Procedural Justice and Legitimacy in Prisons: A Review of Extant Empirical Literature

Significant in the management of a safe and secure custodial environment is the compliance of incarcerated persons with the prison rules and the directives of prison officers. In recent years, there has been increased research focus on the role of normative compliance in the prison environment, which is postulated to derive from the perceptions of legitimacy and procedural justice of those who are incarcerated. This article presents the findings of a scoping review of the empirical literature as it relates to procedural justice and legitimacy in prison settings. This literature is charted and then analyzed across two primary themes, namely “Shaping Perceptions of Procedural Justice and Legitimacy” and “Procedural Justice, Legitimacy, and Compliance.” The presence of normative compliance in prisons and the contribution of procedurally just treatment to perceptions of legitimacy held by persons who are incarcerated are discussed.

‘We are “free range” prison officers’, the experiences of Scottish Prison Service throughcare support officers working in custody and the community

Between 2015 and 2019, 41 throughcare support officers (TSOs) supported people serving short sentences leaving custody across 11 Scottish Prison Service establishments. The role of prison officers in the provision of throughcare in the community was an innovation in Scotland and represents a new approach to the long-standing challenges around supporting reintegration from custody. Drawing on data from semi-structured interviews with 20 TSOs, this article examines their reflections on their role, bringing attention for the first time to the front-line perspectives of those involved in this novel approach to throughcare. TSO’s reflections revealed their growing awareness of the ‘pains of desistance’ and the challenges around reintegration, insights which had not been apparent to them in their prior work as officers working only in prison. The community ‘place’ of the TSO work also enabled a renewed awareness of the limits of rehabilitation within a prison and their own institutionalization after years of working in the custodial environment.

Therapeutic communities and planned environments for serious offenders in English prisons

SummarySeveral English prisons contain democratic therapeutic communities (TCs) for personality disordered offenders, and addiction TCs for serious substance misusers. This article describes how these are organised and comments on how they are specifically tailored and accredited for use in custodial settings. It also describes ‘psychologically informed planned environments’ (PIPEs), offender pathways for those with personality disorders and psychopathy which provide additional support for psychological treatment. It ends by explaining how ‘enabling environments’ are assessed, since these are now becoming widely adopted in prisons to reverse toxic environments – which affect staff, the prison and the outside world as well as the individual prisoner – and to counter negative learning found in custodial institutions.Learning Objectives• Understand the key components of treatment in democratic and addiction TCs• Understand how TCs can operate in a custodial environment• Appreciate the differences between a planned environment and a psychological treatment programme in a custodial environment