Prison Governors as Policymakers,PhroneticPractices as Enacted Knowledge

‘One always looks for a compromise…’: Senior prison managers’ views of law, human rights and prisoner complaints in Germany

“…In explaining how decisions are discussed in the various prison team meetings including frontline officers, social workers and senior staff, and how they had to be documented, they insisted that discretion does not mean arbitrariness. These findings are in line with much of the research on discretion in prison: It is welcome by practitioners and may be used by senior staff as responsible agents to provide 'flexible consistency' (Liebling, Price and Shefer, 2012) or 'intelligent discretion' (Crewe and Liebling, 2015: 7) but there are equally hints that it is sometimes used to play the system (Dubois, 2018) as will be demonstrated in the next section. We argue that this study adds that such an approach to discretion also holds true even in what has been described as a highly regulated prison environment, where law and compliance with the law is a very prominent feature of penal culture.…”

“…As the first comprehensive study on senior prison staff's experiences with accountability and prisoner rights in Germany, we find another jurisdiction in which certain important existing research findings are confirmed: Senior prison staff act as responsible human agents in the prison system (Cheliotis 2006, Crewe and Liebling, 2015, Bennett, 2016a, 2016b) navigating a complex system of regulations and practical demands, requiring ‘practical wisdom’ (Dubois, 2018). Legal prescriptions are seen both as constraint and resource, the respective statutory Prison Act serving as a practical resource to a larger extent than expected.…”

“…In this context, some features of the German context (that will be further outlined below) are of importance: First, prison governors have been traditionally much more independent from prison administration bodies, in Germany situated in the Federal State's Ministries of Justice, than this is the case for example in England Wales: one prison director in our study talked about "all us prison directors who have their little kingdoms" (interview 21); thus proving a strong feeling of agency (Bennett, 2016a) and making a strong 'jurisdictional claim' (Dubois, 2018). Second, there is a distinction to be made between Prison Acts as parliamentary laws with a much greater authority, both legally and in practice (as we will see) and other prescriptions, such as ministerial orders.…”