By Peter Dawson

No one recognises a good teacher more accurately than a pupil, or a good nurse more gratefully than a patient. And no one understands the differences between a good and a bad prison officer1 better than a prisoner.2 This report, made possible through the generosity of the John Armitage Charitable Trust, seeks to bring the wisdom of prisoners to bear on the central challenge facing prisons of how to create an effective and sustainable prison workforce in England and Wales. Changes in sentencing over the last two decades guarantee that prison officers will in future be caring for people spending a much larger portion of their lives in custody.3 Those prisoners will also be subject to far greater uncertainty about when they may be released and whether they will be permitted to remain in the community when they eventually are. Simultaneously, confidence in traditional operating models for prisons has been undermined by a decade of violence, self-harm and disorder, and the physical withdrawal of staff from face to face contact with prisoners legitimised during the pandemic. In this radically altered context the prison service faces a more profound question about the composition of its future workforce than simply whether it can recruit and retain enough people. We will argue that being a good prison officer is a much more sophisticated and skilful job than the prison service currently reflects in its critical human resource processes. If the prison service is to recruit and retain a workforce that can rise to the multiple challenges that it faces over the next decade and beyond, it must develop a new and explicit vision for the role of the prison officer and the way that role needs to be supported. We will argue that prisoners can help both articulate that vision and in some respects support its delivery. The prison workforce is of course very diverse and many people other than officers are crucial to making prisons work. We have chosen to focus on the prison officer role because, more than any other, it affects the day to day life of the prisoners to whom we have listened, and therefore the families they have left behind and the communities to which most of them will one day return. Developing a vision for the role of the prison officer starts with being clear about purpose within a prison. We hope that what prisoners have had to say on that subject will inform every aspect of the prison service’s approach to its employees, and all its partnerships with the many

London: Prison Reform Trust, 2024. 53p.