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GAZETTE
APRIL 1983
The Purpose of Prisons?
Address to the Annual Conference of the Association of Prison Officers,
Green Isle Hotel, 27th May, 1982 *
by
Mary McAleese, Lecturer in Criminology U.C.D.
I
T E A CH Criminology and Penology which is all
about crime control and criminals, without necessarily
ever meeting a criminal, a policeman, or a prison officer.
You deaf with criminals without necessarily ever reading a
book on Criminology or Penology. Indeed you may have
fairly cynical or sceptical views on the need for academic
criminologists or theorists at all.
T o some extent I could understand such antipathy for
when I began to review what criminologists and
penologists had to say about prison officers, I discovered
two things. The first is that despite the mountain of
Penological material examining the minutiae of the prison
system, very little academic attention has been paid to
what must be one of the most crucial areas of prison life —
the role of the prison officer. The second discovery I made
was that where academic penologists had decided to look
at the custodial officers, then what they had to say of them
was far from flattering. In an article published in 1945 by
Joseph Fishman which describes in lurid detail the life of a
prison officer the headline reads T h e Meanest job in the
World'. Gordon Hawkins, himself a former prison
governor, devotes a chapter of his book "The Prison" to his
former colleagues. He titles the chapter on prison officers
T h e other prisoners'. Donald Clemmer in his celebrated
account of The Prison Community claimed that prison
officers had three major preoccupations —none of which
had much to do with prisoners or penal theory. Their first
preoccupation was when do we eat —the second — when
do we quit and the third when do we get paid? How
accurately those preoccupations reflect the main areas of
interest of Irish prison officers today, you are better
qualified to judge than I am. But it is a fact that over the
past few years the Association of Prison Officers has been
more often in the public limelight because of disputes over
pay, overtime, rostering etc, than over idealogical
conflicts about the role of prison in contemporary society.
It does surprise me that at a time when prisons are in
crisis throughout the Western World, at a time when many
observers are demanding the development of alternatives
to imprisonment and the reduction of numbers being
sentenced to imprisonment on the grounds that it is an
expensive, demoralising and dehumanising failure which
compounds criminality rather than reducing it — why are
those people closest to the implementation of penal policy
so seemingly disinterested in the debate? Recently I met a
sociologist who was investigating labour relations m an
Irish semi-state body which regularly throws this country
into chaos in pursuit of wages claims, arguments over
demarcation and overtime. He patiently explained to me
that his research into the causes of this persistent industrial
unrest showed that the real issues were not about money at
all, but that there was a profound deeprooted
dissatisfaction with the job itself—public image of the job
was poor — the body they worked for was the butt of
regular jibes, their work lacked status, they were expected
to perform miracles with outmoded equipment etc., but
instead of investigating these areas of unease and unrest
and making them part of, if not central to their negotiations
with management, their resentment about these things
remained untapped, inarticulate and was translated into
wages and demarcation claims.
That conversation made me wonder just how much that
same kind of dissatisfaction was there within the prison
service itself and how could it be tapped to promote the
development of a better more coherent and more
successful prison system than we presently have. If I was a
prison officer who did have a developed sense of duty and
commitment to the job of caring for prisoners I think I
would feel that society was dealing me a less than fair
hand. There is a public stereotype of a prison officer as a
uniformed locker and unlocker of doors whose job it is to
inflict punishment on prisoners, to repress them, to bring it
home to them that they are bad and the rest of us are good.
The prison officer is chosen to do society's dirty work —
he's probably well enough paid for it in terms of money,
but in terms of status there is considerable public
ambivalence. The prison officer is expected to deal with
problems he was never trained to deal with and then he is
censured by the media for what is identified as his or the
system's failure to solve the problem. For example he or
rather the prison is expected to punish people and
rehabilitate them simultaneously. The P.O. is expected to
take an illiterate adult who has never held a steady job in
his life, who comes from an area where there is chronic
unemployment and teach him to read, equip him with
vocational skills, convince him of the error of his ways and
find him ajob, send him out into the world again a paragon
of virtue. He is usually expected to accomplish all this in
less than six months. He is given heroin addicts, drunks,
vagrants, prostitutes, beggars, psychopaths, sociopaths,
vandals, thugs, murderers, rapists and once they are safely
delivered into his hands, society breathes a sigh of relief
that the problem is now being taken care of and no one
thinks to ask, how well equipped is the prison or its
personnel to handle this particular problem.
Are their other and better ways of handling it. The
prison is there, it can't say no — this is not our problem —
we can't cope, it has no power of veto, no way of saying —
this person is not suitable to what we have to offer — we
are the wrong place. The hospitals can decide who they
will treat, the psychiatric hospitals can say, this patient
does not suit us, the special schools can say, this guy is too
disruptive we don't want him, so they all end up in the one
place which is obliged to keep open house — the prison!
Wh en crime rates soar and the public demand stiffer
sentencing in the unguided belief that the longer and
harsher the sentence the more it will deter the criminal, the
courts respond by increasing penalties, sending more
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