“…While accountability demands, and, with them, oversight, judicial control and individual prisoner's complaints can be seen as useful monitoring against the benchmark of human rights standards (Cheliotis, 2006, Crewe and Liebling, 2015, Coyle and Fair, 2018), in a performance culture these demands may rather be perceived as adding up to never-ending reporting duties, with a multiplicity of sources seeking to hold prison staff to account, usually through the means of paperwork (Curristan and Rogan, 2022). Owers (2007) has cautioned that because of this, managers could focus on the ‘virtual prison’, and not how imprisonment is experienced in daily life and Murphy and Whitty (2007) show that, in such a context, human rights compliance can become formalised and divorced from the purpose and spirit of such norms. Hardwick has echoed this and concedes that prison inspection in England and Wales using inspection scores ‘might feel like a tick-box exercise’ (2016: 650) although the inspector's aim remains to see the concern resolved, not to control if a recommendation has been followed formally.…”