Why Dialogue in prisons?
The are four main reasons why we have been developing dialogues and transferring the skills to run them in prisons during the past 15 years:
- To humanise prisons for all who live and work in these fragmented establishments
- To enable under-performing prisons to excel
- To realise end-to-end offender management in support of sustainable resettlement through Threshold Dialogues
- To develop executive level staff and train senior managers of prison and correctional systems to talk and think together well in support of resettlement
To expand a little on each of these:
To humanise prisons for all who live and work in these fragmented establishments:
Since 1993 we have been developing a practice for dialogue in prisons. The need that we identified was as a result of our experience in dispersal prisons, which house the most serious offenders in England and Wales. We spelt it out in a Prison Dialogue flier in 1999 as follows:
“Prisons tend to be socially fragmented institutions. Individual prisoners, officers and management, who come from hugely diverse geographic and social communities, have to fit into a rigid and bureaucratic institutional life. For prisoners, the loss of freedom and the loss of control in matters of employment, family life and financial affairs often result in boredom, lack of motivation and depression. Openness and creativity can become hidden or misdirected behind an armour of lethargy, aggression and fear. Strained relationships and peculiar patterns of behaviour become ingrained and accepted as normal. They carry on, year after year, without everyone involved realising what is really happening.
“Significant differences of power and strained patterns of trust further compound the problem. Individuals from one group (of prisoners, officers or management) may treat individuals from another group so unreasonably (from the others’ point of view) that they react. In a prison there are limited avenues of expression, and reaction may take the form of disobedience, provocation, violation or violence. This may be interpreted as proof of untrustworthiness, and confirmation that even less respect should be given the other in future. In such a process, each protagonist tends to overlook his or her own contribution to the degeneration.
“Damaging interactions based on stereo-typing and prejudice do occur daily between different subgroups of prisoners (largely based on the nature of their crimes), and between prisoners, uniformed staff and management. Many prisons are doing fine work, but despite this, racism, bullying, assaults, knifings and suicides are disturbingly common. Sex-offenders are particularly vulnerable. Some prisoners spend month after month in segregation blocks.
“The urgent question is: How to break this downward spiral of dehumanisation which reinforces antisocial and brutal behaviour and thwarts rehabilitation?
To enable under-performing prisons to excel
Shortly before his promotion to become the governing governor at HMP Dorchester, we interviewed Dep Gov Steve Holland at HMP Blakenhurst to understand his recent experiences and how he would approach his new role. Once he was established in the role we offered to support him in developing his own style of running an establishment through visionary and citizen leadership. This led Prison Dialogue to work with the governor on the assembling of his Senior Management Team, and then with that SMT on the development of their strategy. HMP Dorchester had significant IR and performance challenges. It lay close to bottom of an unofficial Prison Service ranking, and was put onto a PIP (Performance Improvement Plan) as critical test on the slippery slope to being put out to tender to be run privately. We continued to meet with the Governor and SMT, whilst also engaging distinctly with the PO’s (on their role definition) and the SOs. We introduced mixed level staff dialogues to get the staff talking and thinking together well, and then introduced the notion of staff working directly with prisoners in weekly dialogue groups. In time we extended this into the community through the PPO Threshold Dialogue Pilot (which was partly funded by the Dorset Criminal Justice Board). By the end of the PIP HMP Dorchester had risen to become a top quartile performer, making the biggest performance leap measured in an English prison for many years. We believe that our contribution was a significant factor in the prison’s enhanced performance. This is what we mean by enabling an under-performing prison to excel.
To realise end-to-end offender management in support of sustainable resettlement through Threshold Dialogues
In 1995 we brought together many of the agencies involved in working with offenders to consider how they might work in a more co-ordinated manner to support resettlement (see Resettlement and Reconviction KPI conference). The event was arranged around the journey of the offender from arrest, through imprisonment to resettlement in the community, and as well as all the agencies we had male and female prisoners on day release from HMP Blakenhurst and HMP Brockhill plus resettled ex-offenders. It was evident that each agency follows its own agenda and procedures, for good reason, but to the detriment of the offenders’ chances of resettlement. There are endless gaps through which offenders fall, and generally speaking, the more emphasis that is given to numeric targets such as KPIs, the worse this becomes.
This led us to pioneer end-to-end offender management work through Threshold Dialogues, which we piloted with PPOs at Dorchester and then developed as the Bournemouth Threshold Dialogue with prison dialogue groups in HMP Dorchester and HMP Guys Marsh, and community dialogues in Boscombe. (Refer to Threshold Dialogue).
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