Achieving reform in unstable correctional institutions: a theoretical perspective – revisited

Abstract

In many of our nation’s prisons and jails, the goal of achieving stability has been buried beneath the demand for institutional order. Ill-qualified correctional administrators having failed to achieve stability by overlooking the organizational commitments required from key institutional actors are satisfied in maintaining a chaotic status quo. That is, tolerating a condition of a tenuous order where inmate placation, rather than reformulation, is the guiding policy to neutralize institutional instability. An additional state of classification, order, is proposed here to the two existing states of classification descriptive of the social climates within correctional institutions–instability and stability. In doing so an emerging recognition of the dissimilarities between the states of order and stability are given due consideration. Finally, the vision of a humanistic correctional system held to be an inevitable outgrowth of the evolutionary process of social change is discussed.

Keywords:

• Ill-qualified correctional administration
• inmate appeasement
• participatory management
• correctional stability
• order
• instability
• social change
• correctional reform

Notes

1. Two variant views of intellectual thought exist on the taxonomies descriptive of the social climate within correctional institutions. The first and firmly established orthodox view, which equates order with stability in that they are used interchangeably, is defined with an affinity grounded towards two dichotomous states of classification referenced in the extant literature as order (stability) and disorder (instability). The other view, as argued here, journeys beyond the conventional boundaries of the orthodox view and presents an emerging heterodox perspective that has three distinct states of classification subsequently labeled – instability, order, and stability. Within this contextual arrangement, the operative state, order, becomes a formidable, yet fragile fault line between two antithetical states – instability and stability. As Crewe (2007, p. 257) put it, ‘The extensive space between open rebellion [instability] and absolute consent [stability] represents the normal reality of prison life, in which order prevails, but often tenuously and uneasily …’

2. There are literature references of correctional instability culminating from proactive change in correctional policy (Kauffman, 1988; McCleery, 1960). As Wright (1991, p. 221) asserts, ‘Generally, [correctional] environments are stable, but a disruption, possibly caused by a major policy change, can lead to an escalation of violence.’ An example is McCleery’s (1960) narrative of a transition in a prison’s policy from a punitive orientation to a rehabilitative one. A change initiated by the rudimentary character of a politically appointed liberal administration without penal experience. This shattered the existing social equilibrium – a tenuous order based upon informal inmate appeasements – the linchpin of what is mistakenly perceived as stability. Rupturing established solidarity promotes the propensity for collective inmate unrest and shifting behavioral variations. Bringing justifiable concerns that ill-qualified penal administrator’s lack of perception and insight into the organizational dynamics of inmate subcultures result in, among others, a failure to manage change (Scheim, 1992).