We have over the last couple of years tried to redress what I think was a slight gender imbalance in the registered lecturers in the past and also to try to bring down the average age of those lecturers. It's a bit insulting, I know, to some of the past lecturers, but there you have it. And so last year we had a professor, Kelly Hanna Moffitt, from from Canada, from the University of Toronto.
And this year we are very, very pleased to welcome Professor Alison Liebling from the University of Cambridge. Alison is director of the highly prestigious Institute of Criminology Prisons Research Centre. And most of her work since her PhD on suicide in prisons has focussed on the press and on the role of values, on the role of safety, trust, fairness in shaping the prison experience and her work.
Her work is like Rogers in that is not only theoretically sophisticated, but it is also empirically extremely robust. And for those of us in criminology, in both Oxford and Cambridge, this is something we care a great deal about. So she has carried out a significant programme of research on measuring the quality of prison life, the effectiveness of various different prison strategies of practices both in public and private sector prisons.
And while both Roger and Alison engage in theoretically and empirically robust research as an end in itself, they also care passionately about the impact that their work has on policy and practice.
They care about what we now in the Academy call knowledge, exchange and impact and all of those other things, dissemination and really making sure that their research makes a difference to public life and to the lives of those people subject to the criminal process in England and Wales and further afield. And so it is very fitting that she comes to give this. Ninth Annual Lecture in honour of Professor Roger Hood.
Sir Allison, please take the stage. All very welcome. Thank you very much, Carolyn, and thank you especially for inviting me. I'm honoured to be here. So thank you to you and also to the Oxford Centre of Criminology for inviting me. And I'm delighted to be speaking in honour of Professor Roger Hurd. Of course, I feel like I know him very well as a parts of crossed in so many ways. He's been encouraging and supportive to me, as well as an exemplar of the criminological project.
We've hung out together at exhibitions of Aboriginal art. But I thought I'd look him up anyway. In preparing for today, just in case there was anything I didn't know. And there it was. King. I quit school five ways. Roger Hood is a Brummie or at least he's a temporary and honorary from. That's an important stage in his life that makes us practically family. And I've said he can tell me on your own will we'll discuss the fine detail.
But anyway, you all know his immense contribution to criminology is without doubt. It's beautifully reviewed in the 23 volume by Lucio Zegna and Andrew Ashworth, and of course he's done much and continues to do much since. So I can only hope to share his energy and passion if I reach his in some ways at least enviable stage of life. The other person I want to mention, Carolyn's already raised. His name is my fellow Roger Hurd, lecturer Niels Christie, who spoke here in 2010.
I was among the audience and this is such a loss for criminology and for his family and friends. He would have appreciated my topic this evening, I think, as I hope Roger will, which is the problem of trust. I also raised matters of the tariff, dangerousness and risk, and I've been digging out some of the important things that I have to say on those subjects.
This evening I'm going to outline some of the key findings from the last may not be the last the last of three humanistic studies pursuing a series of complex developments that have taken place in the high security estate or in high security prisons over a number of years, including the changing role of faith identities. A transformed prisoner hierarchy. Longer and more indeterminate sentences. Changing relationships in prison and increased risks of radicalisation and extremism among prisoners.
The implications of these studies extend way beyond the high security state into prisons and also into the community. I also want to talk about aspects of the methodology and what I'm calling person centred social science. We've not written this project up yet. We have written a detailed summary and we've just agreed the outline for a book. I'll talk about who we are in a minute. And so the book is going to be called Prisons and the Problem of Trust.
And I'll explain why it's related to this book in a minute. And last time I spoke here in Oxford, it was at an All Souls seminar. And Stephen Well remembers and others might. I was made quite more to, as I call it, I'm in a considerable state of distress about what I was finding there. So this evening is the story of what happened next and how studying trust in these unlikely places has renewed my sense of hope. So I want to start and end my lecture with people saying things.
So here are some relevant words taken from my fieldwork notebooks that take us into our topic nicely. How are you going to serve your 35 year sentence? Chaplaincy is coming under pressure. How can we demonstrate the positive role of faith in people's lives? We're not here to change you. We're here to be alongside you to show that you're valuable. If three people start writing together, something sinister is going on.
Staff are confident in dealing with prisoner power. But when mass behind a veneer of religion dealing with it as religion is playing into their hands, the prison community is not one that understands the role and place of faith. And the next one is from one of our Home Office steering group members. When we described how we were going to carry out the research they'd commissioned, isn't that really scary?
We tried to keep it equal where the strongest group are, the white shirt, the biggest risk to security is complacency. To not be trusted is a form of violence. What are we going to do now? Now you've gone. This was from a prisoner at Whitemoor when our fieldwork ended in what I called White War, too. So let me start near the beginning. And first, some scenes setting the title of our. Cloud book is linked explicitly to an important predecessor.
Richard Sparks, Tony Bottoms and will have studied two contrasting high security prisons closely in the late 1980s. One of them was long lost it. This is also our what about prisons? They describe two very different models of order, attracting different degrees of ascent among prisoners and giving rise to distinct challenges and risks. I want to suggest that forms of order and degrees or varieties of trust are closely related.
One of our headline findings is that we've also found very different forms of order in each of the study. So different sorts of relationships, different approaches to the rules, a different mood and ethos and different chances of progression out of category. What's different in our study is the focus on trust in particular, and the prominent role of race, religion and risk thinking in the new post-9-11 world.
We might say using a combination of person centred social science, a priest of inquiry and ethnography like measurement. We've been able to describe fundamental differences in the moral climates of apparently similar high security prisons, which lead to significantly different levels of anger and alienation. What we're calling political charge and which shape or make possible which aspects of faith are expressed expressed by prisoners in each environment.
Both methodology and innovative way of recontextualizing the problem, which we've described as the problem of risk recognition and the moral self. We've redefined it as a problem of trust, have opened the way for closer and more meaningful dialogue with participants as well as more accurate measurement.
So we've been able to describe and capture empirically differences between what we might call disabling environments that damage wellbeing and character and enabling environments that support human growth or flourishing and the reduction of risk. One of the innovations in our study has been to include expertise in religious studies and also in hip hop, rap and cultural studies in the team. I'll say more in a minute.
For me, deciding to go back into this territory for a second time via a trust was both a transformative and a communicative decision. The very word attracted trust, openness and interest. It seemed to say to prisoners and to some staff that we were people with imagination, moral energy and depth. We were interested in possibilities and a continuum. So what lay at the other end of the obsession with risk? There was hope in trust. And prisoners understood that and made us feel welcome.
So the project I'm going to talk about mainly tonight in this rather long journey is a two year study which we've just finished locating trust in a climate of fear, religion, moral status, prison of leadership and risk in maximum security prisons. It was funded by the SLC Transforming Social Science Scheme, which means we're supposed to transform social science by last week. And this was a competitive call intended to support groundbreaking, high risk research.
I carried out this project with my colleagues, Ruth, who I've just spotted with Armstrong, Ryan Williams and Richard Bramwell, and we're currently collaborating energetically on the analysis and writing. The choice of research team has been very important in this work and I'll come back to it. But first, how did we come to focus on trust and why did we place trust of all concepts at the heart of a project in such an unlikely place?
As one of the prison psychologists at one of our prisons said to us, Some people might think it's a bit naive to come into a high security prison to study trust, but the answer is cumulative. Our understanding draws on three separate studies carried out between 1998 and the present.
The first, which was on staff prisoner relationships at Whitemoor, was an exploratory study of the way prison officers used power through relationships in what was at the time a fairly professional, legitimate prison. One of the ingredients of relationships which we observed at the time was trust. So despite it being a high security prison, a sort of credit is built up between staff and prisoners, which oils the flow of prison life.
We wrote about this in a qualitative way in that first study, but we didn't measure it. We knew it was there and that a guarded form of trust was doing some work in relation to legitimacy and order, although we didn't use the language of legitimacy at the time either. But that project led to the work I've done with others subsequently on conceptualising and measuring the moral and relational quality of life in prison.
So in other words, the development of a set of essentially qualitative measures of the. Social climate in prisons, which gives us very good data and very good understanding of what's going on in individual prisons and wings within those prisons.
We've incorporated this measurement component in every project since, but alongside creative and qualitative methods, including what we call Cambridge Dialogue, which is regular afternoon length chats with a regular group of prisoners loosely organised around key themes with relevant literature.
What matters here is that by the time of the second study in White Moor, which was commissioned by the Chief Scientific Officer 12 years later, under intense political concern about the risks of extremism and radicalisation in prison, trust had all but disappeared. This had serious consequences for staff prisoners. We resisted studying radicalisation directly. This was the request as it felt like the wrong starting point.
The term is loaded and full of assumptions. So I offered to repeat the first study of staff prisoner relationships in order to explore in a neutral but methodologically careful way as possible what was going on in the prison. And we describe the prison we returned to in 2009 ten as paralysed by distrust. The peacefulness of observing and describing that transformation became, for me, unfinished business.
The explanation for the decline was the combined effects of a post-9-11 climate, the imprisonment of offenders convicted of offences against the Terrorism Act, changes to sentencing and to the population being sentenced, leading to much longer sentences and very complex routes out. And a new people logical approach to prison management, which created distance between managers and the wings. Staff were uncomfortable with a new population who were now 40% Muslim and 55% black.
A mixed race. This compared to so few Muslim prisoners, they weren't counted. I'm 25% black and mixed race 12 years earlier. Half this population of Muslim prisoners had converted to Islam in prison. Of course, one of the difficulties with trust in a high security prison is that they can be too much of it. As we've seen in some private prisons where staff are naive, leading to dangerous gains in prisoner power under policing and escapes.
So this is the problem of trust. It arises most acutely in a high security prison. It has to be intelligently placed. Without it, prisons don't work.
So for the third study, the current study, we applied for funding to carry out a 20 design project exploring the relationship between moral and organisational aspects of the prison's environment, including staff, prisoner relationships and levels of what we called intelligent trust and political charge, or anger and alienation among prisoners in the high security state. And I'll explain the rationale for this precise framing of the question in the moment.
It's taken three detailed studies to work out what the right question is, to assemble the right team, and to develop the right methodology for the task. So the return study to White More found in the language of a recently published article on this theme that the stock culture had changed from heavy present to heavy upset. In other words, stuff had moved away from prisoners, and their orientation towards them was more about security and control than personal development or humanity.
There'd been a kind of narrowing or missed recognition of the changing prisoner community. In the words of Martin Buber, the prison staff, as well as the prison service organisation had shifted from either how to I ate relations with prisoners. Prisoners were regarded as experienced objects rather than experiencing subjects.
So why more to have characteristics of both a new penal logical and a failing state prison, a term I should return to at the time we went back to it, including a relative absence of management presence, officer alienation of retreat and for prisoners, a lack of purpose, safety, fairness or opportunities for growth and meaning.
There were new and unexplored moral and religious challenges in the prison, and because of heavy security, intelligence activity and the links between this and risk or progress out, amongst other things, there was a new mood that regarded talk as dangerous.
The prison was more difficult to penetrate for us as researchers, and power was being fought over by prisoners, some of whom were converting to Islam because it was both appealing and poorly understood and therefore its practices were difficult to police. There were high levels of fear and distance in the prison. We used actual analysis of the struggle for recognition to describe what we saw going on.
Staff no longer knew or recognised their prisoners, but experienced them as dangerous and unfathomable. This was understandable, but it was damaging. There's, of course, much more to say on this. So for a good bedtime read, here is where you find the full account. And now I'm going to move on from that study. Far from upholding social order, this form of imprisonment was damaging character and the civil disposition, and it was generating anger.
And I believe this made it relevant to the risk of extremism. After all, the study was uncomfortable to conduct because even we felt that somehow we were carrying risk thinking into the prison in a way that we happened to 12 years earlier. I think when I talk about how uncomfortable the study made me, this was why it left me uncomfortable that there were some prisoners we never managed to approach, even after a year of intensive fieldwork.
This has never happened to me in my research life before, and it was because we were like the staff detecting distancing looks from some prisoners on some wings. We were never sure how far they were real. So that return study was deeply disturbing. This was a truly difficult topic. It was difficult conceptually, empirically and emotionally. I was not sure at the time how much I wanted to or thought I had sufficient skill, resilience or courage to carry on.
And we didn't include this model in our report because we weren't studying radicalisation. We conducted the research as if the word radicalisation didn't exist, but we drew it afterwards for thinking purposes based on what prisoners were saying. So here we are, drawing on life course criminology following maqam to show how sequences of experiences might add up in a few minutes to the way to increase the risk of the causes and possible turning points are everywhere,
including in certain types of prison climate. But almost always the story starts earlier than this. So our report focussed on what we directly observed and what prisoners and staff described. That was a new and complex set of social relationships among prisoners, including conversion to Islam. Some coercion by groups of Muslim prisoners. Disputes between prisoners over what kind of food could be cooked in the kitchens.
And a power vacuum left by nervous staff who were very concerned about accusations of religious discrimination. We also describe a very poor understanding of Islam, the confounding of religious practice with radicalisation, and a dangerously austere environment in which access to meaningful activities, relationships and means progress. When newly restricted prisoners were serving new, long and indeterminate sentences, often for gang or drug related crimes or newly used joint enterprise charges.
So they weren't always expecting these sentences, and they were expressing very strong feelings of illegitimacy and shock at the predicament. The Chaplaincy Department, which had been the heart and soul of the prison and the hive of active. During our first study where we went for tea and chat, I was completely depleted and demoralised in the face of staff absences and also a change in power and resources away from,
as they saw it, traditional Christian provision. The managing chaplain had disappeared from the prison senior management team, and this was at a time when faith identities were becoming significant shapers of both the flow of power and the route to meaning in the prison.
Ordinary Muslim prisoners felt heavily scrutinised and discriminated against, and we certainly felt that aspects of the prison's management and culture, but also a political climate committed to depriving long term prisoners of meaningful activities or hope, was increasing rather than decreasing the risks of radicalisation. Prisoners were coming in angry and in shock and then they were finding it difficult to navigate their way through long and bleak sentences.
Staff were not helping them or getting to know them well enough and so were adding to these feelings of alienation, discrimination and injustice. So a key message from the White Moor to study was that empirical differences in levels of trust in prison have major consequences for life in those prisons. It looked as if some aspects of the treatment of prisoners might be contributing either to the risk of violence or to extremism,
rather than reducing either. There were certainly risks that overreactive security reporting could alienate those very prisoners who were more knowledgeable and pro-social about Islam or who were peacekeepers on the wing. A lack of trust between security departments and chaplains or security departments of education staff was disabling. Prisoners were using the new no go area faith practices to challenge staff power.
So we ended that report with a reference to a Nora O'Neill's concept of intelligent trust. As she put it, failing to trust trustworthy is costly, not just in financial terms, but also in terms of outcomes. She talks mainly about the lack of trust in organisations and how this undermines trustworthiness. She just took it to audit.
But her argument applies at an individual level when she says those who find their trustworthiness wrongly questioned may feel undermined, even insulted and ultimately less inclined to be trustworthy. So the central practical aim in placing and refusing trust is to do so well. That is, to align the policing of trust with trustworthiness.
So our version of her question is how can prison staff and senior managers, the authorities or any of us place trust intelligently in a climate of fear and risk where distrust grows? And what difference does it make when it's flowing? Could the stretching of risk thinking to include trust building transform practice in this very difficult area of work and make risk assessments more accurate or constructive? So this question has become the foundation of our current study.
No surprises. This was a situation in need of appreciative inquiry. We needed to build trust with our participants to get to know people as they are, to find better possibilities and avenues for dialogue. So just arriving at an authentic, balanced and generative account of life in a high security prison is much harder than it sounds and is getting harder. Appreciative Inquiry adds to our chances of achieving this through, amongst other things, the use of the unconditional positive question.
So we might start hour long interviews with the question. Tell me about an aspect of yourself and your life that you're most proud of. This sets the agenda. Prisoners respond with surprise and engagement to this question. They hear the message. This is about who they are and not how they've been socially constructed by others. Appreciative Inquiry doesn't ignore or neglect the worst aspects of experience, but it pays attention to the full range of experience.
It tries to identify its positive core and the values or ultimate concerns underlying experience. One of the things that's very powerful about it is that the language of the inquiry has important outcomes embedded in it, so it helps to build grounded generative theory. If we're talking about trust and how it grows and what it does, we're already getting into how to make this world better. So it also helps to create a humanistic and intimate research account as well as to get at the full account.
So following some difficult politics about our white study, which opened my eyes to the world above, knows where competing orientations to terror shape our world. This also gave me some time to reflect while the report was being fought over, several things happened at this time. So some of you in this room will remember I was talking about the project to anyone who would listen to me at the time and still trying to make sense of these uncomfortable findings.
Toni Bottoms, who was one as always, agreed to attend one of the strangest meetings ever held about the research at the Home Office. He came as my witness, and Jason Moore, who was a former long term prisoner himself, understood much of what we were trying to describe. Monica lawyer, who is a former high security prison psychologist. She was a member of our steering group, recognised the description as well as the politics and helped me to hold my courage.
There were lots of others. Then a conversation in our institute coffee room with Ruth Armstrong, who was finishing her Ph.D. at the time on Texan and prisoners released into faith based communities. This conversation about faith and its new manifestations excited both of us and quickly turned into a small gathering of theologians, present chaplains and scholars talking. We met three or four times a year.
We called ourselves first, I think it was the what more project dialogue group than it was the Interfaith Dialogue Group, not just the dialogue group. And this group that's now grown to include imams, people from counterterrorism and security groups, prison governors, charities. It was out of this group and my conversations with Ruth that the trust project was arose.
So just before Christmas 2012, the SLC put out this call for transformative social science proposals, and Ruth had the energy for both of us. She, by this time, roped in Brian Williams, who was a divinity scholar who'd never set foot in a prison. And we were all the vibes felt right. We were somehow convinced that looking for trust, if we could find something in this new world of the pursuit of security, would get us somewhere. We team at three are a bit like a radicalised network.
So we recruited Richard, the fourth member. Once we secured the grant, Richard had never set foot in a prison either, but he was an ethnographer of RAF. I needed people whose reach went further than mine in precisely these directions. We carried out two prisons research, sent a team exercise which we call and QPR plus in full some. The week before I had to do this strange pitch to Piers final stage play at the SLC and this is an intense cultural diagnosis of a prison using all our best skills.
So we were in from Sutton, which was a high security prison. We saw such a mixture of active management engagement and recognition of the complex prisoner dynamics. But we also saw lots of risk and risk thinking. We disrupt and segregate that prevent language. We've got a real strong grip on the power base or this will soon be an Islamic jail. Simply describing the situation and making sense of it was going to be our main task.
So because it was not designed into the two whitemoor studies to be longitudinal side our. But precisely what had changed and why was speculative. It had been difficult to reach some of the more influential leaders in the prison, as well as to talk meaningfully about distinctions between varieties of Islam with prisoners. There were so many other problems in the prison, but facing long term prisoners in general survival, meaning safety and progression.
We needed to move from longitudinal thinking to cross-sectional exploration. So was it possible to find two high security prisons above the low trust threshold we found at Whitemoor and see whether things were different? So we decided on two prisons in order to sharpen the analysis, and we chose these prisons very carefully and we took lots of advice on where high levels of trust might be found. Basically up north or in the Midlands. So we, we full Sutton was one of them.
That's in York, my old home. And Frankland is in Durham, another favourite place of mine. And Frankland in particular appealed because the chaplaincy team had responded very enthusiastically to the presentations on I Want More Study, and one of its members led a prison band which consisted of attacked prisoner, a prisoner convicted of a terrorist offence, a muslim Catholic and in prison convert to Islam and a Christian.
And we thought this was a good sign for something that also invited us to visit following a research presentation. And they were very eager to host the research. So the four of us spent much of the next year trekking up and down to York and then Durham spending about five months in each prison. We took our time getting to know people informally before we embarked on formal research activity.
Amazingly, some of the prisoners we found in Frankland had been in the Whitemoor study, and they campaigned for dialogue because they liked the approach and the opportunity. And so that was it. We were welcomed by people we already knew. I said the team was an important part of the methodology.
It was really important to combine expertise in prison sociology and ethnography like measurement with theology and religion, trust, religion, risk, relationships, networks, hip hop, black culture, life post-release and faith based provision that that's what you need to understand a high security prison these days. We were two female and two male members. One was mixed race, one was Canadian. We tried to be as varied as possible.
One of the team led a rap course for eight prisoners, which involved a critical analysis of rap poetry, oral performances and discussions of prisoners own work, as well as discussions of scholarly work on black British culture. This was very well received and offered prisoners an opportunity to be authentic and also critical as well as self-reflective on their own terms. And in an accident of enthusiasm, we got distracted into a third prison, long lot in between the field work in the main sites.
So we used the project revised version of the questionnaire when we did that. So basically we have data from three prisons, but more of the qualitative data from Folsom and Franklin. So our overall aim is authentic description to show things as they are in a highly complex context. And this is achieved through careful methods and the determination to encounter in an eyeball manner, hold people as they are, but attentiveness to detail.
So throughout the project we've been determined to relate to prisoners as well. Not it as a person, not a muslim or a danger or whatever. So as experiencing subjects, not experienced objects, this is really difficult in an environment hardened into a world of it. So our approach is not controlling, it's yielding. And I love this quote at the end What makes a person human is building with others a common world speech with meaning. Because it feels like that's what we've been trying to do.
But we've had to work against working assumptions and frameworks, including about what questions to ask. You can't ask prisoners about who they trust or how dangerous some prisoners might be. You don't want to be on your own with any of those prisoners who are on a No. 1 to 1 contact, you wouldn't emerge alive. It was actually very important for us to be on our own with prisoners who were on a 1 to 1 contact to find out who they were.
So we were exploring what goes on in each prison from the perspective of staff and all for prisoners, asking Where is trust found and how is it built? What does it do? What does in prison conversion to Islam mean and under what circumstances does it occur? When is a religious conversation theological rather than radicalise it? Where do extreme urges to violence or hatred of the state come from? Are these political, religious or internal psychological feelings?
And more generally, but just as important, how do people find themselves in high security, on internal, high risk procedures being monitored by the counter-terrorism agency? And what's their experience of it? How do they get out or downgraded when their riskiness subsides? Are some aspects of their dangerousness socially or procedurally constructed? And then how are all these practices and experiences linked to perceptions of legitimacy and feelings of political charge?
So I mentioned and couple this is our measuring the quality of prison life survey. I do like to measure things, but to do it slowly and carefully keeping the measures as close to the person as possible. So we call our approach ethnography. That measurement, we're looking for what matters most to prisoners and staff, and then we try to find it and talk about it. So our approach involves a lot of just being there, hanging about, talking, listening, drinking tea, arranging and leading of groups.
And all of this intense exposure is far more organised than it looks and eventually we turn it into measurements. So the surveys that emerge from this process, precisely because they're deeply grounded in the field, work well empirically. And it means we can identify important distinctions between prisons in areas that matter. So this is the moral performance of Quality of Life survey and its dimensions. But this project we have developed three new dimensions.
So they're in italics and asterisk trust, an intelligent trust and political charge. Just briefly, here are some ways that this kind of data has helped us understand prison differences in the past. This is a model of variations in suicide and distress in a 12 prison study. And that means we can explain variations in distress, which in their turn explain suicide rates by levels of safety, engagement in personal development activities and so on.
So here we would say that suicides in prison are influenced by a kind of trust in the environment, which is all about safety and relationships.
Likewise, from another second person study, if we're interested in what explains variations in the experience of personal development in prison or the development of potential, then we find that five key dimensions of prison life matter most humanity stuff, professionalism, help and assistance organisation and consistency and bureaucratic legitimacy, which is a relatively new and increasingly important dimension which reflects the organisation
and administration of increasingly complex sentences and risk assessment processes. So prisoners have helped us to grow this dimension. These tend to score lowest, but they also vary the most between prisons. So we're hoping that our new dimension political charge might operate in the same way acting as a kind of intermediate variable, not just for the risk of radicalisation, but for any unwanted outcome like suicide or disorder.
So the term political charge was used almost in passing by Mark Howard in his research on prisoner radicalisation. He found in his comparison of fulsome and new fulsome prisons, drawing on the accounts of prisoners and staff, but also informed by his analysis of 61 cases of extremist violence that had some form of in prison component in the narrative that radicalisation occurs only under specific conditions of confinement.
So he argues in his book The Spectacular View, that there are clashing viewpoints on prisoner radicalisation, the alarmist position that prisons are incubators for radical Islamic terrorist ideology, the reassurance position. No, they're not. And in fact, Islam contributes to rehabilitation. And then thirdly, his position and he found that radicalisation occurred in what he calls failed state mismanaged prisons.
These prisons, he said, generate political charge, anger and alienation which can be felt on the yards and landings. So we're exploring and testing this argument, his hypothesis really quite closely. And so here's a dimension political charge. Our attempt to measure it. And we want to see whether it's being generated by different high security prison climates in here. You see if you some of them are self-explanatory. There's a shame and acceptance item in this dimension.
They're taken from the defiance literature, which suggests that they're inhibited by feelings of illegitimacy. The others have been developed from conversations with prisoners, interview transcripts and a workshop we had with Professor Suzanne Castor, who works in this field. And we found it has relatively high reliability. We've also explored these ideas in the qualitative interviews, too. So he is a prisoner convicted of a serious offence of extremist violence.
Talking about his trajectory or identity. As with many of our interviewees, anger about racism pre-dates anger about Iraq or Syria or whatever. He describes having to counter this racism with a racism of my own. His alienation began on the streets, in school and in the face of police harassment. The offence he committed makes him look anti-West. But he grew up in London. He had white friends. He loved school. And he recounted these details at various points in his interviews.
And he also talked about his appreciation of the few officers who'd been respectful or even kind to him since his imprisonment. Race barely appears in accounts of radicalisation or extremist violence, but it's a really important part of the story. So our four main hypotheses. These are complex, but I hope they now make sense that some intelligent trust generates constructive faith exploration or spiritual capital, as well as personal growth, and it lowers risk.
In other words, the forms that faith and faith identities take will be different in a high political charge, low political charge prison, but high levels of trust characterised at prison and then become extended into staff groups and between departments. So if we find trust, we find it everywhere.
The prisons will differ in the amount of political charge they generate and failed state prisons paralysed by distrust, generate more political charge and therefore more dangerous power laden faith identities, as well as stagnation and damage to well-being and character. And finally, this gets us back into classic prison sociology. But different types of prisoners are esteemed or rise to the top of the prison hierarchy carrying influence in these different kinds of planets.
We collected lots of data. This is what data collected quantitatively. Good samples, high response rate. We probably overdid it and went to some other prisoners too. This is the qualitative data. We formally interviewed the staff data as well, but this is the prisoner interview data. So 67 and 40 at Frankland, 42% were black or mixed race, 21% Asian, 32% white.
Half of this sample described themselves or were described by the prison as Muslim, although this label included individuals who spontaneously explained that this identity was a strategic choice. You have to be here. There are a few of us and have little ideological or religious meaning. Some have converted to Islam in prison. One was the opposite. He kept his distance from the Muslim guys, despite being known by his friends as Muslim because he felt it was holding his progress back.
A quarter of the sample were Christian, 13% were atheist, a handful were Buddhist or Rastafarian. More than half were on Category eight. Most have been convicted of serious crimes of violence involving drugs or gang related violence or murder. So for certain, for example, eight prisoners were serving that for life sentences and over 20 were serving sentences of over 40 years and so on.
And a disproportionate number had been convicted on joint enterprise charges and were appealing against their conviction on the grounds that their involvement had been personal. Their sentences were very long and several were facing tariffs of 35 years or more. Two of these were serving natural life sentences. Lots of our group were many years beyond their tariff and still category eight.
Others were early stages in their very long sentences. The sample included ten prisoners who've been charged with offences against the Terrorism Act. A small number of whom had carried out extreme acts of violence. But most of this number, like the general population of tracked offenders, have been charged with planning or supporting terrorist activity rather than carrying out.
Others in the sample were regarded as at risk of radicalisation in the prison and were being monitored either at the time of the interview or in the recent past by the Prison Systems Risk Management Procedure. One had carried out an act of violence in prison against a Christian prisoner in the name of Islam, and others had been involved in what was self-consciously Muslim non-Muslim conflicts between certain groups of prisoners.
Many of our interviewees were members of our dialogue group who met with us regularly or of the class led by one of our research team. And as I said, some have been interviewed in previous projects. So overall, they engaged with us deeply and authentically and were willing and appreciative participants. The interviews lasted several hours and were often completed in more than one sitting.
They were recorded and transcribed. Some had to take place in segregation units in closed conditions through Perspex, but most took place in private offices, in education workshops or on the wings. They vary slightly, but generally covered details of the sentence. Prison experience and quality of life.
Personal background including what your most proud of faith, ideology and religious practices contained progress and psychological survival, trust relationships and the prison identity and moral character. Informal conversations often continued on the wings or on revisits to the prison, and prisoners also submitted written accounts, poetry, essays and games. Additional materials are still writing us letters.
And in one case, one of the prisoners who was on no 1 to 1 contact wrote throughout the study and then performed at the end around for us, which was all about our project, and it was called to us to trust and sums it up beautifully. So these are the results, and this will mean more to me than to you. But really all you have to see is that there's lots of yellow scattered about.
These are three the three prisons in something long lot in which we were diverted to in the Middle and England and basically for something looked a bit like want more to. So very low scores on harmony and professionalism dimensions but higher schools on security dimensions long lasting and Frankland felt out of school very differently, having lighter and more individualised climates and significantly higher schools on relational and care dimensions.
So when we first saw the results, we divided the prisons into two categories what was always in my head, even if it's not on the slide. So for something the white more to our new analogical characterised by vigilant security, the meeting of targets, proactive rule following and a form of professionalism that relates me to risk management. The other two, Martin and Frankland of Old Philological or Old School better characterised by different form of professionalism.
Relating to the development or progress of prisoners and higher levels of engagement. It's more complicated than that, but that's roughly it. So stuff in these prisons have different narratives about prisoners. They use more discretion. They carried some risk or managed risk through trust. So prisoners in full something said you feel like a statistic in Franklin, they said you feel like a person.
The composition and geographical location of each prison was distinctive and that impacted on the orientation of staff and their perceived levels of power and control. The four prisons are each operating to a distinct underlying model or form of order underneath, which is a distinctive construction of dangerousness. So at Full Sutton staff knew where dangerousness lay. They had a directed vision of dangerousness, but frankly, it was more diffuse.
There were questions asked, were very different approaches to social control. So at Frankland, we even saw dialogue as a major mode of social control in adjudications, and that governors adjudicating on prisoners would say, Now apologise to your officer, let's build this relationship back. It was a it was a very different form of social control. Interestingly, expressions of religious faith were distinctive in these different climates.
At Franklin's, in a somewhat less charged atmosphere, expressing normal religious doubt was permissible. So prisoners invited each other to religious celebrations. Interfaith dialogue was normalised. This was not the case in full. Something I'll say more about if I have time. So if we just take intelligent trust to begin with and look a bit more closely, if it's yellow, it's a neutral score. So three and above is a positive score and a thing below it is negative.
And there's clearly something very different going on between staff and prisoners or between the system and prisoners in each prison. But dimensions, in terms of trust, the scores are significantly different, starting at 2.57 in full, something rising to 2.71, which is significantly higher in long Latin and reaching 2.91 in Frankland. And if you look at the two items, I feel recognised as the person I am in this prison and I have opportunities to show untrustworthy in this prison.
The scores are highly informative. Prisoners feel unrecognised for something less so at long Latin, but much less so at Frankland, which shows a just over the neutral score of 3.02. So there are, according to prisoners, more opportunities to show I can be trustworthy at long last and significantly so at Frankland. None of these schools are high, but these are substantial differences, and we're arguing that these differences matter.
At the same striking pattern of rose for political charge. There was lots of it. Each president had a significantly different overall mean score with a step change from a low 2.61 and something to a significantly higher 2.72. It will not add to an almost neutral 2.95 Franklin. We felt these differences, so for something had a more charged atmosphere and at Frankland, prisoners were less tense.
They engaged with stuff and saw the almost neutral score at Franklin doesn't mean we didn't find angry negotiation, so there were still lots of prisoners agreeing with the angry statements, but the atmosphere was very different. One of the things that we're arguing is that there might be a kind of tipping point around the 2.50 mark below which all prisoners start to withdraw their consent from stuff.
So some incidents occurred while we were carrying out research, including a hostage taking of a prison officer from something, and it was fairly clear that no prisoner was going to tick off the stuff in that climate, where in another climate, a better climate, one or two prisoners might have intervened. So you can see there are some differences with ethnicity and religion also.
So white prisoners gender reported slightly lower levels of political charge by scores, except at long last in which is in Birmingham, where black prisoners reported less and so on. In all prisons, being influential, being high risk, being Muslim and being black or mixed race were dangerous assets. And we're hypothesising that these dimensions are not linear, that there might be tipping points. As I suggested, a lack of cultural competence was evident.
This is one example, but there are many where talking with my hands could be regarded as aggressive if you were black. I talk with my hands all the time. I haven't been accused of being aggressive yet, except when I talk about this research project. Muslim prisoners were often the targets of deep suspicion and misunderstanding. Here's an example. When I was doing another call to prayer, I was written out that I was doing the call to arms.
These are very significant misunderstandings. Many different types of prisoners were subject to assumptions of dangerousness if they were regarded as influential or if they had the wrong friends looking at us negative. A stripped down conception of the penal subject had major consequences for individuals and the prison community, and being written up in this way was often life changing. There were times when there were alliances and conversations about political events as well as local cultures.
So stuff might challenge some of the prisoners on their wing. Why don't you eat Yorkshire pudding, for example? That gave away racial and religious prejudice and these intersected religion became a way of expressing grievance. And these things varied. I guess that's one of our important points. So respect and kindness where they were found could be transformative. Here's a governor at a scary conference. We've invited to an international conference of people interested in radicalisation.
I think this was a Dutch governor was asked about a particular case. How did we de-radicalize this prisoner? I'm not sure. She says. We gave in books and treated him kindly. So our results suggest that our hypotheses are supported. This is our model of political charge. It varied significantly by establishment, and these differences coincided with differences in levels of intelligence, trust, humanity, bureaucratic legitimacy and the quality of relationships in the prison.
Bureaucratic illegitimacy is by far the largest contributor, and it's the dimension. We define it as the transparency and responsivity of the prison or the prison system and its moral recognition of the individual. It's basically about the sentence risk and dangerousness and the way these systems work. So here are the items in bureaucratic legitimacy and the items in humanity. So these are the items that are making the prisoners feel frustrated and angry.
Here are the items in fairness and decency. This is a tough analysis, just the Frankland, which had higher scores. And what you can sort of see is that high schools on bureaucratic legitimacy, staff, prisoner relationships and humanity in particular led to higher schools on both trust and intelligent trust, which in turn led to lower political charge. And these relationships are all significant. I want to get to three last slides because these are important.
This is Frankland and it's showing important wing differences. So we we saved Frankland till last because we'd heard it had a special unit and the pipe, which is a psychologically informed, planned environment and these psychologically supported wings are aimed at fostering good relationships, support, engagement, socially creative initiatives and growth or progression. And what you can basically see is that the scores vary tremendously.
Where there's more yellow, the scores on these dimensions are positive. And the pipes personal development score was among the highest we've seen and it's matched by Grendon. We've actually found it's matched by another prison too, compared to F Wing, which you can see has some quite low scores. And if you can see this, then the political charge scores vary alongside these other differences. So are low political charges. Low score is high in these two much better units.
What was interesting about these two environments, they weren't perfect, but they seemed to be based on a concept of what Christian Smith calls emergent personhood. But they were. I though, if that makes sense. We have done a bit of digging around to find that both Grendon and most recently Warren Hill, these are whole establishments in this case are in the same league and there might be others we don't know. But scores of this kind of quality are outstanding.
They're rare. We tend to find instances of what we're looking for rather than whole prisons or holdings all the time. But what they mean in practice is that there's more than the usual handful of outstanding individuals doing great work. Against the odds, there's something distinctive embedded in the culture and orientation towards prisoners. What we're finding in these places is I about practices and relationships, and they have a concept of emergent personhood at their core.
So we're beginning to think about some of the differences between enabling in the broadest sense and disabling environments in some prison is talking about disabled environments. What impact do you think imprisonment has had on your personality? It's destroyed me really in many senses, as you says, it said I'm going to get upset, etc. You can read the others for yourselves that there are such differences between prisons at the same time and wings within prisons.
We think it's very important at the end that creating monsters, undermining trust. Belmarsh that was so dangerous they couldn't speak to us. We found throughout that the prisoners who were too dangerous to talk to actually weren't too dangerous to talk to at all. So one of our findings is that enabling or higher quality environments are oriented towards prisoners in a distinctive way. They approach whole people as they are via attentiveness to detail.
Poor prisons are more hardened into a world of it. So the short story this is the short story is that we found that prisoners describe becoming human in I vow relationships with all kinds of stuff and how this finding what I can trust in you often triggers or at least supports a process of growth and change. So adding intelligent trust to thinking about risk seems to lead to a better kind of risk management, which can both reduce as well as contain risk.
We've been watching staff do this and getting them to talk about it, and actually they're using the very best of ordinary prison officer skills to do it with some additional psychological understanding. Seeing the prisoner as a person and acting accordingly seems to be transformational. I will stop on this slide, which is probably just as well, because it's going to be too difficult to explain what it tells you.
We're working on this now. So only yesterday we decided to change that module into this module, which is more in line with one of Tony's models. This is us trying to work out the relationship between everything I've just described and some of the dimensions of life in each prison and the social organisation and leadership and hierarchy in each prison, and expressions of religious identity in particular. And it's more simple than it looks that basically in the pipes a more rehabilitative culture.
What we found was that. Prisoners had less fixed religious identities. So in that culture, we met our first Muslim Quaker, for example, a Scientologist. Muslim religious identities were fluid, the boundaries was softer, an exploration of identity was fostered. In Model one, we found narrow, polarised and policed identities with strict norm enforcement, which contributed to a kind of lack of pluralism and decreased tolerance.
So prisoners talked about how they could express their faith identities very differently. And so religious identity looked and felt like gang behaviour. In the first model, the power seeking model where norms were enforced using violence and coercion. The second allowed for a much broader view of Islamic identity. It was still kind of distinct, but there was there was collaboration between groups, a kind of learning to live together identities. And the last two models were much more porous.
So we encountered prisoners who freely expressed doubt about Islam, who were considering changing religion to the rest of faith, or who described relief that they no longer needed to feel obliged to strictly follow rules which were being enforced in the model one so they could choose to miss Friday prayers. They could keep their religious practices private or whatever it was. So this is the bit we're still working on, but we're getting somewhere and we think there's a lot to be said there.
And then finally and I promise I'll stop now. This is our failed state theory of prisons effects. But if we put all of this together and we try to throw in some of the lack of hope and meaning and some of the political and cultural events that are going on outside, which senior managers are having to kind of try and shield their prisons.
From then we can start to build a model which in the tradition of a commission of inquiry, we can reverse and say that if we're looking for a grounded, generative theory of legitimate penal order which avoids some of these problems that we're describing, then it would look something like this. I better stop. Thank you very much.