Humanity in Prison: Questions of definition and audit

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Author: 
Andrew Coyle
Publication Date: 
02/06/2003

As a further element of analysis into the way prisons are managed and prisoners are treated ICPS sought to open up a debate about how what became known as the “outputs” of imprisonment should be measured. Since the 1990s the Prison Service of England and Wales has laid great emphasis on establishing standards for what goes on inside prisons and it developed a sophisticated auditing process. However, these audits tended to focus on features which could be easily measured. This meant that more subtle, but arguably more important, aspects such as relationships between prisoners and staff were not being measured and were as a result downgraded in importance. The Prison Service was committed by its mission statement to look after prisoners ‘with humanity’ but the extent to which this was being achieved proved difficult to measure.

As part of its Humanity in Prison project ICPS set out to provide prison staff and others with a means of measuring how well the duty to treat prisoners with humanity was being observed. A series of meetings was held with senior prison staff in England to discuss how they thought this could be done. The international human rights instruments relating to prison were analysed to discover the key features of humane treatment of prisoners. An audit tool was drafted and was circulated to a wide range of practitioners, academics and human right experts for comment. The final result was a book entitled Humanity in Prison: Questions of definition and audit, which was published in 2003. The book had two objectives. In the first place, it set out to provide a working definition of ‘humanity’ as regards the treatment of people who have been deprived of their liberty. Secondly, it offered a proposal for the measurement of ‘treatment with humanity’ in the prison setting. 

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