Prisons and their moral performance

by Alison Liebling

"This book constitutes a critical case study of the modern search for public sector reform. It includes a detailed account of a study aimed at developing a meaningful way of evaluating difficult-to-measure moral dimensions of the quality of prisons." "Penal practices, values, and sensibilities have undergone important transformations over the period 1990-2003. Part of this transformation included a serious flirtation with a liberal penal project that went wrong. A significant contributory factor in this unfortunate turn of events was a lack of clarity, by those working in and managing prisons, about important terms such as 'justice', 'liberal', and 'care', and how they might apply to daily penal life. Related to this, official measures of the prison seem to lack relevance to many who live and work in prison and to its critics. The information revolution has generated unprecedented levels of knowledge about individual prisons, as well as providing a management reach into establishments