his staff routinely inquire of frontline staff whether they have received sufficient care and support. Mr Shaw spoke positively about the recent improvements in emotional support provided to prison officers:

When we began this work, as I say, five years ago, very frequently you would encounter staff saying, "I did not hear anything. I was expected to come back on duty the same evening." We do not hear that now. There are sometimes specialist staff, particularly medical staff, who will say, "We were missed out of the debrief process", or, "We did not know about this", and occasionally, of course, somebody slips through the net or a mistake is made, but in general what our reports show in investigation after investigation is that the staff who are most affected by responding to a traumatic incident say that they have been offered appropriate support.[181]

165. We welcome the improvement in the care given to staff following deaths in custody which was noted by the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman.

166. Professor Liebling noted that there can often be resistance to making use of the assistance that is available.[182] She also told us that there was probably not a clear consensus about what counts as a traumatic incident. Some incidents that could be traumatic are taken for granted because they happen quite frequently. The relationship between the officers and the prisoner could also make a difference: "if a member of staff has a good relationship with a prisoner it might be a much more traumatic event than if it is with a stranger, so I do not think it is given enough attention."[183]

167. We were highly impressed with the Care Team at HMP Swaleside whom we met during the Committee visit to the Sheppey cluster. The Care Team can be contacted by individual officers on their own behalf or take referrals from other staff. It is Prison Service policy that officers are referred to the Care Team after specific "traumatic incidents," [184] but the Care Team at HMP Swaleside told us that they encouraged officers to contact them or refer others in any circumstances in which they could provide support. Members of the team told us they would frequently contact officers informally.

168. The HMP Swaleside Care Team is based upon guidance in Prison Service Order 8150. Prisons are not required to have a team with a remit that goes beyond the support procedure 'triggered' by a traumatic incident but governors have the option to create such a team. We welcome the creation of prison care teams with a remit to provide emotional support to officers over and above that required following a specific incident. We would encourage governors in all appropriate prisons to set up such a team for on-going, informal support to officers in their stressful role.

143 Op. cit., Woolf, 1991: 286 Back

144 Ev 109 Back

145 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6968794.stm Back

146 Economic and Labour Market Review, Office for National Statistics, December 2008 Back

147 http://www.tuc.org.uk/changingtimes Back

148 Duff, Wake, Burrows & Bremner, Closing the Gaps, Crime and Public Perceptions, (2007) Back

149 Ev 92 Back

150 25 March 2009 Back

151 25 March 2009 Back

152 5 April 2009 Back

153 Ev 124 Back

154 Parliamentary question 158974, quoted in Annex F to the Ministry of Justice submission (not printed; information available from Parliamentary archive) Back