Running Prisons

Is Judith Collins--or Anyone--Paying Attention?

It is hard to get a fix on how badly run our nation's prisons are. We do, however, have an admittedly unreliable but steady diet of news reports of corruption and incompetence in running the prisons.

We have come across an excellent piece in City Journal by Heather MacDonald which reviews developments in prison management and administration in Rikers, New York. We commend it to all who are interested in penology and prison management. Here are some of the highlights:

The article focuses upon jails, as contrasted with prisons, or penitentiaries. The latter are institutions which house the sentenced. Jails, in US terminology, are more like our remand prisons. They are a seething mass of constantly changing populations. This presents huge management challenges. The implication is that if they can be managed effectively and well, then effective policies will apply equally well in prisons. The "population" problem is described as follows:

Jail administrators are obligated to get pretrial detainees back and forth to court on time and to keep them safe until their cases are completed. But pretrial detainees are just less than two-thirds of the nation’s approximately 780,000 jail inmates. The remainder consists of post-conviction defendants with a sentence of a year or less, who serve their time in jail; post-conviction defendants sentenced to more than a year and awaiting transfer to prison; parolees and probationers who have violated their conditions of release; illegal immigrants detained for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and inmates in transit between prisons.

These populations show up at all hours, often with no background information on who they are. Their turnover rate is extremely high: jails process as many admissions and releases in two months as state and federal prisons (which hold about 1.5 million inmates) process in a year. Managing that “churning mass of humanity” is a nightmare, says Jacobson, who now directs the Vera Institute for Justice. “So many arrestees lead unbelievably disorganized lives”—but as soon as they enter a jail, the jail becomes responsible for their well-being.

The first lesson being learned is the importance of gathering extensive data on each arrivee, and segregating them into appropriate groups and supervision regimes. Inmate classification is now being recognised as one of the most effective, cutting edge techniques in jail management.

Over the next few days, Rikers officials will try to gather as much information as they can on the men in the pen, seeking to determine how securely to house them and whether they need medical or psychological care. They will analyze their criminal records, intake questionnaires, medical examinations, and current behavior. Such inmate classification is the cutting edge of jail management. Jails are only now starting to recognize the importance of rigorously analyzing information to maintain order, just as policing has in the last decade. Some jails still practice “open bed” classification, housing an inmate wherever there is an empty bed or, at best, separating felony and misdemeanor pretrial detainees. But careful inmate classification acknowledges that a Mike Tyson in on a drunk-driving charge, say, is likely to be more dangerous than many a felony auto thief—and should be housed accordingly.

Secondly, New York with its zero-tolerance policing policies has, as one would expect, placed enormous pressure on the state's prison system. The lesson is that you cannot have zero-tolerance policing--which is demonstrably effective in reducing crime--without a commensurate spend on the prison system, and a focus on high quality prison management. Zero-tolerance policing increases the complexity of prisons: if a nation is serious about crime reduction, then it has to put the hard yards in not just on the streets, but in the prisons as well.

The spread of quality-of-life policing, which targets low-level offenses like aggressive panhandling, public urination, and littering, has brought a more mentally unstable, troubled population into jails—one that mental hospitals would have treated before the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1960s and ’70s shuttered most state mental hospitals. In fact, jails have become society’s primary mental institutions, though few have the funding or expertise to carry out that role properly. Mental illness is much more common in jails than in prisons; at Rikers, 28 percent of the inmates require mental health services, a number that rises each year. “People are coming right off the streets with a whole range of street problems,” Jacobson reports. “You have to deal with them immediately and figure out: ‘Are you a dangerous lunatic, or just tough?’ ”

Thirdly, prison management must face up to the corruption of prison officers. Rikers has a zero-tolerance policy towards the smallest infraction of the rules by a prison officer with respect to prisoners. They have worked out that the overriding intent of prisoners is to get officers to make just one relaxation of rules: as soon as they do, they are "owned" by the prisoner.

The goal is to gain control of the officer. An inmate’s most potent method of corruption is to persuade an officer to break the rules for him. “Inmates know that once they get a corrections officer to do something for them, even if it’s just bringing them a cheeseburger from McDonald’s, they own the officer,” says Frank Straub, the police commissioner of White Plains, New York. It is illegal to bring an inmate so much as a stick of gum, as corrections officers learn from their first day in the academy. But there will always be a few officers who are turned by a skilled con man.
. . . . The results of any favoritism, even if it’s less shocking than bringing contraband to a cop killer, are disastrous for a jail. “When a corrections officer builds a relation with an inmate, the system starts to collapse,” says Straub, who has studied corruption in New York prisons. “The whole process is undermined.”

One wonders how our nation's prisons would stack up on this principle? We fear the results of any examination.

Another critically important principle is the need to fight jail crime. The principles and practices of zero-tolerance policing have now been brought into the prisons themselves.

More important than visual surveillance is information-gathering. Just as the NYPD started debriefing every suspect it arrested in the 1990s to collect knowledge about unsolved crimes, progressive corrections officials recognize the need for grassroots information in fighting jail crime. “We teach our officers that the most important thing they can do is to listen to the inmates,” says Rikers deputy warden Hall. “Jot things down: Who’s Big Daddy, or Red-O? Feed it up the chain so we can figure out who’s running things, who the predators and victims are. When someone gives you information, be receptive; don’t shut it off.” The Kent County jail reports the information it gathers to the Grand Rapids Police Department—in 2008, 70 reports about unsolved crimes, including 23 homicides and six robberies.

Another principle is the development of "direct supervision" where prison staff constantly mix with prisoners, rather than supervising them by walking through cell blocks every five minutes out of sixty. The latter means that prison officers are the last to find out what is actually going on in the prison. It is effective to contain; it not effective at controlling and shaping the prison culture.

Despite the complexity of the officer-inmate relationship, an emerging philosophy of correctional design, “direct supervision,” seeks to break down the physical and psychological barriers between officers and inmates. In traditional prisons and jails, the corrections officer stays behind a barrier at a workstation, emerging only to make his rounds on a predetermined schedule, while inmates spend their day either in their cells or in a group dayroom. “It’s difficult to manage behavior under such conditions,” says Demory, “because for 59 minutes of the hour, the inmates control the turf.” The traditional design’s passive management style is good at containment but not at shaping the culture, he adds.

. . . . In a direct-supervision facility, by contrast, when inmates congregate out of their cells, the corrections officer is in the same space, either at an accessible workstation or circulating among them, like a community-policing cop walking his beat. The objective is to break down any distinction between the territory of inmates and of officers; the officer is supposed to talk with inmates, set the tone, and intervene immediately in predation and misbehavior.

The direct-supervision model has had impressive results in managing one of Rikers Island’s most difficult populations. A few dormitories of the adolescent jail are devoted to a program in which officers engage constantly with detainees to try to encourage self-control and respect for authority.

Another key principle is "place based management" where prison staff take responsibility for everything that happens "on their watch." They are not allowed to blame bad events upon "the system".

Direct-supervision theory is evolving further in the direction of community-policing concepts. “Place-based management,” for instance, teaches officers to think of themselves as owners of the housing units they supervise. They’re accountable for everything that happens on their watch, just as a community-policing officer should feel responsible for what happens on his beat. Too often, says Demory, who trains jail officials in the concept for the National Institute of Corrections, “if a fight breaks out, the officer thinks, ‘They’re just fools,’ rather than, ‘I’m the manager. How did that happen?’ ”

Finally, the article points out that Rikers and other enlightened prisons have had to get rid of the influence of the prison lobby groups.

The challenges of running jails exceed anything that the academic world—and most of us—can begin to understand. In addition to the huge problems of logistics and safety that jails present on their own, commissioners also face a well-organized inmates’ rights lobby that fights commonsense antiviolence measures. Until recently, for example, New York City officials weren’t allowed to put pretrial detainees in uniform, which made detecting contraband more difficult. Only last year did Commissioner Horn win the right to monitor detainees’ phone calls. Adolescents arrive at Rikers with their criminal histories largely concealed from officials to protect their privacy, hindering the determination of their security risk.

The conclusion:

The recent insights of urban policing—that order matters, that small violations lead to greater crimes, and that information must be gathered and analyzed—are all equally pertinent to jails, where chaos and corruption always threaten.

Here, we believe is a way forward for the NZ prison system and the Department of Corrections. There is a growing body of evidence that a welcome, albeit unintended consequence of running prisons in the Rikers way is that recidivism reduces. There is a great lesson here for any prepared to learn it: if you run prisons with the objective of reducing re-offending, you will fail. If you run them with the objective of intensively managing prisoners, requiring constant interaction with guards, refusing to tolerate excuses or rationalisations for illegal behaviour, criminals end up being less likely to offend. Why? Because they are being treated like responsible human beings by responsible human beings: firmly, fairly, and with a no-excuses dignity.

To make the necessary changes will take strong political and public leadership. It will require a significant increase in the public spend on prisons. It will take a prodigious investment in training prison officers.

Oh, but we forgot. Such enlightened prison policies have come out of zero-tolerance and community based policing strategies. They are an extension of those policies from the community to the prison. Both work. In NZ we have not even got to first base on the policing side of the game.