167. Jamie Bennett. New Managerialism and prisons

See key points at the bottom.

Dr. Jamie Bennett has worked in prisons and wider criminal justice system since 1996 and held a number of senior positions. He is currently Chief Strategy Officer at the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales. He was previously Governor of HMP Long Lartin, a high security prison; HMP Grendon, the only prison to operate entirely as a series of therapeutic communities; HMP Springhill, an innovative open prison which helps men to prepare for their release and resettle into the community, and; HMP Morton Hall, a women’s prison working with a diverse international population.

Jamie was editor of the Prison Service Journal for 17 years and has published over 100 articles and reviews in peer review publications covering topics including: prisons and the media, social inequality and imprisonment, and the development of managerialism. He is the author of The Working Lives of Prison Managers: Global change, local cultures and individual agency in the late modern prison (Palgrave MacMillan 2015), The Penal System: An Introduction Sixth Edition (with Paul Cavadino, James Dignan and George Mair, Sage 2019) and Prisoners on Prison Films (with Victoria Knight, Palgrave MacMillan, 2021). He has also produced four other books: Understanding Prison Staff (ed with Ben Crewe and Azrini Wahidin, Willan 2008); Dictionary of Prisons and Punishment (ed with Yvonne Jewkes, Willan 2008); The Prisoner (ed with Ben Crewe, Routledge 2011), and; Handbook on Prisons (ed with Yvonne Jewkes and Ben Crewe, Routledge, 2016).

Much of his writing has been on the management of prisons and most recently on the disruption to such management by the pandemic in his paper ‘Disrupting prison managerialism: Managing prisons in an age of pandemic’

 

Key points from the conversation;

1. The process of managerialism in the prison system can be dehumanizing and lead to a focus on meeting targets rather than caring for people.

2. There had been a shift in the culture of management, with a greater emphasis on targets and less commitment to broader corporate approaches.

3. The disruption caused by the pandemic led to a recalibration of the relationship between national and local levels of management, giving managers more discretion in implementing guidance.

4. The pandemic also led to a reinvigoration of a sense of place and community, with managers focusing more on the needs of their local community.

5. The experience of managers may have differed from that of ground floor staff, who sometimes felt ignored by top-level management.

6. The prison system experienced a shift from performance targets to change management in order to achieve reductions in resources.

7. There are ongoing changes in the prison system to give more choice and discretion to high-performing managers and to push strategic decision-making to a more local level.