‘It causes a lot of problems’: Relational ambiguities and dynamics between prisoners and staff in a women's prison

Abstract

Staff–prisoner relationships have long been recognised as lying ‘at the heart of the whole prison system’ (Home Office, 1984: para. 16; Liebling, 2011). However, relatively few accounts of women's imprisonment have focussed on staff–prisoner relationships specifically, whether describing their terms and dynamics or relating their characteristics to broader ideas of power, trust or legitimacy. In this article, based on semi-ethnographic fieldwork in a women's prison in England, we seek to do something of both, analysing the emotional and relational complexity of staff–prisoner relationships in the context of women's life histories, and the ways that they intersect with flows of penal power and powerlessness. The article illuminates the complexity and emotional intensity of these relationships, first, by outlining their core features, as described by female prisoners – blurred boundaries, infantilisation, pettiness, inconsistency and favouritism – and then by seeking to explain the complex entanglements of power and dependence that result. These explanations include the relative powerlessness and vulnerability of women in prison, their biographical experiences of abuse and trauma, and a tendency for uniformed staff to be somewhat careless in their use of power, while seeking to build close and supportive relationships with prisoners and engaging in forms of benign paternalism. The article concludes that women's prisons represent a challenge to models of penal order, authority and legitimacy precisely because of the relational nature of the flow of power that tends to characterise them.

Introduction

We need consistency, we need clear boundaries and guidelines, but we also need compassion. […] I am constantly in a state of anxiety, every day, as soon as that door opens. […] Because you don’t know what officer is on, you don’t know what mood they’re in, you don’t know whether they’re going to be helpful to you today or they’re going to be dismissive. (Zara)

Staff–prisoner relationships have long been recognised as lying ‘at the heart of the whole prison system’ (Home Office, 1984: para. 16; Liebling, 2011), and an extensive body of research on staff–prisoner relationships has explored their importance for issues such as prisoner quality of life, order and legitimacy (inter alia, Beijersbergen et al., 2015; Brunton-Smith and McCarthy, 2016; Liebling, 2000, 2011; Liebling et al., 2011; Molleman and Van Ginneken, 2015; Sparks et al., 1996). Because authority is exercised, and legitimacy negotiated, via staff–prisoner relationships, getting these relationships ‘right’ is essential (Liebling, 2004). As Liebling (2011: 491) argues, however, ‘right’ relationships are distinct from ‘good’ relationships: while the latter tend to be ‘too informal, lacking boundaries and professional distance’, or, conversely, too distant and disengaged, right relationships lie ‘somewhere between formality and informality, closeness and distance, policing-by-consent and imposing order’. More recently, in showing how a combination of the ‘absence’ or ‘presence’ of authority alongside its relative ‘weight’ produce different levels of legitimacy, and differing legitimacy deficits, Crewe et al. (2014) have highlighted the complexity of establishing relationships that provide engagement and intervention without being unduly oppressive.

Such findings have been based almost exclusively on research conducted in men's prisons. Meanwhile, with relatively few exceptions, in studies of women's imprisonment, the themes of authority, justice and legitimacy – and their interaction with staff–prisoner relationships – have been rather neglected. As Liebling (2009: 20) argues, the main focus of most studies of female prisoners has been ‘the private, the domestic and the sexual’, with gender foregrounded over themes that are conceptually central in the literature on men's imprisonment. Yet women's gendered experiences and their orientation to matters such as fairness and power are likely to intersect. Bosworth (1999), for example, criticises the omission of women's perspectives from studies of penal legitimacy, proposing that ‘women ground the symbolic language of rights and fairness in their sense of […] identity, indicating that the circumstances under which they recognise the legitimate authority of the staff and institution are dependent on a framework of evaluation which is tied to their sense of self’ (Bosworth, 1999: 126). Likewise, Liebling (2009) suggests that core penological issues, such as trust, authority and justice, seem especially pertinent to imprisoned women precisely because they are of such importance in the lives of women generally.

This question of how staff–prisoner relationships work in women's prisons, and how they relate to gender, power and legitimacy, remains only loosely addressed within the literature. While scholarship on women's prisons has grown steadily in recent years (e.g. Ellis, 2020, 2021; Frois, 2017; Haney, 2010; Kruttschnitt and Gartner, 2005; Lempert, 2016; McCorkel, 2013; Moore and Scraton, 2014; Pollock, 1998; Rowe, 2016; Sufrin, 2017), few accounts have focussed on staff–prisoner relationships specifically, whether describing their terms and dynamics (what they are like) or relating their characteristics to broader penal concepts. In this article, based on semi-ethnographic fieldwork in a women's prison in England, we seek to cover something of both, analysing the emotional and relational complexity of staff–prisoner relationships in the context of women's life histories, and the ways that they intersect with flows of penal power and powerlessness. In doing so, we work towards a richer understanding of the barriers and limits to the legitimacy of women's imprisonment.

Staff–prisoner relationships in women's prisons

This research base on women's imprisonment suggests a set of relational characteristics that transcend institutions and penal climates (in the Global North, at least). First, imprisoned women are typically infantilised by the terms of their treatment. In her study of Cornton Vale prison in Scotland, for example, Carlen (1983) observed that women were treated as both childish and child-like. Decades later, Rowe (2011: 576, emphasis in original) reported similar frustrations among the women in her study, identifying the ‘loss of adult status’ – exemplified in their being addressed as ‘girls’ (see also Easteal, 2001; Haney, 2010; Kruttschnitt and Gartner, 2005; Van Wormer and Bartollas, 2000) – as a ‘mortification of personhood’ that is unique to imprisoned women.

Second, infantilisation is embedded within wider disciplinary practices, notably the intensive surveillance and regulation to which imprisoned women are routinely subjected (Carlen, 1983, 1998; McClellan, 1994; Rowe, 2011, 2016; Van Wormer and Bartollas, 2000). Female prisoners consistently report frustration with the application of minor rules, the policing of the minutiae of their lives (including their appearance and everyday conduct), and the regulation of their intimate and social relationships (Carlen, 1983; Haney, 2010; Lempert, 2016; Rowe, 2016). In conjunction with the dependency paradox, in which, despite being highly reliant on staff (Haney, 2010), female prisoners are expected to act as responsible agents and conform to gender-normative discourses of ‘familiness, domesticity and self-regulation’ (Carlen, 1983: 112; Haney, 2010), this web of control underscores the limits to women's power in most penal environments.

Third, staff–prisoner relationships in women's prisons tend to be tainted by the inconsistent use of staff authority. Relational inconsistency, shifting behavioural expectations and the ‘arbitrary enforcement’ of rules (Carlen, 1983: 113) create an unpredictable and psychologically stressful environment, which sows distrust between prisoners and their custodians (Lempert, 2016). While such inconsistency is also a feature of men's prisons (Crewe, 2011), it may be particularly troubling for women because of the ‘erratic or abusive use of authority’ (Liebling, 2009: 21) to which so many have been subjected prior to their imprisonment.

Although explanations of staff–prisoner dynamics in women's prisons are limited, relevant factors can be discerned within the literature. One explanation centres on the characteristics and backgrounds of women themselves, highlighting the gendered deprivations (such as the loss of maternal or familial roles) that characterise imprisonment for women, or the particular needs that women import into the prison, including those relating to mental ill-health, substance misuse, and multiple forms of marginalisation and abuse (Crewe et al., 2020; Huey Dye and Aday, 2019; Leigey and Reed, 2010). Such factors may contribute to the relational intensity and deficits that many studies describe. Easteal (2001: 99) proposes that women's prisons (in Australia) and the dysfunctional family units in which many female prisoners have been raised are analogous, characterised by ‘broken promises and inconsistency’, requiring the same survival strategies of psychic numbing and deference, and generating similar cultures of distrust. Indeed, both the state of having their own needs unmet, and of having un-meetable expectations imposed upon them, resonate with many female prisoners’ experiences of abusive childhoods (Easteal, 2001; Kelman et al., 2022), leaving them ‘mentally and emotionally straitjacketed into the same debilitating tension and isolation which they have already experienced in nuclear family situations outwith the prison’ (Carlen, 1983: 102).

Here, Mathiesen's (1965: 100) concept of ‘illegitimate patriarchalism’ is apt, conveying the feeling of power being exercised in ways that are personal, arbitrary and extensive, both within prisons and in the context of a traditional family dynamic between parent and child. Given such parallels, it is unsurprising that staff–prisoner relationships in women's prisons are so emotionally complex: for example, women with histories of abandonment and degradation struggle to extend trust to officers (Crewe et al., 2017; Kelman et al., 2022), but may also position staff who have shown them care and support as surrogate parents (Easteal, 2001; Haney, 2010; Lempert, 2016).

Other explanations point to the ways that the penal control of women reflects their broader social control. That is, women's imprisonment is embedded within wider societal discourses around femininity (Carlen, 1983), such that its practices reproduce normative ideals of womanhood and seek to train women into ‘appropriate’ forms of feminine conduct (Bosworth, 1999; Carlen, 1983; Moran et al., 2009; Rowe, 2011). More specifically, officers’ relationships with female prisoners may be shaped by gendered judgements about women's needs and temperaments, in particular, an assumption that women in prison are ‘excessively emotional’ (Britton, 2003: 118), moody and quarrelsome (see also Pollock, 1986). As a result, officers often consider working with female prisoners to be harder than working with male prisoners, revolving around the management of emotions (‘babying’ and ‘mothering’ Britton, 2003: 119) rather than violence and disorder (Pollock, 1986). Likewise, officers commonly regard female prisoners as more manipulative, demanding and questioning of authority than their male counterparts, producing staff–prisoner relationships that are marked by suspicion (Britton, 2003; Owen, 1998; Pollock, 1986; Tait, 2011). Stenström and Pettersson's (2021: 9, 10) study of approved homes for youths highlights how gendered perceptions can lead to the differential management of male and female inmates. Staff interventions were activated with male youths based on the perception of physical threat, but with female youths because of their need ‘to be protected from themselves’ – a paternalistic justification par excellence for exercising authority and surveillance, in which the threshold for correctable behaviour was ‘considerably lower for girls’.

Staff–prisoner relationships are also shaped by institutional factors and characteristics. Comparing two prisons in California, Kruttschnitt and Gartner (2005: 101, 109) found that institutional ethos played a significant role in how women experienced their imprisonment. In Valley State Prison – an establishment designed to be gender-neutral, with an ‘overriding concern with control and security’ – staff–prisoner relationships were uncaring and adversarial, in ways that resembled such relationships in prisons holding men. In the California Institution for Women, a prison with a more gender-sensitive culture, relationships were more humane, although – reflecting longer-term penal shifts – they were ‘more distrustful and detached’ than in the same prison decades earlier. Such broader sensibilities shape the differential treatment of female prisoners cross-nationally, as well as historically, with harsher practices in women's prisons in the US compared to the UK, for example (see Lempert, 2016).

Institutional security levels also play a role in shaping staff–prisoner dynamics. Generally, women are considered a lesser threat to order, safety and security than their male counterparts (Owen et al., 2017), and few women's prisons operate with the security measures found in many establishments for men. Despite these lower risks, as suggested above, Britton (2003) found that the majority of officers in her study preferred to work in men's prisons, where they could organise their practice around security and control, that is, occupational objectives that are prioritised in training and are professionally valued (Arnold, 2005; Rasche, 2000). By contrast, working in the lower-security environment of women's prisons was considered less desirable, and more emotionally demanding, involving far more ‘shades of grey’ (Britton, 2003: 124).

Here, issues of relational closeness and distance are highly relevant. In the US, the swing from the gender-sensitive, rehabilitative ideal of the 1960s to a more gender-neutral, authoritarian penal culture in the 1990s corresponds with a shift from relational closeness to distance (Kruttschnitt and Gartner, 2005). At the same time, the forms of ‘therapeutic governance’ (Haney, 2010) that are often found in penal regimes for women produce complicated forms of relational intimacy between prisoners and staff (Rawlings and Haigh, 2017; Stevens, 2012). In practice, while such environments are generally welcomed by prisoners due to their ethic of care and interpersonal closeness, they imbue staff–prisoner engagement with considerable power. Specifically, intimate information disclosed by prisoners may be used by the authorities, especially when custody and control invariably take precedence over therapeutic ideals (Genders and Player, 2020; Pollack, 2009). In such circumstances, when penal power is activated, prisoners who have developed strong emotional bonds with staff may feel betrayed.

As we demonstrate in the substantive part of this article, based chiefly on women's accounts of their treatment by and relationships with staff, all of these dynamics and ambiguities can generate a considerable degree of ontological insecurity and make the formation of ‘right’ relationships, with appropriate boundaries, highly challenging. Indeed, a core goal of the article is to add more descriptive and analytic complexity to a literature that is rather thin and sometimes a little reductive. While many of our findings correspond with those set out in existing studies – a consistency that is itself significant – the depth of our account, and our attempt to contextualise and make sense of the nature, experience and impact of staff–prisoner relationships in a women's prison in England and Wales, should advance what is known about the relational dynamics at the heart of women's incarceration.

The study

This article draws on data collected as part of a large-scale research project (see Crewe et al., 2022), one sub-strand of which involved an ethnography of penal power and social relations in a women's prison in England and Wales, holding around 300 adult women in closed conditions. Undertaken over an 8-month period in 2018, the fieldwork for this study involved extended periods of participant observation, including a great deal of informal discussion with prisoners and staff, and 48 in-depth interviews with imprisoned women. Granted keys by the governor, which enabled us to move around the prison unescorted, we sought to observe or take part in as much of daily life as possible, hanging out in communal areas of the prison, visiting women in their cells and activity spaces, and chatting with them while they ate or watched television.

Through our familiarity with the prison and the women held within it, we selected participants based on a purposive sampling strategy, as well as a certain amount of opportunism (Gobo, 2007). That is, we tried to recruit for interview prisoners with different ages, convictions and sentence lengths, held in different wings or housing units, and occupying different positions in the prisoner community. We deliberately approached not only the most vocal and sociable women, but also those who mainly kept to themselves. Having previously conducted research in a number of other women's prisons, we are confident that the research site gave us access to relatively typical accounts, particularly since participants also described their prior experiences in other establishments.

Five researchers worked on the sub-study, with Anna Schliehe conducting the majority of interviews in this particular prison. Interviews were semi-structured (Kvale, 1996), drawing on an interview schedule to produce directed but flexible conversations. The schedule included questions related to social life and relationships, power, rehabilitation and change, shame and guilt, and views on the aims and consequences of punishment. Interviews were generally conducted in private rooms in the prison's Offender Management Unit (OMU), and typically lasted between one and three hours. Almost all were recorded and subsequently transcribed verbatim, with a pseudonym assigned to each participant. Data were later coded using NVivo software, drawing on a conceptual framework derived from established work on the nature and experience of confinement (see Crewe, 2015) and on themes within the literature on women's imprisonment, as well as those that became apparent as our fieldwork and thinking progressed. Those included in the analysis reflect the primary themes that we identified in exploring nodes and sub-nodes relating to staff–prisoner relationships, including ‘authority’, ‘care-humanity’, ‘differential treatment’, ‘gendered treatment’, ‘intimate or inappropriate relationships’, ‘judgement from staff’, ‘paternalism-infantilisation’, ‘power over daily life’, ‘trust in staff’, ‘behavioural expectations’ and ‘tightness’. As a means of contextualising such data, we also referred to a node on prisoners’ backgrounds (‘Life before’). While the article draws mainly on the rich descriptions from our interviews, it is also informed by extensive ethnographic fieldnotes, which help capture the intensity and complexity of these relational dynamics. Where we make claims about the motivations and intentions of staff, we do so on the basis of the many conversations we had with them during the course of our fieldwork.

The daily routine of the prison varied. While, on its more closed wings, officers locked and unlocked prisoners at specified times, prisoners residing on the open units held keys to their room, so that interactions with officers happened mainly in the staff office (where keys were deposited when prisoners left their allocated house). Those parts of the prison with greater therapeutic input had more in-depth and intimate staff–prisoner relationships, whereas other areas saw staff more involved in practical matters, such as undertaking headcounts, and granting access to phone credit and toilet roll. Interactions with officers also took place at various work and education places, and in areas such as the dining hall, the OMU, the gym, and in outdoor spaces.

One of the important relational and spatial ‘hubs’ of the prison was a duck pond, located between housing blocks, which many people passed as they moved between activities and departments. Some women spent considerable amounts of time around the pond, sitting on the benches or patches of grass nearby, caring for the ducklings, or chatting with other prisoners or staff. It was here that we encountered some of the most memorable staff–prisoner exchanges of our fieldwork, two of which were particularly notable. One was a residential staff member sitting on the bench with a prisoner who was extremely distressed while having a psychotic episode, taking time to talk to her, and demonstrating deep care for her well-being; the other was an exchange between a group of women and a senior member of staff that was punctuated with demeaning language, and left us with a clear impression of the depth of infantilising treatment that prisoners sometimes experienced.

These incidents were indicative of the very wide range of relationships that we witnessed, which varied – and often shifted suddenly – from deeply compassionate interventions to inappropriate and confrontational exchanges. While the prison's reputation, supported by successive reports from the Prisons Inspectorate, was as a humane establishment, characterised by excellent staff–prisoner relationships, we found a relational culture that was considerably more complex. In general, relationships were informal yet highly involved, defined by a high degree of ‘chat’, and by considerable emotional intensity, which meant that, with very little forewarning, they could become extremely charged. This volatility manifested in fiery arguments between prisoners and staff, involving a great deal of challenge and mutual frustration, and highly combustible disputes. In the sections that follow, we describe some key elements of these relationships in more depth, before offering further context and explanation.

Findings

Blurred boundaries

One key feature of staff–prisoner relationships was the blurring of professional boundaries. Some officers holstered their authority, interacting with informality and friendliness, and seeking to foster a relational environment of care. Those women who responded positively to this approach engaged in casual talk with officers with little reservation, often entrusting staff with their issues, and forming relationships with them that were close and amicable. In Harriet's words, some women ‘have a laugh with staff, yes. [Officers are] normal people. Like, I always get on with them and sometimes you hear funny stories and it's alright’.

The majority of prisoners, however, considered this dynamic excessively informal and inappropriately familiar. Zara felt that ‘There has to be a set of boundaries, set rules, and there has to be lines, and I don’t like it when those lines are crossed’. This sentiment – that a reduction of social distance introduced unwelcome forms of ambiguity – was widely shared. While banter and casual conversations could offer a semblance of normality and foster positive interpersonal relations, often they were seasoned with sexual innuendo, or forms of ‘friendly’ mocking or loose language that, in the eyes of most prisoners, rendered them inappropriate. For example, Tilly recounted an exchange with an officer in which she had sought out assistance on behalf of a fellow prisoner who was being bullied, only for the officer to refer to the victim as a ‘fucking bed wetter’. The use of derogatory terms of this kind communicated a lack of respect and professionalism, but also, through the disclosure of a personal issue, constituted a serious breach of trust (see also Owen et al., 2017).

Such breaches seemed common: women consistently complained about the ‘leaking’ out of personal information (e.g. about offence type or experiences of victimisation), and about the careless manner in which officers talked both in front of their colleagues and prisoners themselves. Knowing that officers divulged personal information – mainly about prisoners, but also gossip about staff affairs – contributed to the low levels of trust women accorded them, and to a sense that the environment was unduly casual. Many women talked of having ‘learned the hard way’ (Tilly) of the enduring consequences of disclosing private information or being unguarded with their boundaries:

I find that some officers will talk in front of prisoners about somebody else's business. […] It spreads like wildfire, and then that person feels super uncomfortable […]. It could be something really, really personal to that person and everybody knows about it and you feel like you can't trust anybody. (Maddison)

When I had my issue, I spoke to [a] Safer Custody [officer], in privacy, but somehow the whole prison knew about it, about my conversation. […] So you can never trust anyone, especially telling officers about other people, because it backfired on me, and it only made it worse. (Maryam)

In this respect, mistrust was less a reflection of ideological opposition to the authorities than an orientation forged through experiences of betrayal.

For some women, officers’ attempts to ‘befriend’ or get close to them generated feelings of considerable unease. Indeed, many women defined appropriate relationships, and care itself, in terms of boundaries that were clear and unbreachable:

An appropriate relationship is where you know your boundaries. So, I don't ask them about their family life and their social life, and they probably don't dive into my life as well. I think officers should know a little bit about you to get to know the person you are, so they know who they're dealing with. But if they start asking serious questions, I think they overstep the boundaries. […] And I think caring is not overstepping boundaries, and showing that little bit of empathy, and being there when you need them, and not disregarding you when you need help. (Gracie)

As the following quotation also illustrates, many women preferred the clarity of well-defined status distinctions to the risky illusion of fellowship:

I was asking them by their surname and they were like, ‘No, no, we go by first names’. I was like, ‘I don’t like that’. Because I feel that's a boundary that needs to be maintained and I think it leads people to a false sense of security […] You’re a uniform, I’m a prisoner, that's it. And I feel like there are a lot of boundary breaches because of that […] and then people feel betrayed. (Hazel)

Just as in men's prisons, then, most participants were wary of staff who tried too hard to ‘be friends’, and recognised the importance of professional boundaries. However, such views were less about the risks, often expressed by male prisoners, of being disciplined for overstepping boundaries that were unclear or concealed (see Crewe et al., 2014, 2015). Instead, they typically reflected an acute sensitivity to the breach of personal boundaries, and a suspicion that officers who tried to generate intimacy were doing so in bad faith or in ways that threatened emotional stability:

They’re not my friends, they’re just guards here who guard me. But sometimes they try to be closer to you in order to unpick some of your stuff, make you vulnerable and then pick on that, to trigger it. I’ve learned that. (Eleanor)

Similarly, the complaint of ‘being let down’ when, having built up a relationship, officers then inhabited their role as rule-enforcers was inflected by a very personal sense of betrayal.

Pettiness and infantilisation

Consistent with the literature, our participants commonly reported infantilising forms of treatment, but also as an environment characterised more generally by infantile behaviour:

The male officers just act like idiots, so they just don’t take anything seriously, they just really don’t care. They’d rather act like teenage boys with their bloody stupid antics. (Tilly)

A lot of girls in here are like children. They are so young headed. You’ve got to treat them like a child. (Amy)

In describing these circumstances, participants often drew on a language of childhood. Rhiannon, for example, commented on the similarities between discipline in prison and family life (see Easteal, 2001): ‘It's a bit like being a child really, because if you do something wrong then there's consequences’. Serena described the use of authority by staff as ‘like having strict teachers and non-strict teachers’. Faith laughed about being treated ‘like a petulant child […] being shouted at, like they’re your parents. [laughter] It reminds you of home’. Several women drew similar parallels, indicating that their dependence on officers was, as Jo put it, ‘not that far from being a child and having to ask your parents’.

Typically, such comments were indicative of a particular power dynamic, which was experienced as far from benign. Being told what to do and when to do it, including, for example, officers monitoring what they were wearing, plus a language of ‘bed-time’ and ‘girls’, made some women feel like they were ‘back in school’ (Susan). One example that was commonly cited was the prohibition of the wearing of slippers outside cells, which was stringently enforced by some officers, in ways that most women considered needless and excessive. Many resented being policed over matters that represented no threat to the order and security of the prison, and which instead felt entirely personal (see Smith, 2009):

They just want to control everything you are doing. They want to decide how you should be happy, decide how you should be sad. You have no right to be sad without their permission. That is what it feels like in this place. (Mollie)

A similar complaint was that staff interfered excessively in friendship decisions and social activities:

I was warned about mixing with one person. We used to play scrabble together and a member of staff said: ‘Do you know what she is in for?’ So I said ‘Yeah’. They said ‘Well you shouldn’t be hanging with her because of her offence – it will go badly against you’. (Maisie)

They’re forever saying to people, ‘You need to watch who your associates are. They’re not doing you any favours’ […] It's like Big Brother here. (Layla)

Layla's use of the phrase ‘like Big Brother’ highlighted the oppressiveness of these interventions. Many women complained that they were deemed ‘guilty by association’ or judged according to the company they kept. In being warned by staff about their peers, or when staff got involved in their personal affairs, many felt untrusted, deprived of agency and over-regulated:

They actively stopped us from seeing each other. […] If they do see us together, ‘what are you doing together?!’ […] Our friendships have nothing to do with them, unless my friendship with someone is causing them to self-harm. Then I understand your need to get involved. (Violet)

In general, then, surveillance, control and rule enforcement were experienced as petty, invasive and highly infantilising. For some women, the powerlessness produced by such practices engendered feelings of anxiety and humiliation, as illustrated in Mollie's recollection of trying to access the staff office on her landing:

If the door is open, do you still knock? Sometimes you knock and they are looking at you like, ‘Is she dumb? The door is open. Come on’. So, you just knock and wait. When the door is open, what do I do? They do not mind if you open it sometimes, and you just walk in and the officer says to you, ‘Read that. What does that say?’ You say, ‘It says “knock and wait”, but the door was open, so I just came in’. So, they just treat you like a child. (Mollie)

Other women reported being given terse and dismissive responses – ‘because I said so’ – to questions about significant decisions relating to prison transfers, home leave or access to children. Conduct of this kind – resonant of Mathiesen's (1965) ‘illegitimate patriarchalism’ – reinforced to women their denuded status.

Inconsistency and favouritism

A further area of consensus among our participants was that officers failed to be sufficiently consistent:

I like consistency. I don’t mind if you are a stickler for the rules, just be consistent because then I know where I stand with you. (Violet)

What are the qualities that you think are most important in an officer?

Consistency. If you’re going to say you’re going to do it, do it. Some officers have their own rules. […] I prefer consistency. (Amy)

Women reported inconsistency between officers and also in how individual officers operated. Regarding the former, they described receiving differing or contradictory instruction from different members of staff, as well as inconsistencies in the ways that different staff members used their discretion and enforced the rules. Women from ethnic minority backgrounds felt strongly that such decision-making was highly racialised and that they were scrutinised more intensively and disciplined more frequently than other prisoners. In Skye's terms, ‘White girls get away with a lot more than the Black girls do’, in part because staff were more suspicious of or intimidated by certain forms of conduct and sociability:

I think it is a cultural thing, because a lot of us Black girls, we are very loud, very vocal, always singing, always laughing, always screaming down the landing at each other. [They] see it as us being aggressive with each other, rather than for what it is: just being loud. (Orla)

For these women in particular, then, staff authority had hard edges.

Examples of inconsistent enforcement abounded. Layla, for example, recalled a time when an officer had found her sitting on her partner's bed and told her that ‘One foot needs to be on the floor’ – a rule she had never been made aware of previously. Similar experiences prevailed in women's accounts of their interactions with officers, for example:

They are little petty rules that you have to comply by, or certain officers get the hump, but then certain officers don’t care. So one minute you could be sitting in your room at a roll-check when you are meant to be at your door and an officer will walk past and be absolutely fine, and then another time it will be ‘well I can [discipline] you for not being at your door’. They’re all a bit different. (Amber)

As well as making rule compliance difficult, the inconsistent nature of rule enforcement generated considerable unease. Phrases such as ‘you never know where you stand’ (Arabella) and ‘you’re always on eggshells’ (Georgia) communicated this sense of psychological disorientation, which compounded women's feelings of powerlessness.

Similarly, the inconsistency of individual officers corroded women's faith in staff promises and practices. Jasmine, for example, explained that ‘They're unpredictable and you can't trust something that's unpredictable’. Indeed, for many women, the arbitrariness and capriciousness of individual officers’ use of authority fuelled a deep sense of ontological insecurity and mutual suspicion:

I think they abuse their authority and they don’t realise the psychological damage they have on someone, even when they’re just playing. […] if you’re having banter with an officer and they suddenly switch, and then use that against you by giving you a negative IEP or something. ¹ (Lottie)

Our main problem being in prison is fairness because nothing is fair. [It] creates a lot of tension as well because you are always looking at the next person, going, ‘Well she was allowed that’ or ‘She's done that’. You are always comparing yourself to everybody else. (Tilly)

As indicated in the quotation above, a common form of perceived inconsistency was preferential treatment. A shared sentiment among many prisoners was that ‘officers have their favourites’ (Elizabeth) and that these ‘pet projects’ were more likely to have their requests met, receive support, be fed information and be treated more leniently if they broke regulations. Recurring tropes, such as ‘if your face fits …’ communicated the salience of such issues and a broader preoccupation with matters of fairness.

In the next section, we seek to account for the dynamics we have so far described. In doing so, we hope to provide a deeper and more focussed analysis of their characteristics than is found in much of the existing literature and to expose the relational challenges of achieving legitimacy in such contexts.

Explaining staff–prisoner relationships

Little of the literature on women's imprisonment provides a detailed explanation of how penal power flows or the terms that shape how it is enacted and experienced (although see Easteal, 2001; Haney, 2010; Kelman et al., 2022). One of the aims of this article is to offer insight into such matters. In the following section, we seek to explain some of the key elements of staff–prisoner dynamics in our research site, with reference to considerations in three domains: the particular needs, circumstances and backgrounds of the women; attempts by staff to use their authority to benign effect; and the nature of the environment itself.

Women's needs, circumstances and backgrounds

First, then, the intensity of staff–prisoner relationships – the strength of feeling expressed within and about them; and the speed with which they could change – was in part an outcome of the depth of some women's emotional needs. For officers, dealing with acute distress, self-harm and mental health problems was extremely draining, and many women recognised the general strain placed on staff as a result of the extent of support that some of their peers required: ‘I see people talking to the officers twenty-four seven. I do not know how the officers put up with it, the same broken record all the time. […] They go there and talk, talk, talk’ (Zoe). When women's despair clashed with staff fatigue, arguments could quickly ignite. This was exacerbated by the tone with which some women addressed staff, which – as Georgia notes below – was often sharp and abusive:

A lot of people here haven’t got filters, and they haven’t got any social skills, so they go in and say, ‘excuse me, you fucking bastard’. And then of course the officer gets pissed off, and [the woman] can’t understand why [the officer] don’t want to help them. (Georgia)

Second, histories of trauma and abuse made many women acutely sensitive to certain forms of staff conduct (see Huey Dye and Aday, 2019; Kelman et al., 2022; Owen et al., 2017). Lottie described shifts from banter to discipline as ‘almost like grooming in a non-sexual way’, while Elizabeth explained that the ‘trauma’ of loud and unexpected noises ‘could bring back a gunshot for somebody […] and a really bad time in their life’. Similarly, in their discussions of trust and mistrust – which related mainly to the careless disclosure of personal information or the misuse of power, rather than staff failing to act on their promises (see Crewe et al., 2015) – women often made direct or implied links to previous experiences of being let down or exploited:

There is corruption going on in jails, so you never know what they want from you […] so when you think this person really wants the good for you, you don't know what they’re actually doing. So the trust in some of them can be quite low. (Amy)

I’ve got very jaded views of staff because of some of the things I’ve been through, so I see everyone who has power has the ability to use that and I always hold that really prevalent in my mind, so I only trust to a certain extent. (Zara)

Anxieties of this kind were compounded by the recent history of the prison, during which several staff members had been caught having abusive relationships with women in their care. For our participants, such incidents were deeply destabilising, generating acute concern about attempts by staff to forge closer relationships, making them question their own judgement, and producing generalised mistrust in the prison system. For example, having been abused during her sentence, Maryam struggled to interpret staff conduct – in this case, when they seemed considerate about her privacy – even when it appeared benign:

That makes me think the men are nice, but then I’ve had that in my abuse before, and that will send the triggers off. […] So am I supposed to have someone treat me horrible or am I supposed to have someone treat me nice? […] I have witnessed, and I have been subject to, sexual abuse from officers while being in prison, so you don’t know where the borderline is anymore. (Maryam)

Skye also identified the emotional impact of the power that staff wielded, combined with the extensive and intimate knowledge they possessed, in the context of previous abuse:

They’re in a position of authority. And some of us here who have been abused by a man and have had really horrific things done to us by them, so you’re being asked to conform to a system that puts men in charge [who] know everything about you – they know your life forensically, and then they’re also having to deal with you on a one-to-one basis, face-to-face, physically and emotionally. And yeah, it causes a lot of problems. (Skye)

As Kelman et al. (2022) have also noted, then, many features of staff–prisoner relationships – including being told what to do, and having to navigate rules and boundaries whose enforcement was inconsistent or capricious – resonated with prior experiences of abuse.

Third, the combustible nature of staff–prisoner relationships reflected the fact that, for most prisoners, imprisonment was intensely painful, and they were deeply reliant on officers to alleviate their distress. For example, one common source of resentment was the perception that officers failed to appreciate the anguish caused by separation:

Even though you have not heard from your family, you get locked up. They just do not care. You cannot use any excuse. ‘I have not heard from my family today. Please can you give me five minutes more?’ ‘No’. It is really difficult and frustrating when you hear your mum is sick […] and there is nothing you can do but sit, pray and cry. (Mollie)

The reason I’m anxious every day is I’m waiting to wake up for the day when I get the phone call to tell me my nan is dead. […]. Staff say stupid things that just trigger these instant responses […] They haven’t got a clue what you’re going through. (Zara)

When women felt they were denied contact with loved ones without good reason, or that officers lacked empathy, their reactions were often volatile and vociferous.

More generally, many women were not willing to accept staff decisions without clear justification:

She wrote on the form that I was argumentative. […] Of course I'm going to argue. I didn't shout or swear, because I don't. But I was arguing about it because I didn't agree with it. What am I supposed to do? Just leave it? You've given me an IEP warning so I'm going to argue about it. (Gracie)

Prisoners argue with the officers because they’re really badly inconsistent […]: ‘Well yesterday I was told that I could have it!’ ‘Well you’re not having it today’. ‘Oh my god. But so and so wrote it in the book!’ ‘But I’m not so and so and I’m saying no’. ‘Oh my god’. (Elizabeth)

Few women displayed an automatic opposition to officers as representatives of state authority or were hostile to them as powerholders per se. However, staff authority required continuous legitimation, with individual decisions questioned by the women on their individual terms, based on a demand for fairness, consistency and moral defensibility.

This orientation to power – individualised and censorious – reflected women's helplessness and dependence, relative to the overarching power of prison officers. Many described being at the mercy of far-reaching staff authority:

You've got no control. It doesn't matter how nice you are to them. […] If you put a foot wrong, they could change your life in a snap. (Georgia)

They literally control everything and what we do, how we speak and if we’re putting our point across, that's seen as arguing […] And they’re quick to give you an IEP. […] you can’t have a discussion or put your point across because you would just get shut down completely. (Brooke)

In such circumstances, while women often felt powerless, this did not equate to passivity. Rather, it left women with few resources other than direct challenge to meet their needs and relieve their distress. Zara's account of her frustrations highlighted this interaction between dependence and confrontation:

If you ask someone to do something and then you go back four or five hours later, I’ll go ‘Have you managed to find that out?’ And then they’ll say ‘Well, no’. And I'm one of these people that asks ‘Why?’ And they’ll just sit there. ‘You don’t have any authority or right to ask me why.’ ‘Well actually I do because you assured me that it would be done within an hour; it's now four hours later and it's not done, so I'm just asking you a question of why’. […] You rely on the staff because you have no control. (Zara)

Benign paternalism

Feelings of inconsistency and favouritism were sometimes the outcome of the attempt by staff to use their discretion in a manner that was intended to be supportive and tailored to individual needs. Some women spent a good deal of time in staff offices due to their dependence on officers to assist them with personal matters, or as a way of seeking out care or conversation. While many of our participants recognised this differential need for staff support, others were less sympathetic in their interpretation of the unequal distribution of staff attention and variations in treatment. In the following quotation, for example, Arabella complains about the compassionate use of authority, meant to alleviate anxiety and isolation:

They’ll treat this prisoner one way, and the next prisoner totally different. […] I’ll give you a classic example: on the wing at the moment, there's one girl, ‘Oh, I can’t go for my med[ication] around everyone else, because I get panicky’. There might be five people in the meds queue at a time. So, she has to be specially brought out first, but she can walk down to dinner with 200 people. Does that make any sense to anybody? No. […] Then you’ll get certain ones, because the officers get along with them, they are left out all day. They might be unemployed, but their door is open all day. There's no rhyme or reason to this place. (Arabella)

Relatedly, a good deal of the kind of intrusive and infantilising interference that participants resented reflected forms of benign paternalism, organised around attempts to protect women's safety and well-being (see Malloch, 2000). That is, many of the risks faced by female prisoners had a relational dimension that was extremely difficult to police. Much of the tension within the prison resulted from break-ups and jealousies within the establishment, while forms of peer exploitation often occurred through what appeared to be friendships. As a result, as was often acknowledged, there was some legitimacy in officers seeking to monitor and manage the social and relational domain:

Some friendships can get a bit obsessive. […] an innocent person who has no experience in prison, they need protecting from certain characters that have committed heinous crimes or are sexually dangerous. There's a lot more monitoring for certain people. (Katie)

I can understand why […] the system doesn’t like relationships between prisoners. Because say if an argument does happen, it can erupt very quickly in here. But if that person is making your sentence a lot easier and time goes quicker, I don’t see the issue. (Brooke)

Some women clearly appreciated that officers were trying to protect them from people who might lead them astray (‘the wrong crowd’) or damage their chances of progression. Yet, as Brooke noted, officers could not easily distinguish between relationships that were exploitative and damaging and those that were helpful and supportive. Mollie made a similar point, that well-meaning interventions could deprive women of sources of peer support:

If I say to them, ‘[X has] been very supportive to me since I have been in jail – hanging out with [her] has really helped me’, they do not believe that. They still think [X is] a bad influence on me. They will do anything they can to separate us, not realising that separating us might cause me some emotional distress. (Mollie)

Such comments bring into focus the difficulties for staff of using their authority in domains that were both intimate and risky.

Environmental factors

Compared to mainstream men's prisons, frontline staff expressed almost no concern about being assaulted. Lacking such fear about the repercussions of their decisions and practices, it was easier for officers to over-use their power or use it illegitimately (see Sparks et al., 1996). Certainly, women's accounts of being disciplined suggested the over-use of authority regarding relatively minor issues (one said she had received a downgrade to her privilege level because she had arrived to pick up her medication five minutes early), and a perception that officers regarded themselves as beyond challenge: ‘[They say] “because I say so and you have no right to question me”’ (Mollie). Likewise, officers had few concerns about the risks of escape or disorder, making them more liable to allow some boundaries to slip, and to focus their attention less on institutional than interpersonal risks (e.g. intimate relationships).

In this context – where prisoners felt relatively powerless, staff boundaries were rather loose, and support was unequally distributed – the cultivation of close relationships with uniformed staff was one of few viable means by which women could leverage favourable decisions, or ensure basic forms of assistance and emotional support. Doing so often involved a form of trade-through-talk (see Ward, 1982), in which information about self and others was included in the to-and-fro of general discussion, or was offered more deliberately as a quid pro quo or demonstration of ‘goodness’. Much of this talk was about personal issues, or the relational politics of the establishment and was folded back into staff preoccupations and interventions. Paradoxically, disclosing such matters without knowing how the information might then be used could reinforce to women their own lack of power.

Finally, infantile behaviour was in part produced by the environment itself. As Amy noted, women in prison ‘become more child-like. […] because you feel like you’re being told off all the time’, while Faith explained that ‘You act out because you're getting treated like a 14-year-old child, who has been grounded. So if you’re going to treat me like that, I'm going to behave like that’. Maddison suggested that dysfunctional behaviour was produced by staff inconsistency:

… like having a husband and wife team and you have children. Children will play off against their parents, but if both parents are reading off the same page, you have a smoothly-run unit. It's just so dysfunctional. It makes you dysfunctional, it makes you feel like [laughs] you're going crazy but you're not. (Maddison)

Conclusion

Liebling (1999: 152) notes that extremes and variations in human behaviour – including compassion and abuse – are ‘observable, or implicit, in the daily round of events’ in prison. In women's prisons, this variance is especially evident in the relationships between prisoners and staff. The main aim of this article has been to illuminate the complexity and emotional intensity of these relationships, first, by outlining their core features, as described by female prisoners – blurred boundaries, infantilisation, pettiness, inconsistency and favouritism – and then by seeking to explain these features in ways that move beyond standard accounts.

A key theme throughout has been the relative powerlessness and vulnerability of women in prison (see also Frois, 2017; Moore and Scraton, 2014; Owen et al., 2017), significantly shaped by their life experiences prior to their confinement, and producing forms of need and mistrust. Seen in this light, many of the emotionally fraught interactions that we witnessed reflected complex entanglements of power and dependence. Women's reliance on staff reinforced a dynamic of neediness; their lack of power, in combination with their desperation and distress, produced insistent and vociferous forms of challenge; and their biographical experiences made them acutely sensitive to the use and misuse of authority. For the same reasons, many women were impelled to develop close relationships with officers, while others were highly passive or detached, based on feelings of fatalism or anxiety, respectively.

Such orientations are in certain respects gendered, in that women in prison represent an exceptionally vulnerable segment of the population. In our analysis, their characteristics were exacerbated by the environment and were reproduced by the ways in which inconsistency, unpredictability and loose boundaries reinforced their existential and emotional insecurities, to the point where some questioned their own judgement and sense of self. While many of the problems in the ways that officers engaged with women were the result of carelessness or a lack of professionalism, others related to forms of benign paternalism and sincere efforts to build close and supportive relationships.

These complexities reflected the relational nature of the flow of power – the management of the prison through relationships – and its volatile and changeable form. Characterising this form of authority is challenging. Individual women's experiences of power were often contingent on the particular relationships they had formed with individual staff members, rather than a more general mode of institutional authority; and while the power embedded in monitoring, intimate regulation and forms of talk was undoubtedly ‘tight’, it was also both ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ (Crewe, 2011; Crewe et al., 2014): in many ways oppressive, yet different from the more threatening, coercive weight that often characterises men's prisons, rooted in concerns with security and control. Likewise, staff were both ‘present’ and ‘absent’ (Crewe et al., 2014): sometimes engaged to a point of over-involvement, yet at the same time unduly casual, in ways that undermined their own authority and created an environment that the women found highly destabilising.

In such respects, women's prisons represent a challenge to models of penal order, authority and legitimacy precisely because power flows through the complex, charged and ambiguous relational dynamics we have described. Many of the most de-legitimating elements of staff conduct (gossip, un-boundaried exchanges, lack of predictability, unprofessional language) related to these dynamics. The fact that women were so critical of the prison, despite it being ostensibly decent and relaxed (cf. Moore and Scraton, 2014), tells us a good deal about the particular difficulties of accomplishing justice – and forging ‘right relationships’ (Liebling, 2011) – in prisons holding women, and about the gendered dimensions of penal legitimacy. Such findings are particularly notable given recent literature identifying how, for many women who have experienced trauma, addiction and degradation in the community, prisons can serve as places of refuge, containment and narrative reinvention (e.g. Bucerius et al., 2021; Crewe and Ievins, 2020; Frois, 2017). We do not dispute such findings. Rather, we want to emphasise that, even when imprisonment can, in certain respects, provide protection and restoration, its mundane power relations can also render imprisonment highly stressful. Indeed, much of this stress relates to the same experiences of abuse and exploitation that can make prisons sites of temporary relief. So while imprisonment might well provide some women with ‘the only opportunities available to them to escape dangers or challenges they face in the community and to access basic social welfare provisions’ (Bucerius et al., 2021: 532), their relational dynamics always risk compounding experiences of trauma, reinforcing feelings of mistrust, and reproducing experiences of powerlessness (Comack, 2018; Kelman et al., 2022). The difficult fusion of care and control that women's prisons generally seek to provide feels particularly threatening to many women, because of how it resonates with abusive and confusing experiences of intimacy and authority in the community (Liebling, 2009). We would therefore caution very strongly against any suggestion that, because prisons sometimes offer relief from addiction, assault and the basic struggles of survival, they do not produce distress or are likely to repair deep damage to psychological well-being and relational trust.