|
The prison library contains my dissertation thesis,
centring on the issue of recreation versus rehabilitation in prison
libraries. I present it warts and all, without amendations or apologies,
essentially as I originally submitted it; I have, however, altered the
Table of Contents, incorporating some bookmarks and a jump menu to aid
the reader. Good hunting.
|
|
"Why should she live to fill the world with words?" (Gloucester, 3 Henry VI, 5.5.44) |
|
Rehabilitational vs. Recreational Principles in Prison Libraries: A Study
Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MA/MSc in Information and Library Management at The University of Northumbria at Newcastle (School of Information Studies) September 2000
I hereby grant permission for reproduction to the Department of Information and Library Management at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle to allow this dissertation to be copied in whole, or in part, without further reference to the author. This permission covers only single copies made for study purposes, subject to normal conditions of acknowledgement.
Chapter One: Legislation, Rules and Standards Chapter Two: Literature Review Chapter Four: Questionnaire Data and Analysis Chapter Five: Interview Data and Analysis Chapter Six: Critique of Research Appendix Two: Exploratory Questionnaire Appendix Three: Covering Letter for Interview Appendix Four: Interview Questionnaire Appendix Four: Interview Transcripts:1;
2; 3;
4; 5;
6; 7. Appendix Seven: Correspondence with HO Appendix Eight: Correspondence
with Library Association Appendix Nine: Correspondence with Political Parties
I would also like to thank Michael Heine, my supervisor, for his vitally important support and advice. To S and T for their wise counsel. The work contained in this dissertation is entirely that of the acknowledged author. Rehabilitational vs. Recreational Principles in Prison Libraries: A Study
Methods · An exploratory questionnaire posing qualitative and quantitative questions to be sent to136 prisons in England and Wales.
· The branch library model is overwhelmingly popular amongst the sample groups.
ACA: American Correctional Association ALA: American Library Association CEOB: Chief Education Officers' Branch ETAS: Education and Training Advisory Service (formerly the CEOB) IG: Instructions to Governors KPI: Key Performance Indicator LA: Library Association (UK) NVQ: National Vocational Qualification PLA: Public Library Authority PO: Principal Officer PSI: Prison Service Instruction PSO: Prison Service Order SCPL: Standing Committee on Prison Libraries SLA: Service Level Agreement SO: Senior Officer YOI: Young Offenders' Institution Prison librarianship occupies a unique position in the intellectual topography of information management; situated in an ambiguous half-world somewhere between corrections and public librarianship, it offers fertile ground for those fascinated by the ethical dimension of the profession. It is answerable, in the main, to two masters (1). Its chief protagonist, the prison librarian, is alternately admirable and unenviable, administering his/her facilities in extremely stressful circumstances, often with limited financial and professional support, and a highly distinctive user population (2). More importantly, it is worth remembering that the prison library as an entity is older than prison librarianship as a profession, dating back to the early nineteenth century, and the rule of Chaplains, when the dilemmas faced had a soteriological, as well as an ethical dimension. This thesis represents an attempt to chronicle and understand the perspective and library Weltanschauung of prison librarians and library officers on the role of prison libraries in the present day. This thesis is a study specifically of prison libraries in England and Wales. Scotland, Northern Ireland and other crown dependencies have slightly differing systems of library provision which have historically separate provenances, and are commonly regarded as residing in a state of "catch-up" with the Anglo-Welsh system: Scotland in particular has recently been the focus of much interest in this respect (3), but the subject is beyond the scope of the present investigation.
(1) Aim (a) To identify the professional dispositions of prison librarians/prison library officers, in regard to the rehabilitational or recreational function of prison libraries. (2) Objectives (a) To investigate the ways in which prison librarians/prison library
officers perceive Background to Aim and Objectives The aim of this thesis is primarily conceptual: it is intended as a study of the perspectives, ethos and librarianship philosophy of librarians in the prisons and correctional facilities of England and Wales, and more particularly of the way in which individual librarians and prison library officers perceive the themes of rehabilitation and recreation, and their relation to prison library function. Although the origin and history of these ideas are traced, and their application examined, this is not intended as a political disquisition or insidious polemic: the purpose is simply to examine and explore the views of prison librarians on library roles and responsibilities, not to recommend, canvass, endorse or interempt them. This would be intellectual presumption of the worst kind, and would in any case far exceed the capabilities of a fifteen-week MA/MSc dissertation survey. The intention is investigative, not normative: models are explored, not commended or rejected. The background to the thesis is the work of William J Coyle, a highly controversial American writer on prison librarianship whose oeuvre is examined in greater depth in the Literature Review of Chapter One. In 1987 Coyle, then Correctional Library Consultant at Colorado State Library, began a quasi-political assault on what he described as the "serious failure of the public library model" (4), and, by implication, its adherents, the "service-oriented librarians" (5) working within corrections in the United States of America. Coyle provided an historical account and analysis which distinguished several groups or factions within prison librarianship, each with their own model: pointing out that the earliest role of the prison library was rehabilitational, he argued that since the late nineteen-sixties the perceived failure of rehabilitational programmes had led to an ideological vacuum in the prison library. This vacuum, he contended, had been filled by the model of the public library and the policy of meeting not just educational and rehabilitational, but recreational need. This was anathema to Coyle: "Providing inmates with palliatives should
not, cannot be our purpose. Whether Rehabilitation was to exist in the library in the form of "useful, informative and educational" (7) collections/programmes which "challenge, in various ways, the facile assumptions on which inmates build and sustain their criminal careers" (8). This vision is, of course, highly debatable. Coyle's work is essentially theoretical, and a manifesto rather than a programme - and his later monograph, "Libraries in Prison", remained elliptical in this respect. Nonetheless, his vision of two paradigms within the field of prison librarianship - the public library model and the purely rehabilitational, "enabling" model - is thought-provoking. In England and Wales, the prison librarian is subject to a Byzantine collection of Prison Service Orders, Prison Service Instructions, Instructions to Governors, Operating Standards, European Prison Rules and Service Level Agreements. The principal advice on the roles and philosophy of the prison library is provided from three sources: The Library Association's Guidelines for Prison Libraries, Home Office Policy Statement Seven: Library Facilities for People in Custody, and the Home Office's Prison Libraries: Roles and Responsibilities. These three sources are closely related: the Home Office has actually endorsed the Guidelines for Prison Libraries (9), and its later publications represent an expansion on the aims and objectives of the Library Association - Roles and Responsibilities is a report from the Standing Committee on Prison Libraries (SCPL), which includes in its membership authorities from County Librarianship and the Library Association. The Library Association Guidelines incorporate the now famous recommendation that:
The "branch library" model, regardless of Coyle's opposition, is a powerful one, and the professional literature of UK prison librarianship overwhelmingly supports its vision. However, the question remains: to what extent are these two models supported by prison librarians? Does service philosophy vary in different types of prison? How free is the librarian/library officer to choose? Are there other models and paradigms to which librarians adhere, or are the considerations of Realpolitik and meeting financial obligations more important than issues of "role" and "vision"? Is there a dominant professional disposition, or are prison librarians "theoryless", essentially pragmatic managers of information? As a "satellite" objective, the issue of split service provision was subsumed in the primary aim of the research. Split service - collections of books held outside the main library of the prison - has played a significant role in prison library service in the past, making the job of the prison librarian even more problematic: the most extreme form of split service is wing library provision, in which separate collections of books are maintained with limited contact from the institution's central library: a library enclave. This can often lead to scenarios where the visiting prison librarian devolves power to administer the wings to a library officer or inmate orderly, and in practice seldom visits. The Library Association has condemned the practice of wing libraries, stating that "the splitting of libraries into smaller wing collections is inefficient in respect": duplication of stock, the curtailment of choice, and transferral problems are all associated with wing libraries, and, by implication, in split collections of every kind. A secondary objective of this study, then, was to identify the number of wing libraries in England and Wales, and to discover the service philosophy of the librarians administering such stock: a prison whose service was wholly split could justifiably be said to be a different type of prison library to one which was operated entirely from a central chamber. Similar considerations led to the inclusion of Education Department-control as one of the objectives. In theory, prison libraries in HM Prison Service fall within the administrative ambit of the Education Officer (12), and the Library Association recommends that the prison library be in close physical proximity to facilitate co-ordination of their activities. In practice the control has occasionally been nominal. As with wing libraries, then, this study has as its secondary purpose a survey of Education Department control, and its impact on the ethos and service philosophy of the prison library. Ultimately, then, this is a survey of the nature, spread and stratification of philosophies in prison librarianship, not an appraisal of the veracity or legitimacy of the claims made by those philosophies. It is a survey, not a treatise; it is a study of the extent to which the datums of rehabilitation and recreation obtain in prison libraries, and how those datums are defined by prison librarians - not an attempt to empirically verify the claims of pro-rehabilitationist thinkers. That does not make the aim of this thesis redundant or remotely abstract: the extent to which an absicht or idea is popular is at least as important as its objective truth. Terminology - A Brief Explanation Several key terms have been extensively employed during the writing of this thesis, and the context of their use needs some clarification to prevent confusion. The terms "rationale" and "legitimacy" are related to particular articles and monographs, and are treated in the Literature Review. The word "paradigm" has been occasionally substituted for terms such as "ethos" and "philosophy" in relation to the discussion of the principles which lie behind library service provision. All three of these words (and other words and phrases in the body of the text) have been employed in an approximate, non-exclusive sense in keeping with their typical usage: they are not intended to surreptitiously exclude apparently "unsystematic", equally legitimate conceptions on the purpose of library provision, but simply to provide a useful medium for describing and delineating such views. It is clear, in any case, that an ostensibly simple approach to the purpose of library provision may comprehend a great number of datums and pendant concepts which make it eminently worthy of treatment.
Chapter One: Legislation, Rules and Standards "Humans always bring more to interpretation
than a precise knowledge of the rules" The provision of a library service to inmates is a statutory obligation; a prison library is not (13). The modern prison library is the product of a negotiated settlement of many years standing between the Prison Service and the County Library authorities. 1941 saw the creation of a pilot agreement between East Suffolk County Council and the Borstal: the Borstal agreed to recompense the Council. The capitation fee was born. Nationwide extension of the capitation fee principle was finally achieved in the nineteen seventies, but is still the source of friction today: the Public Library Authorities (PLAs) which provide the vast majority of prison library services around the country could theoretically refuse to supply a service within a prison, and instead invite the Governor to arrange transportation of inmates to a public branch library of their choosing (14). This has in fact never occurred, although library service to some prisons consists of mobile rather than on-site provision. The 1964 Public Libraries and Museums Act functions as an "enabler", providing a framework for PLAs to begin supplying a service to prisons - it cannot enforce or underwrite such provision. Since the creation of HM Prison Service in 1995, the Governor has attained considerable devolved powers over staffing and hierarchy - a notable development given the dramatic transferral of resource management control to governors under CI55/1984 a decade earlier. The Governor at local level has the final say on the nature of the library service. The Home Secretary is ultimately responsible for ensuring that inmates receive a library service: the PLA is accountable merely for the quality of service provision - bookstock etc. HM Prison Service's Statement of Purpose also obtains: "Her Majesty's Prison Service serves the public
by keeping in The prison library is subject to a number of rules and regulations: Service Level Agreements have to be met, and failure to meet requirements can theoretically lead to the prison sub-contracting out with a private supplier. The first part of the Service Level Agreement treats of standards and the nature of the service. Prison Service Orders are designed to last for a period not less than a year, and are generally long-term in scope: the prison library must implement relevant PSOs. All prison libraries are officially obliged to retain certain books under IG73/96 (Instructions from Governor), including those administered by private contractors. It is also suggested that the circular code be included with the listed books. Alongside the new Statement of Purpose, a series of Prison Service Operating Standards have arisen to promulgate certain targets which "[…]Governors of all prisons and YOIs
are expected to work However unenforceable the Operating Standards may be, they do merit some attention: like Roles and Responsibilities and Guidelines for Prison Libraries, they are the outcome of consultation between the interested parties, and contain a fascinating insight into the Prison Service's perspective towards prison libraries. Section U23 states that "The establishment, in liaison with the Public
Library Authority, The implication of this last sub-clause is clearly a partial endorsement of the branch library model; this is further clarified in the commentary to the same page, which suggests that "The prison library should cater for the information,
cultural, Again, this is essentially an embodiment of the suggestion by the Guidelines
for prison libraries that "The prison library should provide the
resources necessary to meet the informational, cultural and recreational
needs of the prison community" (19). European Prison Rule 82 further reinforces the official stance: "Every institution shall have a library for
the use of all categories of The phrase "community library services", while nebulously-phrased,
clearly The vexed issue of censorship, meanwhile, is worth some attention. In reality its effect on the general bookstock is rather limited in scope: no universal "Papal Index" of books is available to every establishment, although it is of course feasible for individual governors to compose such a list of proscribed texts/stock. Standing Order 7B paragraph 32 empowers the Governor with the prerogative to "exclude specific publications from the establishment's
library if he [sic] This power can often be exercised on "literature which may facilitate the commission
of crime, or may The prison librarian and prison library officer naturally have an input into what is referred to the governor-grade staff. The actual composition of banned stock may vary from prison to prison - at a Prison Library Group Study School in 1996 one Senior Officer anathematized books encompassing subjects as diverse as "terrorism, pornography, Micro-electronics, radio engineering, SAS, explosives, martial arts, tattooing, locks […]" (23). Books on Portugal and the Portuguese have reportedly been excluded from certain prisons due to the association of Portugal with international paedophile rings (24). It will be noted that all of these are strictly circumscribed areas; it is, however, known that certain prisons exclude psychology books from their library (25) as a result of fears that certain inmates might use such matter to manipulate future victims. This could, of course, impact seriously on the nature and philosophy of service provision - excluding an entire corpus of knowledge from the collection, as opposed to selected volumes or works. As a pendant to this, it has been known for some time that covert monitoring of inmate reading patterns occurs in several prisons (26); this is an issue of security rather than librarianship, and will not be further dwelt on here. ETAS (formerly CEOB before its reorganization in 1994) has a large role in the life of the prison library. Acting as the advisory "overseer" of education and library provision, ETAS monitors and assesses the provision of library service to prisons, working jointly with the SCPL: it also provides training support and setting-up grants via bids to individual prison libraries. This latter point is significant: since ETAS contracts its services to particular Prison Service establishments, at least one writer has predicted that the "Home Office will be unable to sustain a coherent policy about library provision" (27). It is worth remembering, however, that even ETAS has endorsed the "public library" model on the pragmatic grounds that "the vast majority of materials held in prison libraries belongs to the public libraries" (28). Conclusion In conclusion, the prison library is a minefield of legislation, rules and codes. Censorship, security and the advent of market-testing are complicatory factors in this area, and Standing Orders and Prison Service Orders can play an important part in subordinating the library to HM Prison Service's over-riding purpose of "keeping in custody those committed by the courts" (29). The extant reports and operating standards are almost uniformly an overwhelming endorsement of the Library Association's stance that prison libraries should adopt the paradigm of the "branch library": indeed, this has largely been the case for the past twenty years. Finance (in the form of the capitation fee) rather than ideology has been the real source of friction during this period (30). However, the apparent gaps in legislation, the appearance of private prison libraries, the fragmentation of CEOB and the use of SLAs on a local level have made it increasingly evident that prison libraries can play a role as instigators of policy alongside their traditional administrative role. The prison librarian may well have more autonomy in the formulation of collection development and service philosophy than is commonly realized.
|