Hollowing out peer support: Knowledge conversion in hostile knowledge environments of open prisons

Abstract

This article examines peer-led induction in open prisons to explore how managerialism, responsibilisation and staff culture distort the circulation and conversion of knowledge in penal institutions. Drawing on Nonaka and Takeuchi’s SECI model, it shows that the stages of socialisation, externalisation, combination and internalisation were systematically fractured. Officers possessed tacit insights into the anxieties of transfer, while peers held experiential expertise; however, both forms of knowledge were displaced by managerialist priorities that privileged paperwork and audit over relational support. This created what is theorised as a hostile knowledge environment, where valuable tacit expertise was muted, fragmented or reframed. The article further introduces the peer support paradox: the tendency for responsibilisation and audit cultures to hollow out lived-experience interventions, turning them into rituals of compliance. The findings extend debates on legitimacy, responsibilisation and penal governance by showing how hostile knowledge economies erode authenticity, learning and institutional credibility.

Introduction

Prison interventions are frequently presented as vehicles for transition, rehabilitation and humanisation within otherwise punitive regimes (Schreeche-Powell, 2025a). In recent decades, the growth of peer-led schemes has been justified on the basis that prisoners themselves hold distinctive knowledge and experiential expertise, allowing them to deliver forms of support that are inaccessible to staff (Perrin, 2024; Smith, 2025). Peer-led induction (PLI) schemes exemplify this model. They are designed to alleviate the shock of entry into prison – or, in the case of open conditions, the disorientation of transfer – by providing guidance, reassurance and information from trained peers (Schreeche-Powell, 2025a). ¹ At the policy level, such schemes embody the language of empowerment, inclusion and responsibilisation (Garland, 2001). They appear to reflect broader shifts towards recognising lived experience as a resource within penal cultures (Maruna and LeBel, 2012; Weaver, 2022).

Yet, as this article argues, the reality of PLI is often disjunctive: the promise of relational support and empowerment is consistently undermined by the cultures of staff and managerialism in which it is embedded. What should be a process of trust-building and knowledge exchange is reduced instead to a bureaucratic ritual – a tick-box exercise in compliance rather than a meaningful intervention. Drawing on empirical research of open prisons this article demonstrates that the failure of PLI does not lie in its conceptual design but in its organisational embedding. The central analytical concern is the management and conversion of knowledge: how knowledge is created, resisted and hollowed out under conditions of managerial oversight and entrenched staff traditions.

The concept of knowledge conversion is drawn from Nonaka and Takeuchi’s (1995) influential work on organisational knowledge creation, which distinguishes between tacit knowledge (embedded in experience and practice) and explicit knowledge (codified and communicable). In theory, PLI requires the translation of tacit prisoner expertise into explicit guidance for newcomers, facilitated by staff oversight and embedded within managerial frameworks. However, research has shown that these processes are fractured. Information is delivered in inaccessible formats, tacit expertise is undervalued and staff disengagement undermines the socialisation of knowledge (Schreeche-Powell, 2025a). What remains is not the internalisation of support but the accumulation of forms signed, boxes ticked and compliance achieved.

The dominance of managerialism in contemporary penal governance provides the backdrop to these fractures. The rise of managerial logics in the late 20th century (Clarke and Newman, 1997; Hood, 1991; Hood and Dixon, 2015) has transformed the governance of public services, including prisons, prioritising accountability, audit and performance metrics (Bennett, 2016). In penal contexts, this has meant the ascendancy and intensification of monitoring and proceduralism, often at the expense of relational practices. As this article will demonstrate, managerialism in open prisons manifests in an overriding concern with evidence of process rather than whether it is meaningful for prisoners (Schreeche-Powell, 2025a). This bureaucratic rationality, echoing Power’s (1999) analysis of the ‘audit society’, turns interventions into ‘rituals of verification’ where compliance displaces care.

Equally significant are cultures of prison staff. Occupational traditions among officers have long been documented as resistant to change (Crawley, 2004; Crewe, 2009; Liebling et al., 2011; Schoenfeld and Everly, 2022). In the case of PLI, staff were not simply passive implementers of managerial priorities but active mediators of them. Many officers perceived peers as potential replacements for staff, especially in an era of austerity (Ismail, 2020), and resisted their involvement as a threat to their professional identity (Schreeche-Powell, 2025a). This resistance did not always take an overt form but manifested through indifference, minimal compliance and inconsistent support. Such practices resonate with Lipsky’s (1980) conception of ‘street-level bureaucrats’, who retain discretion in implementing policy and can dilute or reshape interventions through their daily practices. In open prisons, staff discretion frequently translated into the hollowing out of PLI with officers withholding the relational labour that would have given the intervention substance.

The result was the displacement of legitimacy. Prisoners often experienced induction as perfunctory, describing feelings of neglect, invisibility and abandonment. Rather than drawing support from peers, they turned to informal networks, bypassing the intervention. The relational potential of PLI was undermined by staff disengagement and managerialist logics. Knowledge was not converted into understanding but reduced to compliance artefacts, echoing critiques of responsibilisation (Garland, 2001) and the hollowing out of professional practice (Newman and Clarke, 2009).

This article makes four contributions. First, it demonstrates that effective knowledge conversion is foundational to penal interventions; where tacit and experiential knowledge is not converted, delivery is liable to become procedural rather than supportive. Second, it demonstrates how the staff culture mediates this process by filtering or blocking knowledge flows. Third, it reveals how managerialist logics hollow out interventions, creating the appearance of delivery while stripping them of their substance. Fourth, it introduces the concept of the peer support paradox, ² offering a new way to theorise how lived-experience initiatives are simultaneously valorised and undermined in carceral contexts. The article first situates knowledge management within penal contexts, then applies the SECI model to PLI. It examines managerial and occupational cultures, traces the cultural undermining of induction and concludes with the implications for penal governance.

PLI is not an isolated failure but symptomatic of late-modern imprisonment: the tension between empowerment and control, between policy rhetoric and organisational practice, and between lived experience and bureaucratic artefact. This article extends carceral governance debates by theorising prisons as hostile knowledge environments and demonstrating, via SECI, how audit and officer culture systematically fracture knowledge conversion, explaining why lived-experience interventions become rituals of compliance.

Knowledge management in penal contexts

Organisational theory highlights knowledge as a form of capital that must be created, shared and embedded in practice. Polanyi’s (1966) distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge showed how much expertise is embodied and experiential. Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) extended this through their SECI model, emphasising cycles of socialisation, externalisation, combination and internalisation. When such processes fail, knowledge becomes siloed, underutilised or stripped of context.

Prisons represent a particularly challenging context for knowledge management. They are hierarchical, secretive and defensive organisations (Jacobs, 1977; Sim, 2009; Sparks et al., 1996; Symkovych, 2018). Knowledge is closely tied to authority and order, and its circulation is shaped by suspicion and risk aversion. As Crewe (2009, 2011) shows, everyday prison life involves delicate negotiations of legitimacy, discretion and power. These features do not simply make knowledge flows difficult; they make them highly politicised. Questions regarding which knowledge is recognised, whose knowledge counts, and how knowledge is legitimised are bound up with organisational control. Prisons as such exemplify what this article terms a hostile knowledge environment. ³

Bennett (2016) demonstrates how, in the last three decades, prison management has been saturated with the technologies of audit, monitoring and target-setting, embedding managerialist logics into the daily fabric of institutional life. Performance targets are a ‘visible assessment of individual, team and prison performance, constantly in the consciousness of managers and shaping the practices of frontline staff’ (Bennett, 2016: 74–75). This analysis situates prisons within the wider transformations of new public management (NPM) (Clarke and Newman, 1997; Hood, 1991), in which performance indicators, rating systems and audit cultures displace professional judgement and relational engagement. Under these conditions, knowledge is increasingly valued when it is auditable. Their totality highlights that prisons do not merely neglect tacit knowledge; they actively reconfigure organisational priorities around audit-friendly forms of explicit knowledge.

Tacit and explicit knowledge in carceral settings

Applying Nonaka and Takeuchi’s (1995) framework to the prison setting highlights the tension between tacit and explicit knowledge. Explicit knowledge abounds in prisons, including induction handbooks, security protocols, policy documents and risk assessment tools. In contrast, tacit knowledge is more difficult to legitimise. Officers develop occupational expertise (Crawley, 2004) that enables them to ‘read’ atmospheres, de-escalate tensions and interpret behaviour. Prisoners cultivate survival strategies and social codes (Crewe, 2009; Sykes, 1958), which can be mobilised to support others in peer-led schemes. However, tacit knowledge in prisons exists uneasily alongside managerialist priorities. However, it is not easily converted into measurable outputs. It resists codification, making it difficult to incorporate into performance indicators. As a result, organisational attention shifts towards explicit knowledge that can be audited; completed forms, signed induction sheets or statistical returns that signify compliance. The imbalance is not incidental but structural: the dominance of audit cultures makes explicit knowledge overvalued and tacit knowledge marginalised.

Knowledge in criminal justice organisations

The challenges of knowledge conversion are not unique to prisons but are visible across criminal justice organisations. In each case, tacit and relational forms of expertise are marginalised when managerial frameworks demand codification into measurable output. Lipsky’s (1980) account of ‘street-level bureaucrats’ demonstrates how frontline workers interpret and reshape policy, often creating disjuncture’s between managerial intent and practice. In probation, Raynor (2012) has shown how ‘what works’ knowledge was translated into actuarial tools and performance measures, stripping away the nuance. In prison education, research documents how managerial oversight prioritises measurable outputs at the expense of meaningful pedagogical engagement (Behan, 2014; Coates, 2016). This dynamic can be situated within Newman and Clarke’s (2009) notion of hollowing out, which captures how managerial reforms erode professional autonomy and reshape public service practice. Bennett’s work brings this critique into the prison itself: here, managerial technologies of audit saturate organisational life, ensuring that performance targets dominate staff consciousness and shape their everyday conduct.

Barriers to knowledge conversion in prisons

In prisons, the conversion of knowledge is not merely difficult but is also structurally constrained. Organisational features that are often taken for granted; rigid hierarchies, entrenched occupational cultures, pervasive suspicion and the dominance of audit logics; interact to fracture the SECI cycle. Each stage of knowledge conversion is distorted: tacit insights are blocked from socialisation, externalisation is curtailed by secrecy, combination is narrowed to audit-friendly forms and internalisation produces compliance rather than learning (Schreeche-Powell, 2025a). These are not incidental obstacles but the constitutive dynamics of penal governance. Understanding prisons as hostile knowledge environments requires examining how hierarchy delegitimises peer and staff expertise, how suspicion discourages trust, how managerialism privileges explicit over tacit forms and how occupational cultures defend authority against change. Together, these barriers explain why interventions designed to valorise experiential knowledge, such as PLI, are hollowed out in practice. To see how these fractures operate in practice, it is useful to trace them across five interlocking barriers: hierarchical authority, cultures of secrecy, the dominance of audit, entrenched officer traditions and the contested role of peer knowledge.

Hierarchical authority

Prisons are highly hierarchical, with authority cascading downwards. Officers may possess tacit expertise, but their scope for discretion is constrained by managerial directives and performance targets. Bennett (2016) illustrates how such targets act as visible benchmarks of institutional success, reorienting practice towards compliance. Prisoners, even as peers, occupy the lowest rung of this hierarchy, with their knowledge treated as suspect or illegitimate.

Cultures of secrecy and suspicion

Prisons operate with what can be understood as a ‘culture of suspicion’, sustained by mutual mistrust and fragile legitimacy (Sparks et al., 1996). Knowledge is guarded rather than shared. Officers may fear that disclosing tacit insights could be used against them, while prisoners often conceal their experiential knowledge as a survival strategy. This defensiveness curtails the open socialisation of knowledge envisioned by Nonaka and Takeuchi.

Managerialism and audit

Power’s (1999) analysis of the ‘audit society’ resonates sharply here. What matters is not whether knowledge is meaningfully transferred but whether processes are documented. Bennett (2016) adds specificity: in prisons, audit technologies such as performance ratings and key performance targets saturate management consciousness. Knowledge that can be captured in such metrics thrives, whereas knowledge that resists codification withers.

Occupational cultures

As Crawley (2004) documents, officer cultures are often resistant to change. Crewe (2009) shows that authority depends on subtle negotiations between staff and prisoners. Within this culture, knowledge that appears to erode staff’s authority is resisted. Managerial logics reinforce these tendencies by limiting the scope for discretion, encouraging defensive compliance and exacerbating the gap between formal policy and lived practice.

Peer knowledge as a challenge to penal knowledge economies

Peer-led interventions, at least in principle, attempt to disrupt these dynamics by valuing prisoners lived experiences as tacit knowledge with institutional relevance. Maruna and LeBel (2012), Nugent and Schinkel (2016) and Weaver (2022) highlight the potential of peer expertise to foster legitimacy, support desistance and reconfigure relationships within the penal field. However, peer knowledge sits uneasily within the penal knowledge economy. Officers may resist it as a challenge to their authority, while managers seek to instrumentalise it within audit frameworks. In the prison context: peer knowledge is acknowledged only insofar as it can be captured within performance indicators or ratings systems, meaning its value is redefined through the lens of audit (Schreeche-Powell, 2020, 2025a).

Taken together, these dynamics suggest that prisons are uniquely hostile environments for knowledge management. Nonaka and Takeuchi’s model assumes that organisations seek to learn and adapt through cycles of tacit–explicit conversion. In prisons, by contrast, tacit knowledge is marginalised, explicit knowledge is fetishised, and managerial technologies of audit ensure that only certain forms of knowledge are legitimised. When considering performance targets and managerial control, knowledge is not only filtered by hierarchy and suspicion but also systematically reshaped by audit logics. PLI schemes, designed to valorise prisoner knowledge, therefore enter an organisational field already structured to hollow out or repurpose such knowledge for managerial ends.

Methodology

This article draws on empirical research into the role and experience of PLI in open prisons. This study aimed to examine how peer interventions are designed, implemented and experienced in practice, with particular attention to organisational dynamics, knowledge flows and staff culture.

A qualitative research design was adopted to capture the participants lived experiences and the meanings they attached to induction. Semi-structured interviews formed the core of the data, supplemented by documentary analysis of induction materials and the relevant policy frameworks. Fieldwork was conducted remotely between 2020 and 2023, using online platforms. Although the original design anticipated a multi-site ethnography, Covid-19 restrictions curtailed in-person access. Nevertheless, remote interviewing produced rich, reflective narratives and broadened the geographical reach of the participants. The final sample comprised 26 participants: 21 former prisoners and 5 prison officers spanning three open prisons in England and Wales.

• Former prisoners: All were adult men who had transferred from closed to open conditions and undergone PLI during their early weeks of transition. Participants ranged in age from their early 20s to mid-50s and included both first-time entrants to open conditions and those with repeated experiences of custody. Several had served long custodial terms prior to transfer, while others were closer to release. Recruitment occurred through prison reform charities, social media networks and snowball sampling. This produced a sample varied in age, offence type and sentence length, but united by their direct experience of navigating peer induction in open conditions.

• Staff: Officer participants were accessed through professional contacts and a designated gatekeeper. They included both long-serving officers with over 20 years’ experience and newer recruits with fewer than 4 years in post. Some had spent much of their careers in open conditions, while others had transferred from closed prisons to open ones. Their involvement in the PLI varied: a couple were directly responsible for coordinating the scheme, while others were more peripherally engaged, but all had worked alongside peers delivering induction.

Recruitment of prison officers presented distinct challenges due to cultural and institutional sensitivities. As with other hard-to-reach professional groups (Shaghaghi et al., 2011), serving officers were often cautious about engaging in research. The closed nature of officer culture, and occupational norms of secrecy and solidarity, alongside both organisational risk aversion and a fear of violating anonymity compounded this difficulty (Arnold et al., 2007; Crawley and Crawley, 2007). Access was therefore facilitated through a gatekeeper, a senior serving officer, who acted as a mediator and guarantor of legitimacy. While this process necessarily limited the officer sample, it enabled the generation of candid insights that may not have been accessible through more formal or managerial recruitment channels. In this sense, the small but information-rich sample should be understood as a reflection of the constraints of researching within carceral institutions. In this vein, the study did not seek statistical representativeness but instead prioritised the richness of insight. As Wolcott (1990: 62) has argued, ‘doing less, more thoroughly’ is often more valuable in research than breadth of coverage.

The study was approved by the researcher’s university’s ethics committee. Participants provided informed consent, were reminded of their right to withdraw and all data were anonymised with altered identifying details. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed thematically, drawing on grounded theory coding strategies within a theory-informed thematic analysis rather than seeking a full grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014). Coding proceeded in iterative stages: open coding generated initial categories, axial coding identified relationships between them and selective coding refined the core themes. This process revealed recurrent patterns of fractured knowledge flows, staff resistance and the dominance of managerial logic. The analysis was informed by the traditions of ethnographic edges (Davies, 2015), while also drawing on organisational theory on knowledge conversion. The aim was not only to capture participants’ experiences of PLI but also to situate them within broader questions of knowledge management and penal governance. The next section turns to the empirical material from this study, applying Nonaka and Takeuchi’s framework to illustrate how these fractures manifest in practice.

Findings and analysis: Fractures in knowledge conversion

Applying Nonaka and Takeuchi’s (1995) model of knowledge creation to the practice of PLI reveals a cycle that is repeatedly interrupted. Each stage of the SECI process – socialisation, externalisation, combination, and internalisation – was fractured by the interplay of managerial priorities, staff resistance and prisoner disillusionment. Rather than enabling the flow of knowledge between peers, staff, managers and new prisoners, induction became a site of knowledge blockage and distortion.

Socialisation: Staff resistance and the blocking of tacit exchange

Socialisation requires the sharing of tacit knowledge directly between individuals. For PLI, this meant that peers drew on their lived experiences to guide newcomers supported by staff oversight. However, officers often resisted, dismissing peer contributions or constraining the space for authentic dialogue. One officer observed,

The older staff who have been in the job for years are a bit more old school and don’t like the new approach [. . .] they are more about giving out orders to people. (Officer Emily)

This resistance delegitimises peer knowledge. Prisoners further recognised that induction lacked authenticity, with one describing peer support as ‘a myth’ because he was told simply to ‘crack on with it and figure things out myself’ (Ash).

I just remember standing in that office while the officer was rushing through the forms. He didn’t even look at me, just told me, ‘sign here, you’ll get shown around by another lad’. The peer sat there, said hello, but it felt like he didn’t want to say anything in front of the officer. I walked out feeling like, ‘right, that’s it then, I’m on my own’. (Pauley)

Officers’ withholding of knowledge was not always about prisoners but often about the management. Several participants described refusing to invest effort in induction because they believed their work would not be recognised or valued by managers. As one officer admitted, ‘Why should I put in the extra time when management don’t care?’ (Officer Kev). This illustrates how tacit knowledge was deliberately withheld as a way of resisting managerial priorities rather than simply a lack of willingness to support prisoners.

The tacit insights of peers – strategies for managing open prison life, coping with anxiety, or building trust – were often stifled by cultural resistance. Socialisation was therefore fractured at its root: peer knowledge was prevented from being exchanged in ways that new prisoners could trust or value.

Externalisation: Tick-box cultures and scripted knowledge

Externalisation requires tacit knowledge to be articulated in explicit forms, such as structured advice or induction presentations. In principle, PLI institutionalised this stage by positioning peers alongside staff as guides. In practice, externalisation is hollowed out by managerial demands. Officers themselves admitted their compliance was driven by audit, not meaning:

It’s about ticking the box for the things they [management] focus on. Everything else is a free for all. (Officer Woody)

This demonstrates how managerial priorities led to some officers disengaging from the externalisation stage, reducing knowledge exchange to the minimum needed for protection from managerial scrutiny.

On paper, the peers are meant to sit down with them, walk them through the basics, help them feel less lost. That’s the idea anyway, and management like to say that’s happening. (Officer Woody)

Peers were reported as being reduced to functionaries delivering pre-approved information rather than articulating their lived expertise.

. . . what I got was basically a script. They opened a booklet, read a few lines about the rules, then ticked the sheet. I tried to ask questions about home leave and they just said, ‘you’ll find out in time, just sign this’. It didn’t feel like support, more like I was part of their admin. (Rich)

Prisoners noticed this disjuncture, with Joey recalling that peers disengaged once the paperwork was signed:

As soon as I signed off the paperwork they needed, they were off, and that was the last time I even saw them. (Joey)

Here, the externalisation of authentic peer knowledge was replaced by the reproduction of scripted and audit-friendly content. Knowledge conversion collapsed into bureaucratic ritual.

Combination: Fragmented knowledge streams

Combination requires explicit knowledge from different sources to be integrated into a coherent whole. However, induction was characterised by fragmentation. Officers admitted ignorance regarding PLI:

When they [staff] come onto the unit to cover, they are really dismissive of us and how we do things. They don’t even make the effort to do things our way. (Officer Lily)

Data show that managers emphasised performance targets, staff prioritised order and peers delivered scripts with minimal coordination. This caused confusion for newcomers:

Support and guidance cost nothing, but it seemed to be a big thing to them [. . .] couldn’t even get the basics right. (Jimmy)

Prisoners echoed this sense of disconnection, describing how induction generated confusion rather than clarity: ‘Sometimes too much information, too fast and other times not enough– I felt flustered and came away with more questions’ (Rich), while others felt wholly neglected: ‘It was like we were invisible’ (Joey). For prisoners, this reduction of externalisation reinforced their sense of being processed rather than supported, intensifying the perception that induction was something done to them rather than for them.

Some mentees were even more blunt, framing peer withholding as deliberate:

They should know what we need [to know], but they don’t give a fuck about telling us. (Steve)

Officers also acknowledged that the scheme was again hollowed out by managerial priorities, with one noting that

management are more interested in ticking the box than making sure lads actually know what they’re doing or what we have got to say to make it better. (Officer Kev)

Instead of integrating multiple knowledge sources into a meaningful induction, the process reproduced silos: managerial knowledge for audit, staff knowledge for control and peer knowledge for compliance. The combination failed because no actor had the incentive to synthesise these elements into a shared resource. These accounts highlight not just poor delivery but the absence of integration across staff, managerial and peer knowledge streams, leaving new prisoners unable to make sense of induction as a coherent process.

Internalisation: Displacement into informal networks

Internalisation requires newcomers to absorb explicit knowledge and embed it into their own tacit practices. However, many prisoners left induction more confused than supported. David described,

. . . anxiety went sky high [. . .] I overthink at the best of times but new prison, new people, new rules, new things to learn it kind of takes over your thoughts. I was obsessing over it and it was stressing me out. (David)

Here, induction did not provide a framework he could internalise; instead, the absence of clear guidance intensified his uncertainty. Rather than embedding new practices, he was left rehearsing his confusion, ‘obsessing’ without resolution. This illustrates how fractured externalisation and combination left prisoners unable to convert knowledge into tacit coping mechanisms.

Rather than embedding useful knowledge from induction, prisoners later relied on informal networks to navigate the regime. Alan’s frustration captured this dynamic:

What’s the point of having peers and staff if they ain’t gonna help? [. . .] It just stressed me out even more. (Alan)

The peer and staff didn’t really explain anything. I spent nights lying awake, worrying that I’d get something wrong and be shipped back [to closed conditions]. I couldn’t relax until another guy, not even part of the scheme, in the gym queue went through the basics. It wasn’t official, it wasn’t induction – it was just someone taking pity on me. (Steve)

Here, internalisation occurred outside formal channels, bypassing the scheme altogether. This displacement shows how cultural and managerial dynamics hollowed out the intervention where mentees were forced to migrate to informal knowledge sources but not through the sanctioned induction process. The staff confirmed that this withholding was sometimes purposeful. As one officer reflected,

Management are always on our backs about induction, but they don’t back us when things kick off. So, why should I back their schemes? I keep my head down, do just enough. (Officer Paul)

This reveals a deeper layer of staff disengagement. Not only were officers complying minimally with induction, but their withholding of effort was also framed as a form of resistance to management. This distrust in management eroded the willingness of officers to invest relationally in the process. For prisoners, this meant that tacit knowledge that could have eased their anxieties was withheld not out of ignorance, but out of officers’ resentment towards management.

The broken cycle

Across the cycle, fractures were evident: (1) socialisation was blocked by staff resistance and peer disengagement; (2) externalisation was hollowed out by managerial tick-box cultures; (3) combination was undermined by fragmented silos and cultural dismissal; and (4) internalisation was displaced into informal prisoner networks. These dynamics show that the problem was not the absence of knowledge but rather its mismanagement. Tacit expertise was mistrusted, explicit knowledge was reduced to audit outputs, and cultural resistance fractured the circulation of insights. What remained was a hollow intervention: induction existed on paper, but its knowledge economy was broken. This amounted to a systematic loss of knowledge as tacit expertise from both peers and staff rarely reached newcomers in meaningful ways. Strikingly, across both staff and prisoner interviews, no participant offered consistently positive accounts of PLI. While individual comments occasionally noted small benefits, the dominant narrative was one of frustration, mistrust and emptiness. This absence underscores the depth of systemic fracture. Crucially, the fracture was sustained not only by managerialist logics but also by officers’ active resistance to them. Several participants framed their refusal to share knowledge as a way of ‘not playing management’s game’. In this sense, staff mistrust of management acted as a deliberate blockage in the SECI cycle, ensuring that tacit knowledge remained unspoken and unshared.

While the data revealed a dominant narrative of structural rigidity and managerial constraint, it is important to acknowledge that participants also recognised moments of potential and good practice within the PLI model. Some participants expressed optimism that, if implemented collaboratively and responsively, PLI could genuinely support adjustment and well-being in open conditions. As one participant reflected,

They need to sit down with us and ask us what would help us settle better . . . if they did that and gave us what we wanted to know then I would have felt so much better.

While another observed that

It’s a great idea in principle, but they ain’t got it set up right here to do that’s all. (Steve)

These perspectives highlight that the issue is not with the concept of peer support itself, but with its managerialist and non-responsive delivery. Although participants reported similar patterns of frustration, subtle variations did emerge between the sites where they experienced PLI, potentially reflecting differences in local leadership and the degree of support for peer involvement. These contextual dynamics underline that the effectiveness of PLI is contingent not only on its design but also on the cultural and institutional conditions of the open prison itself. A more needs-driven, co-produced approach; one grounded in dialogue between staff, management, peer mentors and mentees, was seen as key to unlocking the latent potential of the intervention.

Discussion: Managerialism, tick-box cultures and staff resistance as knowledge management

The open prison context is central to interpreting these findings. Unlike closed conditions, open prisons operate as transitional spaces that bridge the divide between custody and community. They represent a liminal or ‘threshold’ environment; one characterised by a precarious balance between autonomy and surveillance, and between institutional retreat and continuing control (Schreeche-Powell, 2025a, 2025b). This PLI occurred not at the outset of imprisonment but during a later stage, following transfer from a closed establishment. This setting shapes both the meaning and function of induction: it is less about institutional orientation and more about reorientation-learning how to manage increased autonomy, relational distance from staff and the anxieties of impending release. This period is emotionally charged, marked by uncertainty, self-surveillance and the challenge of navigating new forms of penal enactment. The process demands not simply procedural information but emotional and relational support, which many participants felt was lacking. PLI therefore occupied a paradoxical position: while it should, in theory, work particularly well in open conditions, its implementation was often constrained by the same managerial, occupational and risk-averse practices that characterise the closed estate. The findings demonstrate how each stage of Nonaka and Takeuchi’s (1995) SECI cycle was fractured in practice. To understand these fractures, they must be situated in the organisational logics of the prison: managerialism, audit and staff culture. These are not simply contextual factors but active forces of knowledge management, shaping what forms of knowledge are legitimised, which are suppressed, and how tacit and explicit knowledge are valued. This section interprets the findings showing how prisons undermine interventions such as PLI by reconfiguring knowledge flows around audit, authority and cultural resistance.

Externalisation: Managerial capture and the hollowing out of peer knowledge

The officers’ admissions of yielding to managerial imperatives exemplify the saturation of managerialism in prison life. This echoes Power’s (1999) analysis of the audit society, in which measurable outputs displace substantive evaluation. Clarke and Newman (1997) describe how NPM restructured public services around performance targets and monitoring, reshaping not only practices but also organisational values. Bennett (2016) situates prisons squarely within this transformation with assessment of staff, team and prison performance, embedded into managerial consciousness. The findings confirm this: officers such as Kev declared: ‘I do what their priorities are [. . .] that way I can’t be criticised’.

This is knowledge management in action. Staff choose to externalise only the knowledge that is auditable, withholding other insights. Within the SECI cycle, this produces a distortion in the externalisation stage. Tacit knowledge is not articulated into meaningful support. In this way, the hollowing out of tacit insights transformed PLI into what might be called a ritual of compliance. Induction ‘happened’ in the sense that paperwork was signed and targets met, but this was a hollow enactment: a performance of accountability that substituted form for substance. Recent evaluations have further highlighted the fragility and resilience of managerialism under pressure. Bennett’s (2023) study of pandemic-era prison governance underscores how entrenched audit cultures persist even in crisis contexts, illustrating the resilience of managerial logics and supporting the argument that prisons function as ‘hostile knowledge environments’.

The same hostile environment also shaped the behaviour of peers themselves. Prisoners’ accounts of peers disengaging once paperwork was signed or treating support as a burden underpin what I conceptualise as the peer support paradox. Unlike staff, whose distortions were shaped by audit requirements, peers’ disengagement were perceived as personal dynamics: the lack of motivation to continue once official tasks were complete, or support as an onerous responsibility. From a knowledge management perspective, this meant that tacit experience was not shared but stalled. Rather than enabling the democratisation of knowledge, PLI collapsed into disengagement – induction was formally complete, but meaningful support was absent.

Socialisation: Staff cultures as filters of tacit knowledge

If managerialism shapes the valued forms of knowledge, staff cultures act as filters that regulate its circulation. Officers’ descriptions of colleagues as ‘old school’ and resistant to reconfigured relational approaches to PLI (Officer Emily) resonate with Crawley’s (2004) account of prison officer conservatism, rooted in occupational identities that privilege order and control.

Crewe’s (2011) analysis of soft power sharpens this argument. Extending his logic, officers maintain authority not only through overt discipline but also by shaping informational environments – deciding what knowledge prisoners (and, at times, colleagues) access and when. In PLI, staff dismissal of peer contributions can be understood as an exercise in informational control. By preventing peers from becoming credible conveyors of knowledge, officers preserved their position as gatekeepers of legitimate information, even when they themselves declined to share it.

This reflects the observation that staff culture is saturated with ambivalence and mistrust. Officers’ silence is not a void but a defensive practice: tacit knowledge withholding as a form of occupational resistance. In SECI terms, this blocks socialisation – the sharing of tacit knowledge directly between individuals. Instead of peers transmitting experiential insight and officers reinforcing it, tacit knowledge was filtered out by staff suspicion. From a knowledge management perspective, these practices block the socialisation stage of knowledge conversion. Tacit knowledge that peers might have shared with new prisoners was discredited in advance by staff scepticism, while officers’ tacit understandings of prison adaptation were withheld or filtered. Staff resistance to PLI should therefore not be seen only as attitudinal but as an occupational practice that functions as knowledge management – whether strategic or habitual – sustaining officer control over informational environments. While managerialism emerged as a dominant theme in shaping hostile knowledge exchange, it may also be understood as both an originating cause of, and an amplifier for, epistemic hostility within the open prison environment. As the data and wider scholarship suggest (Crawley, 2004; Liebling et al., 2011), the deeper roots of this hostility often lie in the occupational identity and cultural inheritance of the officer role itself. Prison officer culture, shaped historically around discipline, containment, and authority, continues to mediate how knowledge is valued and shared within penal settings. This culture sustains a guarded stance towards external or prisoner-derived expertise, reinforcing traditional boundaries around who is deemed a legitimate knower within the prison. Such defensive epistemic practices undermine initiatives like PLI, which rely on more collaborative and horizontally structured forms of knowledge exchange. Managerial logics of measurement and control do not so much replace this culture as co-opt and reproduce it, translating long-standing custodial values into bureaucratic form. Understanding managerialism, therefore, requires recognising its dual positionality, as both driver and amplifier of hostile knowledge exchange, operating in tandem with the deeper socio-political and cultural configurations of the officer role and the enduring tension between punishment and rehabilitation in the prison’s institutional purpose.

Combination: Fragmentation, silos and organisational failure

Combination requires the integration of explicit knowledge from different sources into a coherent whole. The findings suggest tendencies that PLI reproduced fragmentation: managers focused on audit outputs, officers prioritised order, peers delivered scripted inductions and prisoners sought support informally.

This reflects Clarke and Newman’s (1997) account of how managerial reforms produce organisational fragmentation. Performance regimes disincentivise collaboration, as staff are judged individually against narrow targets, and the emphasis on visibility shapes conduct around meeting audit requirements rather than embedding practices substantively. The result is a knowledge economy of silos. From a knowledge management perspective, this explains the fracture in the combination stage of the SECI cycle. Explicit knowledge streams – managerial documents, staff protocols, peer scripts – ran in parallel but were never integrated. The absence of combination was not incidental but systemic: the organisational culture had no mechanisms or incentives to synthesise knowledge across the groups.

Organisational silos are not unusual in bureaucracies, but in prisons, they are exacerbated by suspicion between staff and management and by mistrust between staff and prisoners. Analysis of managerial priorities shows that integration was never incentivised: managers cared only that induction was ‘delivered and recorded’, not that its content was consistent, meaningful or shared across groups. The result was a knowledge economy characterised by fragmentation, where combinations failed because no actor had reason to bridge the divides.

Internalisation: Defensive silences, displacement and the peer support paradox

Internalisation depends on prisoners embedding explicit knowledge into tacit practices. However, as the findings showed, prisoners often left induction feeling unsupported, anxious or confused. They internalised knowledge through informal networks, bypassing the formal scheme.

This displacement reflects the tensions underlying the ‘moral performance’ of prisons: staff cultures, managerial pressures and institutional legitimacy shape whether knowledge is trusted or internalised. In the case of PLI, organisational silence undermined trust. Officers like Kev voiced explicit hostility: ‘Why should I bother helping them?’ – with ‘them’ directed not at prisoners but at management, signalling a refusal to convert tacit knowledge into support. Such defensive silences fracture the SECI cycle in its final stage. Prisoners internalised knowledge informally, but the formal induction process was diluted into a performance directed as much to management as to newcomers.

This illustrates the deeper dynamics of the peer support paradox. When induction was reduced to paperwork or withdrawal, prisoners migrated towards informal networks of advice and reassurance – trusted friends, longer-serving prisoners or improvised coping strategies. Several participants described bypassing peers altogether, perceiving them negatively rather than as credible sources of orientation. In knowledge management terms, the SECI cycle was not simply hollowed out but diverted: socialisation and internalisation occurred, but only through unsanctioned channels beyond the formal scheme.

As David described, induction left him ‘obsessing’ and ‘stressing out’ rather than equipping him to adapt. Internalisation of meaningful knowledge did occur, but not within formal induction. Instead, prisoners reported relying on informal networks, friendships and their own trial-and-error learning. This displacement reflects how cultural dynamics – staff suspicion, managerial priorities and peer self-interest – disrupted the embedding of knowledge, leaving new prisoners unsupported by the very intervention designed to help them.

Here the paradox of PLI becomes clearest: an intervention intended to valorise lived experience ultimately delegitimised it. Nugent and Schinkel (2016), writing about desistance narratives, caution that lived experience risks institutional co-option – a risk starkly evident here. Responsibilisation and managerialism converged not only to suppress tacit insights but also to push them out of the formal domain. In PLI, knowledge conversion was not liberated but displaced, as peer expertise circulated informally while the formal scheme offered little more than a performance of compliance.

Knowledge management as power in prisons

Taken together, these dynamics demonstrate that managerialism and staff resistance are not simply barriers to intervention but are active forms of knowledge management. They shape the penal knowledge economy by determining which knowledge is shared, silenced or reconfigured.

• Managerialism privileges explicit, auditable knowledge, hollowing out externalisation.

• Staff cultures filter tacit knowledge and block socialisation.

• Organisational silos prevent integration and fracture combinations.

• Defensive silence and prisoner mistrust displace internalisation.

Therefore, prisons represent hostile knowledge environments. Unlike organisations that seek to harness tacit knowledge for innovation, prisons treat tacit knowledge as a destabilising force. Bennett’s (2016) emphasis on performance targets helps crystallise this interpretation: within such regimes, knowledge matters only in so far as it is visible, countable and controllable. Staff resistance, managerial capture and prisoner disillusionment are all part of a knowledge economy structured to undermine the authentic conversion. The foreclosure of authentic knowledge flows also forecloses organisational learning. Instead of adapting practices in light of peer or prisoner insights, managerial outputs insulated the institution from critique. In this sense, managerialism not only distorts knowledge but also actively prevents organisational adaptation. Understanding PLI through this lens highlights why the scheme faltered. It was not simply mismanaged but was actively undermined by the prison’s knowledge economy. The SECI cycle collapsed not because knowledge was absent, but because its conversion was resisted, distorted or redirected at each stage. This all suggests that penal interventions cannot succeed without considering the knowledge cultures of prisons. In carceral contexts, knowledge is not a neutral resource but a contested terrain managed through suspicion, audit and resistance. In this sense, managerialism and staff culture are not background conditions but central mechanisms of knowledge management that actively undermine penal intervention.

While this study offers fine-grained insights, its limitations must be acknowledged. First, access restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic meant that interviews were conducted remotely with former prisoners rather than those currently imprisoned. This inevitably shaped the kinds of narratives available: participants reflected retrospectively on their experiences, which may have altered how they framed, remembered, or interpreted events. Such retrospective accounts nonetheless provide valuable space for reflection, often producing more candid and critically distanced insights than might have been possible inside prison. Second, the staff sample was small, and their perspectives cannot be taken as representative of officer culture more broadly. Instead, they are best understood as illustrative accounts that help illuminate the organisational dynamics surrounding PLI. Third, the reliance on voluntary participation through charities, personal contacts and snowball sampling may have shaped the sample towards those holding stronger or more critical opinions about induction. This approach fostered detailed and reflective narratives but may have muted the presence of more balanced or affirmative perspectives. Taken together, these limitations mean that the findings should not be read as statistically generalisable but as analytically illuminating. They provide a theoretically informed case study of how knowledge conversion falters under the organisational logics of the open prison.

Conclusion

Fractures across the SECI cycle have profound consequences. When socialisation was blocked, externalisation hollowed out, combination fragmented and internalisation displaced, what remained was not a functioning PLI but a bureaucratic façade. These fractures stemmed not only from managerial capture and the sidelining of peer expertise but also from officers’ failure to convert and share knowledge. Staff did not consistently socialise tacit know-how, translate practice wisdom into accessible guidance, or integrate knowledge across shifts and roles. Instead, their practices were channelled into managerialist processes that prioritised audits over the relational aspects of induction. In knowledge management terms, the organisation failed to learn, adapt or embed insights. In penal terms, the intervention lost legitimacy, undermining both its stated aims and the credibility of rehabilitative initiatives more broadly.

This dynamic results in a systematic loss of knowledge. Peers held valuable tacit expertise in navigating open conditions, but staff cultures routinely muted or reframed these insights. Officers themselves possessed rich tacit understandings of transfer anxieties and institutional routines, yet when this knowledge was externalised, it was typically done in highly formalised, audit-friendly ways that satisfied managerial requirements rather than relational needs. For prisoners, the consequence was an informationally impoverished experience that bred confusion, mistrust and cynicism.

Such practices eroded legitimacy during a critical moment of transition. Induction is a time when fairness, recognition, and support are most needed, yet officers’ adherence to process over relationship squandered these opportunities. Prisoners internalised distrust rather than reassurance, turning to informal networks for guidance and concluding that formal induction was irrelevant or hollow. These experiences did more than frustrate learning; they actively eroded legitimacy. Legitimacy is based on fairness and recognition. Here, newcomers instead internalised neglect and mistrust, weakening institutional credibility at a critical moment of transition. In this way, staff disengagement not only undermines peer support but also corrodes the institution’s moral performance. As such, the implications extend beyond programme delivery to the legitimacy of the prison itself. Tyler’s (2006) procedural justice model and Liebling’s (2004) work on the moral performance of prisons both emphasise fairness, respect and recognition as the foundations of legitimacy. By reducing PLI to an exercise in compliance, open prisons forfeit the opportunity to build legitimacy at a critical juncture: entry into the institution. When prisoner knowledge is rendered invisible, the institution signals indifference to lived experience, corroding perceptions of fairness and undermining trust in the system’s authority. This corrosion also extends to staff, who are cast as bureaucratic gatekeepers rather than relational practitioners, diminishing their professional legitimacy and sense of purpose. In turn, this fosters resentment towards managerial priorities, weakening staff motivation and widening the gap between frontline practice and organisational rhetoric.

Therefore, the peer support paradox must be understood less as a failure of peers and more as a product of the institutional knowledge economy shaped by staff and managerial logics. Peers could not share authentically when their contributions were scripted, marginalised or treated as threats to officer authority. Staff participation, governed by audit-driven routines, prioritises measurable outputs over relational knowledge sharing. This meant that both peer and officer tacit knowledge was stripped of authenticity and retooled for compliance. The cycle of knowledge conversion collapsed at every stage, not because knowledge was absent but because its circulation was blocked, distorted or reframed by those charged with managing it.

The implications extend beyond induction. Education, resettlement and treatment schemes that rely on knowledge exchange are equally vulnerable when staff and managerial priorities dominate. Authority in prisons is exercised not only through coercion or psychological ‘tightness’ but also through the control of what counts as knowledge and how it circulates. This form of knowledge power helps explain why interventions often falter, even when they appear progressive. The case of PLI is symptomatic of a broader condition: these interventions and schemes are equally vulnerable when embedded in hostile knowledge economies. The problem is not technical but structural; prisons manage knowledge in ways that foreclose authenticity, learning and legitimacy. Without cultural change in staff practices and structural reform of audit regimes, interventions premised on the value of lived experience risk becoming little more than rituals of verification.

Seen this way, the failure of PLI is not an isolated misstep but a symptom of the wider condition of the penal state. Prisons operate as hostile knowledge environments where tacit expertise is mistrusted, explicit metrics are fetishised and staff knowledge conversion is constrained by managerialist processes. Until prisons move beyond defensive occupational traditions and create spaces where officer and peer knowledge can be openly shared, converted and embedded, interventions will continue to be hollowed out. The promise of care and support will remain trapped in paperwork, and organisational legitimacy will remain at risk of erosion. Seen this way, PLI underscores a broader critical agenda: knowledge in prisons is not a neutral commodity but a field of power relations. If policymakers and prison governors wish to move beyond hollow rituals of compliance, they must attend to the prisons’ knowledge economy.

As such, the findings highlight several practice and policy implications for enhancing knowledge exchange within open prisons. First, the managerialist ethos that pervades much of the prison system needs recalibration towards relational and reflective practice. Greater synergy between management and frontline staff is essential, supported by clearer communication channels, recognition of staff knowledge and adequate resourcing. Without this, staff disengagement and epistemic resistance will continue to undermine interventions such as PLI. Second, recruitment and training require reorientation to embed the values of power-sharing and co-production that underpin effective peer support. Staff and peer mentors should be selected and supported for their openness to participatory practice rather than adherence to traditional custodial cultures. Third, PLI and similar non-accredited interventions should be subject to the same standards of programme theory and evaluation as accredited offending behaviour programmes. Developing an evidence-based framework for such non-offending behaviour interventions would strengthen quality, mitigate iatrogenic outcomes and align the work of open prisons with broader well-being goals. Ultimately, institutional investment in reflective learning cultures, where both staff and prisoners are seen as knowledge holders, tacit knowledge is recognised and utilised, reliance on audit metrics is reduced and relational trust actively fostered, offers a pathway to transforming hostile knowledge environments into spaces of collaborative support.