Don’t call them prisoners, they’re residents
‘Hyper-liberal’ guidance for probation service also describes offenders as ‘supervised individuals’
CRIMINALS serving time in jail have been rebranded “residents” by prison chiefs and offenders have been renamed “supervised individuals” in official guidance for probation officers.
The move is seen by officials as an attempt to avoid “labelling” people as offenders in order to help them move on from their lives of crime. But it has been criticised by former prison governors as evidence of “fashionable” and “hyper-liberal” theories that fail to force offenders to take responsibility for their crimes.
Even prison reform groups acknowledged they did not use the terminology and preferred to call offenders in jail either “prisoners” or “people in prison.”
It is part of a wider attempt to modernise prisons and focus efforts on rehabilitation which includes a £600,000 Government-funded project to assess whether rebranding and redesigning jails can reduce reoffending.
At HMP Berwyn in North Wales the experiment has included renaming cells as “rooms”, prison blocks as “communities” and holding cells “waiting rooms”. Inmates are provided with laptops when they arrive and there are facilities for tea and sandwiches.
Last week Joe Farrar, head of the prison and probation service, used “residents” in announcing: “All prison governors will be given funding to spend on in-cell activities and extra technology to help our incredible staff support residents to maintain family ties and access support services.”
“Residents” is now part of the prison lexicon included in guidance, for example, from HMP Wandsworth, advising: “Residents have phones in their rooms and are able to make outgoing calls.”
In the latest executive summary for the probation service’s Target Operating Model, there is no mention of offenders but “supervised individuals” are referenced four times.
However, Ian Acheson, a former prison governor and Government adviser on extremism in jails, said: “Describing prisoners as ‘residents’ in places where you would sometimes hesitate to put livestock is just sophistry.
“Instead of parroting fashionable orthodoxies the prison service should concentrate its efforts on safe, ordered and purposeful prisons with staff clearly and confidently in charge. You can’t change people’s lives and stop them making further victims with labels.”
David Wilson, a former prison governor and emeritus professor of criminology at Birmingham University, said it was right that people should not be judged “by the worst thing they have done 30 or 40 years ago” and were entitled to “move on”.
But he said the use of “labels” was symptomatic of a “hyper-liberalism that doesn’t want to be honest with itself about the fact that there are people who do harm and sometimes extreme harm to other people and to society.
“The people who laugh at this most of all are offenders themselves. The offenders themselves say: I think I should be like a resident or I am a person under supervision and I am not a drug dealer, or burglar or person who has caused grievous bodily harm.”
He said that as a prison governor he would call inmates Mr to be courteous in order to try to get them to be courteous but this was different to “hyper-liberalism that doesn’t want to be seen to be judging when judgment is required”.
A prison and probation service spokesman said: “Our staff are focused on keeping the public safe from dangerous offenders and preventing reoffending, regardless of the terminology they use.” He said the terms “offender” and “prisoner” continued to be used by staff while the term “resident” was sometimes used to collectively describe prisoners and children in custody.