New Public Management and Political Control: Comparing three
European correctional systems1
Arjen Boin (Department of Public Administration, Leiden University),
Oliver James (Department of Politics, University of Exeter) and
Martin Lodge (Department of Government, London School of Economics)
Paper prepared for the SCANCOR Workshop “Autonomization of the State: From
integrated administrative models to single purpose organizations”, Stanford University,
1-2 April 2005.
Address for correspondence:
Dr. R. A. Boin
Department of Public Administration
Leiden University
P.O. Box 9555
2300 RB Leiden
The Netherlands
Email: boin@fsw.leidenuniv.nl
First draft, not for quotation without authors’ permission. This paper builds on material
contained in Hood, C, James, O, Peters, G and Scott, C (eds) (2004) Controlling Modern
Government Cheltenham, Edward Elgar.
1
1
Abstract
This paper explores the consequences of the New Public Management (NPM) for
political control in three correctional systems. The three systems present contrasting
experiences of a vanguard NPM reformer (the correctional systems of England and
Wales) an intermediate position that has undertaken substantial NPM reforms (the
Netherlands) and an NPM laggard (Germany). All three systems have experienced a rise
in prisoner numbers and resource constraints, which has made control by the political
executive both more pressing and more difficult. Whilst the advocates of NPM structures
and practices suggested executive politicians would be able to ‘steer and not row’, the
practice of these systems has been one of considerable rowing where NPM has been
attempted. We find very little evidence of either enhanced control capacity or improved
detention quality as a result of NPM-inspired reforms.
2
1. Introduction: The promises of NPM
In the past two decades, the New Public Management (NPM) paradigm has swept the
public administration systems of many OECD countries. In a surprisingly brief period of
time, many politicians and policymakers embraced its promises and implemented its
precepts. Not all countries adopted the same programs, but many do adhere to the
underlying philosophy. A quiet revolution took place, which is illustrated by the common
use of such concepts as performance contracts, planning and control cycles, and a
philosophy of “steering, not rowing” (politicians set priorities and policymakers worry
about the details).
The NPM-proponents – both in academia and government – promised quite a lot.
Not only did NPM promise a “cheaper and better” government, it came with the added
bonus of politicians being spared the daily humbug of administrative detail. By adopting
this new philosophy of administration, politicians would increase their capacity to exert
control over the public sector. Considering the dire straits many governments were in
during the 1980s, it is small wonder so many cash-stripped governments embraced NPMinspired reform.
The NPM philosophy has a miraculous quality to it, if only because it promises to
reconcile the irreconcilable: less red tape, higher performance, and full accountability.
Whilst there are many different definitions of NPM, the core of NPM is easily
summarized. Politicians formulate clear targets and specify the various outputs that must
be produced. They contract with agents of implementation. Freed from traditional forms
of oversight associated with Weberian bureaucracy, these agents will employ their
expertise to fulfill the prescribed policy aims.
NPM thus promises to increase political control by executive politicians
(ministers and core executives including prime ministers’ offices and finance ministries).
This form of political control contrasts with that exercised by the legislative or judicial
parts of government, or by the users of public services in various forms of participative
structure. More specifically, control is here defined as “whatever keeps the state of any
given system within some desired subset of all its possible states” (Hood et al, 2004:5).
NPM does so by manipulating the “whatever” part of the dimension: the
mechanisms of control. The NPM philosophy prescribes post-performance assessments
and new forms of process management. It emphasizes the absolute and relative
importance of competition, which includes both contests for contracts within the public
sector (including the use of quasi-markets) and competition between public and private
sector bodies. It advocates the use of competitive mechanisms, with rewards for staff
linked to relative performance.2 Overall, NPM deemphasizes traditional oversight
mechanisms. The NPM philosophy, in other words, calls for a redesign of control
mechanisms.
The key question, then, is twofold. First, we want to know whether the rise of
NPM has led to a redesign of institutionalized control structures. The second question is
more important, as it asks whether and how any NPM-induced change in control
2
Here we encounter an inbuilt tension, as these aspects of NPM may conflict with increased control by
executive politicians. The use of quasi-contracts opens up control systems to participation by the users of
services, and involving private actors in the systems broadens out the actors involved in provision of
services to include bodies that are not publicly owned.
3
mechanisms has actually affected the capacity for political control (as defined above). In
this paper, we report empirical findings that help to answer the first question and we build
on these findings to explore possible answers to the second question. We draw our
empirical findings, in part, from a comparative research that has just been published and
in which the authors of this paper participated (Hood et al, 2004). We build on these
findings to explore the promise of enhanced political control.
We explore these questions by studying three prison sectors: in England & Wales,
Germany and the Netherlands. The three country cases are particularly useful for
exploring the NPM claims. All are full members of the EU, and have been for over three
decades, and are OECD countries that form the principle focus of inquiry for studies of
NPM. The prison systems in England and the Netherlands were among the first policy
sectors of both countries to be subjected to NPM-inspired reforms. Both systems are
virtual showcases of New Public Management. The German system, on the other hand,
has experienced very little impact of NPM. This allows us to compare the three systems
on the dimension of control mechanisms.
Over the past two decades, all three countries had to deal with an increase in the
prison population, a decrease in budgets, a general trend of politicization of penal issues
(“getting tough on crime”), and increased international regulation.3 We may thus expect
an overall decrease in control, as the constraints on prison administration increased in
weight (cf. Hargrove and Glidewell, 1990). The question is whether the introduction of
NPM-reforms compensated for these constraints.
We begin this paper with a brief history of NPM and discussion of the relation
between NPM reform and political control. In section 3, we explore the relation between
prison administration, the autonomy of correctional systems and the capacity to control
prison systems. In section 4, we present the empirics of our three prison systems. We
conclude this paper by discussing the relevance of our findings to wider questions of
NPM-inspired governance.
2. New Public Management: Reconciling the irreconcilable?
The body of thought that we here discuss under the NPM label contains explicit promises
for better government. To construe how proponents of NPM define good and better
government, we should differentiate between actual developments in practice inspired by
NPM-thinking and the literature that has spawned around both the developments and the
underlying thinking. The actions of practitioners and the writings by academics all
suggest that the scope of NPM reform has been substantial: it has been implemented in
many countries and policy sectors, in many shapes and forms. 4 Many practitioners have
enthusiastically embraced both the jargon and prescriptions of NPM; on the academics
3
As an overall pattern, there is evidence of the emergence of a limited European level of control affecting
all three countries. However, the level is more strongly associated with the Council of Europe than the EU,
suggesting limited evidence of Europeanisation rather than EU-isation (and having effects on countries
beyond EU member states).
4
See the annual surveys of public management conducted by the OECD PUMA public sector group
(OECD, 1997, 1998). The dominant view in the literature on NPM is that these forms have spread to many
countries (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992, Dunleavy, 1994).
4
side, a deep divide has developed between the many proponents and the adamant
opponents of modern government.
Debates about the ‘New Public Management’ have dominated the disciplines of
public administration and public management since the early 1990s (Hood, 1991; Pollitt,
1993). The term has been used in a variety of ways, referring to ‘market-based
administration’ (Lan and Rosenbloom, 1992), decentralized (organizationally and
spatially) methods of organizing production (Hoggett 1991: 243), ‘the hollowing out of
the state’ (Rhodes, 1994; Saward, 1997) or ‘reinventing government’ (Osborne and
Gaebler, 1992). These terms reflect both the fear and the excitement that observers have
brought to the discussion table.
A core element of NPM thinking lies in the belief that politicians should “steer”
rather than “row” (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992). This is, in essence, a return to the once
classic division between the domains of politics and administration (Wilson, 1887). In
this classic perspective, Politicians are responsible for making critical decisions;
administrators are the experts in implementing them. Politicians should not be engaged
too much in micro-management, whereas administrators should refrain from becoming
too preoccupied with the political dimensions of their work.
A second element is the belief that administrators should be given much more
room to exercise their judgment and to apply their expertise in the implementation of
policy. In the NPM line of thought, politicians suffer from the illusion of control: they
think that they can (and should) micro-manage the policy process. Politicians must learn
to trust implementing agents (Van Gunsteren, 1976), providing them with authority,
discretion and funds to do the job.
A third element is the continued belief in the pillars of democratic governance:
political control and accountability. Proponents of NPM claim that old-fashioned control
arrangements not only frustrate government performance but also cloud accountability
relations.5 The proposed relation between politics and administration therefore comes
with new accountability arrangements. NPM proponents argue that politicians should be
held accountable for the achievement of targets and not so much for the small routine
accidents that occur on the way to great performance. This, is the assumption, would
streamline the accountability process, making it more transparent as well.
These three pillars of thought leave the problem of bureaucratic autonomy to be
resolved in practice. The premise of increased discretion and the emphasis on output
performance management combine to increase the autonomy of a policy sector. Too
much autonomy, however, may give rise to “runaway” bureaucracies. The right mixture
of control mechanisms should prevent this from happening, or so we may deduce from
NPM thinking (which tends to underplay this effect on control capacity).
The adoption of NPM-inspired reform denotes a move to more explicit standards
and measurement of performance in the public sector, greater emphasis on output rather
than input controls, a shift to disaggregation of units in the public sector, a shift to greater
competition and contract based delivery of services, a stress on private sector styles of
management practice and greater parsimony in resource use. 6 In particular, the ‘executive
This is known as “the problem of the many hands” (Thompson, 1987; cf. Bovens, 1998).
The impact that NPM reform may have on the control structure of administrative systems is clarified by
distinguishing between four types of control (Hood et al, 2004): mutuality, competition, contrived
randomness and oversight over individuals operating in public institutions and organizations.
5
6
5
agency’ control model has been suggested to combine these forms for central government
provision of services. In this model, routine activity is passed on to executive agencies
which are then controlled at arms-length using a package of control of global budget and
a set of performance targets. The agency, headed by a chief executive, is responsible for
day to day performance within this framework (James, 2003). It is suggested that the
forms have their origins in the disciplines of management and new institutional
economics, with Anglo-American sources for some of the ideas for corporate governance
being particularly prominent (Hood 1991; James, 2001; 2003).
The insights deduced from NPM literature may thus be summarized in three
propositions. When NPM reforms are introduced, 1) policy sectors become more
autonomous (at least formally); 2) control mechanisms change; and 3) political
accountability is focused on outcomes rather than process. The introduction of NPM may
have, of course, other possible outcomes. In this paper, we investigate whether these
claims have materialized. Furthermore, we explore the effects that alterations in the
control structure may have had on the control capacity. We will explore these relations in
the context of prison systems. In the following section, we introduce this traditional
domain of governance.
3. Governing prison systems: NPM and the control of autonomous systems
The prison sector is an area of core public sector activity that raises particularly stark
issues of control, because prisons are ‘total institutions’ (Goffman, 1961) exercising
drastic state power. They separate individuals from society, and monitor and shape much
of their lives, including such matters as when and how to eat, work, sleep and exercise.
They are frequently engaged in efforts to discipline, correct and rehabilitate their
prisoners and, as such, the control of these activities is an important issue in the daily
affairs of a prison. But as the many scandals in prisons show, a most important issue is
control of the keepers – the question of ‘who guards the guards?’ Paraphrasing
Dostoyevsky and Churchill, we might say that adequate control over prison
administrators is a hallmark of civilization. The NPM promises of increased control
therefore seem of particular relevance in this sector.
The NPM philosophy may, in fact, hold its biggest promise for the operation of
expensive and expansive policy sectors that are characterized by a relatively high degree
of bureaucratization. Most if not all Western prison systems met this definition in the
1980s: the prisoner population was growing, the prison bureaucracy bloating, and, as a
result, the budgets were chasing spiraling costs (see f.i. Cavadino and Dignan, 1992).
In this section, we consider the relation between NPM-reform and prison
governance from a theoretical perspective. It would appear that any control promises that
can be deduced from the NPM philosophy are quickly watered down when we juxtapose
the underlying NPM propositions with theoretical insights on the administration of
prisons and prison systems.7 The theory of prison governance provides us with a firm
There is a small subfield – located somewhere on the nexus between criminology, organization theory,
public administration and political science that deals with the governance of correctional systems. For an
overview, see DiIulio (1987). In this paper, we deal with mainstream domestic prison systems rather than
7
6
body of conventional wisdom – borne out by empirical research – that allows us to
consider the implications of NPM on the control of correctional systems. We will here
discuss the special nature of the prison organization, the autonomy of prisons and prison
systems, and patterns of political accountability in Western prison systems. From this
discussion emerge a set of hypotheses and a specific way of gauging control over prison
systems.
The nature of prison
The Western prison typically serves a set of complex, mutually conflicting and hard-toachieve goals (Cressey, 1965; Hargrove and Glidewell, 1990; Boin, 2001; cf. Wilson,
1989). These organizations must house suspects and convicts in a way that is both
humane and appeals to the punitive nature of a prison; they must maintain order, prevent
inmates from escaping and facilitate their “resocialization.” They must deter future
criminals, while appeasing the political spectrum. This inherent “policy vagueness”
means that policymakers, prison wardens and corrections officers must negotiate between
the aims, trying to find a compromise that works.
After they agree (if they can) on a philosophy of punishment, the employees of a
correctional system must find a way to implement it. A tried-and-proven way of running
prisons does not exist. The various goals all imply a certain way of working (with much
intra-band variety); a specific combination of goals will require a more refined way of
thinking and working. In practice, prison systems show a high degree of variety in their
interpretation of goals and in the “technology” they adopt to achieve these goals. 8 This
variety follows the inability of policymakers to “translate” complex and contradicting
goals into workable policy directions.9
This inbuilt tendency toward variety is kept in check by the laws of street-level
bureaucracy (Lipsky, 1980). The first law holds that street-level bureaucrats – in our case
better known as the “guards” – do not like too much undefined discretionary space,
because it forces a continuing array of dilemmas to their desk. The second law tells us
that street-level bureaucrats will not sit by idle and hope for the best. The resulting
outcome is what we may call the third (and best known) law of street-level bureaucracy,
which predicts that in the absence of clear policy directives these implementing agents
will devise their own. These directives will serve the operators rather politicians or
society at large, but the observable outcome tends to please all: order is maintained. The
costs (in terms of human suffering) tend to remain hidden, until some sort of crisis
exposes them.
The performance of prisons and prison system is thus hard to measure. Some aims
are measurable: prisons can always report the number of “processed” inmates and the
number of escapes. But that is usually where it ends. In Western prisons, detention
quality is determined by the process of administering punishment – a process that is
special facilities (for example mental institutions or facilities associated with the detention of terror
suspects).
8
We can distinguish between inter-system and intra-system variety.
9
An interesting exception to this pattern is the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons, which displays a high
degree of unity in both philosophy and practice of prison administration (Boin, 2001).
7
rarely subjected to clear formulations of aims and performance indicators. To assess the
level of control that a responsible minister can exert over a prison system would, ideally,
require the consideration of three performance dimensions:
1) The achievement of formal policy goals. This is the typical policy evaluation
exercise, in which prescribed policy aims are compared to measured outputs.
2) The number and intensity of institutional crises. One of the undesired states
that a prison system can assume is a state of crisis, which means that the
general perception of its performance deviates significantly from the
envisioned performance. Such crises usually revolve around scandals and
incidents (such as extreme violence, riots, escapes, prisoner abuse).
3) The legitimacy of the prison system. Legitimacy encompasses political and
societal support for the functioning of (in this case) a prison system. Such
support will usually – but not always – depend on the previous two
dimensions.
What would happen if the policy aims are clearly formulated and translated into output
measures, as NPM has promised to do? The emerging hypothesis would be that NPM
will facilitate a shift of emphasis toward the measurable goals of penal policy, which tend
to be law-and-order goals (number of escapes, number of prisoners). The prison system is
likely to operate more cheaply (more prisoners in a building), which does not necessarily
lead to an improvement on the first dimension outlined above. After all, the quality of
detention – a process characteristic – will be left to the good will of prison bureaucrats
down the policymaking line. If quality considerations suffer under a preoccupation with
efficiency, the performance on all three dimensions may eventually suffer as a result.
From a pure theoretical perspective, there is no strong reason to expect an increase of
control following the adoption of NPM-measures, unless control over a few bottom line
aspects such as costs or escapes is a primary aim of policy.
Prison autonomy
Prison systems tend to display a mixture of informal autonomy and heavy bureaucracy, a
mixture that is characteristic of the uniformed services in which the power of the state is
vested. The defining factor is the inherent discretion that the street-level uniforms –
usually the lowest paid and educated – have in the exercise of their task. The police
officer patrols the street by himself or with a colleague; the soldier must decide alone
whether and when he shoots; just as the prison officer is often alone when he decides
what is right and wrong in his interaction with prisoners. This discretionary room is the
source of the perennial scandal, but it is the only feasible way to run uniformed
bureaucracies.
This risky characteristic has traditionally been met with a heavy dose of
bureaucratization. Prison headquarters have traditionally tried to minimize the risks of
undesirable practices by a combination of rules, schedules, oversight and a pinch of
contrived randomness. In the more enlightened prison systems, attention would be paid to
training and mutuality-based forms of control (creating a culture that prioritizes humane
8
treatment of prisoners). By creating external avenues of control, prisoners usually have
receive the opportunity to make their grievances known (to judges, politicians or action
groups). The informal autonomy at the bottom of the system would thus be encapsulated
by formalized mechanisms of control, which would keep any tendency toward
discretionary abuse in check. Failures in these mechanisms have been traditionally
associated with prison scandals.
The NPM philosophy poses a direct threat to the fabric of this control system – a
system that has evolved over many years of Western prison administration. The premise
of NPM-reform is the increased autonomy of the implementing agency. Moreover, an
NPM-inspired reform program would address the relatively high level of
bureaucratization (“What are all these bureaucrats doing at headquarters?”) and deemphasize the preoccupation with process (moving toward measurable output indicators).
All this results, we would hypothesize, in a higher level of autonomy for the prisons
within the prison system. As long as prisons meet their targets (which will be the easily
measurable and easy-to-achieve ones), process oversight will likely be limited.
Unless new forms of control are designed and implemented, we may expect a
higher incidence of prison scandals – a broadly defined category of problems between
keepers and the kept. The relaxation of process-oriented control measures and the
increased autonomy of prisons give badly run prisons more room to create problems
while meeting their performance targets. The hypothesis deduced from prison theory is
that – the ceteris paribus clause applies – NPM-reforms will be accompanied by a hardto-measure decrease in detention quality and an increase in prison scandals.
Political accountability
In Western prison systems, the organization of accountability has traditionally been
clearly embedded in law and custom. Prisons embodied the power of the state, which had
to be checked carefully. In practice, however, politicians would pay less attention to the
daily affairs of the prison system – prisons do not deliver much votes after all. Attention
for prisons would be driven by incidents and election cycles.
The NPM promise is to do away with much of the incident-driven discussion on
prison administration. The idea is that responsible politicians should not waste anybody’s
time on discussing routine incidents or operator failure; they should be held accountable
for the overall performance of the system. This promise completes the “package deal”
that NPM offers: an autonomous system of high-quality policy delivery, which must be
service-checked periodically. As long as the system continues to function in line with the
pre-formulated indicators, no political discussion is necessary.
NPM-inspired reforms, we may hypothesize, thus tend to enlarge the gap between
accountable politicians and the street-level exercise of power. The responsible minister is
more or less “removed” from the process of administering prisons. In extreme cases, this
limited access to the prisons in combination with nice performance indicators may lull
the minister into a feeling of control: ministers do not have to worry, as long as the highranking prison officials provide periodic facts and figures that indicate goal performance.
However, as the indicators do not capture the process of prison administration, the
9
minister may lose sight of what is going on behind prison walls – the traditional essence
of political accountability in respect to prisons.
All this points to increased political vulnerability. Removed from the core process
of prison administration, accountable politicians will deny responsibility for the
inevitable failures (escapes; violence; drugs; corruption) that come with running closed
institutions. We hypothesize that NPM-inspired reforms are likely to result in more – and
more intense – political debates about the quality of prisons and the role responsible
politicians should play in maintaining detention quality.
4. NPM trends and their consequences
In this section, we examine the three prison systems selected for this paper. We first
describe whether and how NPM-inspired reforms have changed the control structure
surrounding these prison systems over the past two decades. We will specifically
concentrate on whether and how the NPM control mechanisms outlined in sections 2 and
3 have changed systems. We try to gauge the impact of these (non)changes on the
capacity to control these systems.
England and Wales
This prison system resembles somewhat of a showcase for NPM: it has been an early
adopter of NPM prescriptions. This trend includes the adoption of the executive agency
form for delivering prison services, the increased use of public/private competition, as
well as changed forms of oversight to make more use of performance information. In
addition, new oversight bodies have been created. Moreover, the system has become
more transparent as it has opened up to media interest and the increased involvement of
outsiders in the traditional system of oversight bodies.
The Prison Service vigorously adopted NPM reforms in the late 1980s and 1990s,
but the backbone of the formal political control continues to be hierarchical
administrative control, as summarized in Figure 2 (at the end of this paper). The Home
Secretary has formal powers for ‘regulation and management’ of prisons including
standards of treatment of prisoners, and issues Prison Rules for that purpose under a
Prison Act of 1952. Prison Rules Orders provide guidance on the interpretation of these
Prison Rules, and advice is regularly issued to prison governors.10
In the early 1980s, well before anyone spoke of NPM, quasi-contracts were
instituted between individual prisons and the Prison Service. This principle was applied
to the system as a whole when the Prison Service was set up as a quasi-autonomous
executive agency in 1993 with a set of performance targets and budget controls
monitored by the Home Office (HM Prison Service 1999). Within the Prison Service,
10
Different arrangements for prisons operate in other parts of the UK. In Scotland, the Scottish Executive
Justice Department reporting to the Scottish Parliament has supervised the Scottish Prison Service agency
since 1999 and there is a separate Scottish HM Inspectorate of Prisons. In Northern Ireland, the Northern
Ireland Prison Service reports to the Northern Ireland Office and its Secretary of State. But it is the system
for England and Wales that this section focuses on.
10
individual prisons now account to the Headquarters for their performance, with
monitoring against targets in various areas such as security, prisoner facilities and cost.
The whole Service is further subject to civil service regulations, especially for senior
posts overseen by the Cabinet Office, and public expenditure control systems run by the
Treasury. The Service’s key performance targets are now subsumed within the Home
Office ‘Public Service Agreement’ as part of a recently instituted comprehensive
government-wide system of performance targets monitored by the Treasury (James 2004)
The effect of these structures has not been fully to isolate the political executive
from intervention or responsibility for day to day running of the Prison Service. In this
sense, NPM has been partially about rhetoric rather than reality. The Home Office,
Minister for Prisons and Home Secretary have kept a close interest in high profile
prisoners and particular prisons and regimes that have received media attention. As has
been the case with many politically-salient executive agencies, the target system has been
supplemented by informal indications of shifting day to day priorities. Procedures for
joint working were strengthened following a dispute between the Chief Executive of the
Prison Service and the Home Secretary about responsibility for day to day operational
management in 1995 (James, 2003). In this dispute, the Home Secretary attempted to
blame the chief executive for escapes from high security prisons as an ‘operational’
matter, whilst the chief executive noted the Home Secretary’s repeated intervention in the
system on a day to day basis. In the end, the chief executive was sacked and the Home
Secretary did not resign, but the chief executive subsequently sued the Home Office for
wrongful dismissal. This case was settled out of court, an indication that there was some
truth to the chief executive’s claims. After 1997, the responsibilities of the Home Office
and Prison Service were restated in a way which more formally acknowledged the close
links between the agency and the department.
Perhaps the most significant area where NPM forms have made an impact is the
rise in public-private competition. The consequence has been to strengthen executive
control over the system by introducing external benchmarks for assessing the
performance of the public system and the use of competition between public and private
providers. The first contracted-out private prison opened in 1992. Currently, 9 prisons
containing around 9 per cent of prisoners have their management contracted out to
private companies, with two built by the public sector and run by private companies and
7 built and managed by the private sector under the Private Finance Initiative (National
Audit Office 2003: 5).11 The practice of clearer specification of performance standards
for private prisons has spilled out into public prisons and both are now subject to similar
operating standards, exposing relative performance. Some years ago the Prison Service
announced its intent to subject the management of the worst performing prisons to
competitive tendering. Brixton was suggested as a candidate in 2001 and four other
prisons were subsequently put under consideration. Moving in the other direction, two
prisons that were once run by the private sector are now being run by public sector
management teams after successful bids.
The introduction of privately managed prisons was accompanied by new
oversight structures. A local Prison Service Controller, with a permanent presence within
the prison, monitors compliance with relevant statutes and contractual obligations.
11
There are elements of a competitive market, with four private providers, Group 4, Premier, Securicor and
UKDS.
11
Controllers have formal powers of enforcement within an overall regime set by the
Contracts and Competition Group in the Prison Service Headquarters. Contracts include
detailed specification of levels of discipline, complaints and treatment of prisoners (HM
Prison Service, 2001). In cases of non-compliance, the response is usually a default
notice, followed by a financial penalty if the matter is not remedied within twenty days.
In emergencies, the prison can be taken back into public hands.12 Private prisons are
further subject to public inspection and complaint systems as well as oversight by their
companies’ headquarters (National Audit Office 2003: 2-3).
The introduction of private prisons has reduced the influence of the professional
control structures relative to the political executive. Within the Prison Service, there is
substantial movement of senior staff between establishments. Headquarters staff have
often worked in the field. Annual staff turnover is relatively low (6 per cent in public
prisons in 2000/2001 [National Audit Office 2003: 27]). These features create some
professional norms which act as a form of control within the system and partly shield it
from political control. However, the, annual staff turnover is higher in private than public
prisons, averaging around 25 per cent (and ranging from 12 to 42 per cent). High
turnover would appear to inhibit mutuality based control relative to formal rules and
management direction. The increased competition with private providers has reduced the
influence of the Prison Officers Association (POA) union, which was very influential in
the 1970s and 1980s in setting local working practices (Vagg 1994: 52-4; 106-7).
Beyond executive focused oversight systems, the NPM changes have not
substantially increased political control by the legislature. Parliament monitors the
system, especially through the convention of ministerial responsibility and through Public
Accounts and Home Affairs Committee investigations. Under the executive agency
system, the heads of the Prison Service and the Home Office are ‘Accounting Officers’
who are obliged to comply with rules over financial procedures as set out in Government
Accounting and reporting to Parliament (HM Prison Service 1999, Annex B). From time
to time, the National Audit Office produces reports on prisons, and prisons are also
subject to general regulations for food hygiene and health and safety.
There have been other trends in the system that do not seem linked to NPM which
have weakened both executive and legislative control. Prisons have Independent
Monitoring Boards have always been composed of lay people rather than prison
professionals. The limited system of oversight by semi-independent administrative bodies
was strengthened in 1981 when the Prisons Inspectorate was separated from the Prison
Department and made to report to the Home Secretary rather than the prison
administration. The Inspectorate carries out thematic inspection and regular five-year
inspections involving a five-day visit, supplemented by shorter follow-up visits of three
days. The Chief Inspector has no enforcement powers to sanction prisons or the Prison
Service, but inspectors have developed a ‘ladder of escalating sanctions’ if desired
modifications are not forthcoming.13 The Inspectorate’s statutory duty to publish reports,
12
The threat of not contracting out further prisons to private firms, or even ending the contract, encourages
private prison providers to comply with concerns raised by the Prison Service.
13
The first rung on the ladder consists of informal comments to governors or directors during or after
inspections. The second rung consists of recommendations in inspection reports submitted to the Home
Office for publication. A further step up the ladder of sanctions is to make comments directly to the
Director General or Home Secretary, although this rung is rarely reached.
12
except where security is at issue, provides the opportunity for ‘naming and shaming’
prisons to influence their behavior, which is particularly important in the absence of
formal authority to sanction prisons.
The Chief Inspector of Prisons is an outsider to the prison service, though other
Inspectors have direct prison expertise (Hood et al 1999: 134-7).14 At times, the
‘outsiders’ have pressed for improvements to conditions that have conflicted with Prison
Service staff norms and attempts to control costs. The Home Secretary has partially been
able to reign in the Chief Inspector as a controller, recommending appointments to the
post. However, all three of the most recent Chief Inspectors have publicly criticized both
the Prison Service and Home Office. The Chief Inspector who retired in 2001, General
Sir David Ramsbotham, argued that an emphasis on efficiency savings meant it was
difficult to provide programs designed to reduce re-offending. He also criticized
performance targets for creating ‘bureaucratic overload’ on governors and diverting them
from improving conditions (Timmins 2001). After incidents (most notably the major riot
at Strangeways prison in 1990), special inquiries (such as the Woolf Report after the
1990 riot) have been instigated. The reports have led to the establishment of new
overseers, reforms to structures, and attempts at greater standardization of conditions
across facilities (Vagg 1994: 170-2). Such responses to scandal have taken the system
temporarily out of the control of executive politicians, although the long term direction of
the service is still under the control of ministers.
The role of non-state actors in political control has increased over time, but this
does not seem linked to NPM changes. Traditional non-governmental bodies monitoring
the prison system include the Howard League for Penal Reform and Prison Reform Trust
who have agendas to ‘modernize’ prison conditions. The already high level of media
interest in prison conditions has been increased by the privatization of prison facilities
which appear to generate more media interest than equivalent scandals in public facilities.
Broader public scrutiny of prisons is provided by Independent Monitoring Boards
(formerly called Boards of Visitors), which operate as local inspectorates, being entitled
to visit prisons at any time and obtain access to all areas. They monitor conditions and
report on them, sometimes submitting an annual report to the Home Secretary. Overall,
the political control of prisons beyond the executive and legislature has traditionally been
weak, and this does not seem to have been changed greatly by NPM structures.
The Netherlands
In the late 1980s, the Dutch prison system was “volunteered” by the minister of Justice as
one of the first large-scale bureaucracies in the Netherlands to adopt NPM-insights. The
prison system was reorganized into an Agency (DJI), which “contracted” with the penal
14
The current Chief Inspector, Ann Owers, was general secretary of an immigrant welfare body and is the
director of Justice, the all party human rights and law reform organisation. The Chief Inspector from 19952001, Sir David Ramsbotham, was a former army general, and his predecessor, the late Sir Stephen Tumin,
who held the post from 1987-95, was formerly a County Court Judge. Similarly, the first Prison
Ombudsman, Sir Peter Woodhead, was a former Admiral, and Stephen Shaw, who took over in 1999, was
previously director of the Prison Reform Trust charity (Prisons Ombudsman 2000: 6-9).
13
institutions.15 The minister of Justice maintains full responsibility and reports to
parliament within a statutory framework of prison regulation. General policy goals are
formulated in the Justice Department, which are then translated into policy directives and
operational targets within DJI.
The DJI director allocates budgets and formulates performance indicators that are
set out in the annual contract between DJI and the governor of clusters of prisons.
Oversight is mostly based on tracking a list of performance indicators (which has been
gradually reduced from over a hundred to 34), with governors reporting their
performance statistics to DJI headquarters every quarter.16
The contractual relation between DJI and its governors is output driven: as long as
governors meet their targets, DJI headquarters largely refrains from intervention. Up until
the mid-1980s, the central prison bureaucracy used to dispatch inspectors to the prisons.
These inspectors – who would usually announce themselves – would compare the
observed functioning of the prison to the rules and regulations. The inspection function
was axed for unknown reasons sometime during the mid 1980s.17
This is not to say that governor and staff are without any form of supervision.
Each prison has its own Board of Oversight, a group of local citizens who regularly visit
the institution and make themselves available to the prisoners. They communicate their
advice to the prison governor, and, if necessary, to officials higher up in the chain. In
addition, the independent Raad voor Strafrechtstoepassing en Jeugdbescherming (RSJ),
largely made up of academics, judges and former policymakers, visits the prisons and
advises the minister of Justice on the feasibility and desirability of new laws and policy
directives, judged solely in the interest of prisoners.18
A range of organizations complement this institutional structure. As one of the big
spenders in the Justice field, the prison sector has to deal with financial oversight both
from within the Justice department and from the Department of Finance. The audit office
(Algemene Rekenkamer) may perform ex-post evaluations and the Labour Inspectorate
can investigate all issues having to do with the work environment. The functioning of the
prison sector is subject of regular debate in parliamentary subcommittees and, if
necessary, in parliament itself. Prisons do not have their own sector-specific ombudsman
but the National Ombudsman – reporting to parliament – may act on complaints from
within the prison system. Ombudsman reports have been published and have received
widespread attention. The courts may become involved and the National Detective Squad
(Rijksrecherche) investigates all cases in which prison staff stand accused.
The main development, however, that has kept the power base of prison
governors in check is the institutionalization – not related to NPM – of the complaints
15
The prisons, alongside institutions for juvenile offenders and some psychiatric hospitals, are part of the
National Agency of Correctional Institutions (Dienst Justitiële Inrichtingen - DJI), a semi-independent
agency in the Justice department. The formal systems of oversight are summarised in Figure 4 (at the end
of this paper).
16
Formally, the Office of the Prosecutor (het Openbaar Ministerie), is responsible for ‘the execution of
detention’, this office has traditionally shied away from its task and, indeed, few people even seem to be
aware of it.
17
The Justice Department has worked on reintroducing a prison inspectorate, which is to begin functioning
in 2005.
18
Representatives of the national body RSJ made 43 prison visits in 2000. The findings are not published,
but aggregated in the annual RSJ report.
14
procedure for prisoners, which was initiated in the late 1970s. The complaints procedure
is well used and accepted as a fact of life by all (even in Holland’s only supermax).19
The Dutch prison agency makes little use of competition as a control device.
There is no public-private competition in provision of prisons for adults, although DJI
does contract with private youth institutions and forensic institutions (but they did so well
before NPM reforms occurred). There is little competition between prisons, for example
by using performance measures as benchmarks. Instead prison governors have adopted
the principles and practices of the worldwide quality control movement, experimenting
with audits and control circles. This approach relies on mutual auditing (governors
visiting colleagues) and defines agency headquarters out of the loop. The governors have
long resisted any form of comparison between the institutions.
Field autonomy
Prison governors have long maintained considerable discretionary powers, which was
compounded by hands-off, long-distance monitoring by DJI. In the 1970s, the director of
the prison system, Hans Tulkens, encouraged governors to be flexible in adapting
departmental rules to the situation – on the condition that their discretionary freedom
would benefit the prisoners. The economic crises of the 1980s brought a funding squeeze
that reined back ambitions for developing rehabilitative programs, but the relatively loose
relation between headquarters and prison administrations remained. Formally, the
governors have always remained largely responsible for running their prisons, within the
limits of law and budget (Kelk, 2003). The predictable result was a variety of practices,
cultures and prison regimes (Boin, 2001).
Living up to their administrative philosophy of decentralized governance, DJI
policymakers would leave the management of the prisons to the governors. Headquarters
would not engage in site visits, nor did policymakers pay regular, informal visits to their
colleagues in the field. Monitoring was viewed both by governors and DJI policymakers
as a breach of trust, an unnecessary and outdated form of regulation. Whilst DJI
policymakers will certainly castigate governors who fail to deliver on the performance
dimensions or overrun their budgets, most do not stumble in this way. The governors
consider non-interference as the only proof of respect for their professionalism. Mr.
Jägers, the former DJI director, did not consider it reprehensible to admit that he had ‘no
idea what is going on in the prisons.’ Insiders described Dutch prison governors as ‘rulers
of their fiefdoms’ (Boin 2001).
The introduction of NPM did little to wrest control from governors, who had
grown accustomed to their independent position. During the 1980s, parliamentary
majorities pushed for double-bunking of prisoners; the governors resisted this pressure,
claiming the moral high ground. After a series of violent escapes in the early 1990s, the
first DJI director perceived a window of opportunity to curb the power of governors and
19
The complaints procedures run by these bodies have some bite for individual cases but less in terms of
general policy. Prisoners begin the process by lodging a complaint with the prison’s Board of Oversight.
This Board makes a recommendation to the governor, who is not obliged to comply. The prisoner can
appeal to the RJS, whose verdict is binding for the prison governor. This complaint procedure is well used
and accepted as legitimate both by prisoners and staff (Vagg, 1994), but the policy advice frequently
submitted by the RJS or the Ombudsman carries far less weight than departmental or staff considerations.
15
impose a minimal degree of uniformity on the prisons but was opposed by the governors
(Boin and Otten, 1996). It took an institutional crisis (in 2002) to force the governors to
accept double-bunking (Dekker, Jongejan and Spek, 2003) which is now rapidly
becoming standard practice in Dutch prisons.
DJI has occasionally tried to augment its influence over the field operations. The
ultimate sanction is removal of a prison governor (rotation is rarely used in the Dutch
prison system). For instance, one recent DJI director seized on the opportunity offered to
him by a media hatchet job on a very influential governor who had been running the
largest prison in the Netherlands for nearly 18 years. He was removed from his position
‘in the interest of the system’ and offered a position as security advisor in an office near
his home town. Similarly, the DJI has used a recent clustering operation (merging the
administrative offices of contiguous prisons) to select a few ‘general directors’ to run
several prisons in their region. This seems like an obvious attempt to break the informal
‘old boy network’ that has frustrated central efforts to impose a minimal degree of control
over the field. United in their own union (VDPI), the governors have effectively used
union protection to work against policy initiatives not of their liking.
If we define control in terms of the capacity to keep a system in or near some
desired state, it is clear that the introduction of NPM has done little to enhance it. The
actual performance (in terms of goal achievement) of the Dutch prison system has long
been concealed by a ‘favorable agency myth’ (Hargrove and Glidewell, 1990), which
holds that a magical transformation occurred from a rather backward system in the
immediate post-WWII years to an enlightened prison system commanding the awe of
both critical academics and pragmatic policymakers all over the world (Downes, 1988;
Franke, 1995). Politicians, policymakers, prison staff and media have adopted this agency
myth as an accurate depiction of the Dutch prison system.
But the truth is that the Dutch system is one of the most expensive in the world
and performance is not appreciably higher than European counterparts; on some key
performance indicators such as escapes, suicides or health care it is actually lower (Boin,
2001). The one-man-one-cell principle was long invoked to argue the superior quality of
Dutch prisons, but recent developments have voided that argument.
The Dutch prison system has suffered from several deep crises, which invited
political scrutiny and negative media attention. In the early 1990s, a series of escapes and
continuing cell shortages nurtured an image of a badly run prison system. Several
conflicts emerged between DJI headquarters and prison governors. More recently, prison
governors fought a public battle with policymakers as they protested budget cuts and the
introduction of double bunking (Dekker et al 2003).
The overall legitimacy of the prison system seems to be in decline. Whereas the
Dutch prison system could traditionally count on both political and societal support for its
rehabilitation-oriented mission, this support has all but vanished in recent years. This
became painfully clear in the Spring of 2003. A parliamentary committee had invited
representatives from the corrections field for a hearing on double bunking. The
unanimous protests were largely ignored by most members of the committee; the media
paid no attention to the public hearing at all.
16
Germany
In the literature, Germany is usually regarded as a ‘tortoise’ when it comes to the
adoption of administrative reform. The German prison system is no exception: it is still
largely run by the federal states, the Länder. The systems of oversight have not been
reformed by extensive adoption of NPM forms and have exhibited substantial stability, as
summarized in Figure 3 (at the end of this paper). Prison directors are ultimately
responsible for the operation and performance of their institutions, but there are many
constraints on their actions – set by their Land ministries.
The actual oversight of prisons is conducted by the individual Länder. There is
not so much a single ‘German’ approach towards control of prisons, but rather 16 prison
regulation regimes, broadly distinguishable by more ‘social-democratic’ (and ‘liberal’)
and more ‘Christian-democratic’ interpretations of the application of the broad
parameters of the federal law. The prisons in the former East have been incorporated into
the West German system.20
Direct oversight of prisons rests with the respective Land ministries of justice.
Routine reporting requirements for prisons show substantial variation across the different
Länder, consisting of a mixture of annual reports, operational reports and the duty to
report ‘unusual incidents’. Länder adopt different approaches towards inspection, some
separating inspection regimes across operational-managerial, ‘social’, and ‘security’
issues, with the latter inspections sometimes being unannounced, or announced one day
in advance, as in Saxony, or only to the prison director, as in Hesse. In the past three
decades, unannounced visitations were largely abandoned in most Länder, although team
composition has been randomly shifted in order to avoid the emergence of a stable
‘inspection team’ ethos, and to allow more prison staff to be exposed to other
institutions.21
This system of oversight has been embedded into two wider institutional
constellation. First, federal legislation, 1977 Strafvollzugsgesetz, sets out the broad
parameters of the way in which ‘justice’ is executed. Art. 151 states that ‘supervision’
(Aufsicht) of prisons is to be exercised by the relevant Länder justice administrations.
Article 2 requires measures that enable the prisoner to lead a crime-free and socially
responsible life post-imprisonment, with security a supplementary goal. The federal
ministry of justice has no formal means of administration beyond the federal legislation
although it visits prison institutions regularly and initiates consultation and informationsharing exercises.
Second, co-operation at the intergovernmental level across the Länder leads to
formal and informal standard-setting in the form of ‘directives’ (which fill out the federal
law), and more informal coordinative standardization. Federal-wide directives, agreed by
the justice ministers of the Länder, require the regulatory authority (or the
Aufsichtsbehörde) to visit prison institutions as often as necessary in order always to be
20
Whilst these systems in their traditional form are beyond the scope of this section, their incorporation
into the reunified system appears to have had little effect on the Western systems. For example, in Berlin,
all former GDR prisons were closed and the ‘new’ Länder have been involved in a programme of
modernising their prison system by constructing and thereby replacing many prison institutions (as well as
personnel).
21
The parliamentary committees of the various Land parliaments also conduct announced visits to prisons.
17
‘informed about the whole running of the prison’, while granting the individual Länder
the authority to regulate public access. In 2002, all Länder exercised oversight of their
prison systems through specialised divisions within their justice ministries.22 At the same
time, Art.156 of the federal law provides prison directors with substantial discretion in
the running of their prisons, with the extent varying across the Länder.
The control of individual prisons involves a variety of formal control elements
including legal supervision (Rechtsaufsicht), operational supervision (Dienstaufsicht),
and broad ‘professional’ supervision (Fachaufsicht). For behavior modification, a whole
range of potential measures exists, from informal exchange to the formal issuing of
particular or general directives (Weisungen) and to the outright removal of a prison
director.
Ministries
issue
general
directives
(Ermessungsrichtlinien
and
Auslegungsrichtlinien) to guide and instruct prisons in their interpretation and application
of the law. More specific directives (Erlasse) are issued ad hoc in response to specific
incidents. In general, these measures are regarded as a tool to restrict the interpretation of
the 1977 law (and therefore challenge its legal intent), while also constraining the
autonomy of prison management. Nevertheless, at least formally, the federal law
provided a central role for prison directors to use their discretion in the interpretation of
the law (this substantial discretion also reduced the ability to challenge decisions). Such
powers, which are (increasingly) differently interpreted across the Länder, did not affect
the legal competence of the ministry to intervene on a case-by-case basis.
Apart from the direct management of prisons by the ministry, which varies among
Länder, the overall prison management system is highly juristic, reflecting to some extent
the predominance of jurists in the initial prison regimes (until the l980s), and to some
extent also reflecting a specific German sensitivity about the high potential for abuse in
total institutions. Prisoner rights were established in the 1977 federal law, although the
law provided substantial discretion to prison directors. A specific court chamber deals
with prison complaints.23 Complaints to the parliamentary committee require a formal
response by the ministry.
In most Länder parliamentary control is exercised by the Petitionsausschuss
(responsible for complaints) and by the Rechtsausschuss (interested in legality and the
interpretation of law). A largely advisory, but also oversight activity is provided by the
so-called Beiräte (Gerken, 1986; Feest, Lesting and Selling, 1997; Schäfer 1997). A
Beirat is typically composed of lay people including local members of the Land
parliament, social welfare organizations and sometimes business representatives. While
initially (in the late 19th and early 20th century) explicitly designed as an external
oversight institution that prisoners could address directly, this function had by the end of
the 20th century mainly turned into the giving of advice to the prison director.
The main change in oversight has been a shift in some Länder towards delegating
managerial responsibilities to the prison institutions themselves. However, far from a
‘managerialist plot’, this shift reflected the preferences of a reform-minded ‘advocacy
coalition’ interested in reforming the management and control of prisons rather than an
international movement. While to some extent adopting the language of managerial
22
With the exception of North Rhine-Westphalia (which relies on a three-level system involving ministry,
agency and prisons).
23
In most Länder the complaint system was regarded as largely ineffective, leading to a maximum of 3-4
‘substantial’ (or ‘inconvenient’) court statements per year per Land (about 1 per cent overall).
18
reform, this advocacy coalition was mainly interested in reducing operating routines that
they claimed were useless: the routinized forms of control that constrained the
management of prisons, without enhancing effective outside oversight (cf. Beier, 1992;
Köpsel, 1992).
For example, both ministry officials and prison directors often see controls as
purely formal (using a ruler to measure prison reports by length of entries without regard
to their content). Arguably, the traditional style of controlling the prison system was that
ministries would get involved following incidents, by either summoning staff ‘to be
hauled over the coals’ (‘dann wurde denen der Kopf gewaschen’)24 or by imposing ad
hoc measures on the overall prison system after a single prison incident.
Thus, themes of decentralization and delegation of tasks (shifting certain levels of
staffing policies and the like to the prison level), ‘privatization’ of non-core tasks to thirdsector organizations, and the strengthening of the role of the prison director appealed to
this coalition as one way to allow for greater diversity and experimentation, while also
reducing costs and thus reducing the vulnerability of prisons to cost-cutting pressures
from other interests, notably finance ministries.25
However, moves towards increasing formalized contractual relations between
prison and ministry alongside delegation of management were greeted with some
skepticism by prison officials. In particular the realism of targets was disputed. For
example, in one Land, a zero escape rate target was set for political reasons although it
was widely regarded by those in both the ministry and the prison to be an impossible
target. Interviewees commented that there was always likely to be political interference at
times of crisis. At the same time, any attempt at ‘delegation’ was likely to be reversed in
times of crisis (following events such as suicides or escapes) with ministry officials and
politicians extremely anxious to re-establish control. In fact, in Lower Saxony, after a
series of incidents, attempts at delegated control involving the creation of individual ‘link
people’ between prisons and ministry were abandoned and there was a return towards a
more central and centralized form of collecting information and monitoring prisons.
The competition elements of the NPM trend are largely absent in the Länder.
There is generally little use of competition among Länder (as part of a wider
constitutional norm to aspire towards relative equal standards of living), and ministries do
not use comparisons between prisons as a basis for league-table competition. The
idiosyncratic features of different units are traditionally seen as a barrier to the use of
benchmarks and information is not presented or collected in ways that allow for ready
comparisons across Länder. To some extent this reflects differences in prison
infrastructures across the different Länder. It also partly reflects political and
administrative disagreement about which indicators are meaningful. At the time of
writing, there were some attempts to develop a basis for cross-Land comparison, but
there was also a commitment not to use rivalry across the Länder, to avoid blaming and
finger-pointing that might reduce the capability of the prison system to withstand political
pressure for immediate responses.
Since the passing of the 1977 law, there has been a general trend towards
reducing the use of hierarchy and an increase in the autonomy of the field. The Länder
24
Interview, ministry officials.
See Flügge (2001) and other contributions in the volume edited by Flügge, Maelicke and Preusker (2001)
which is said to be the manifesto of this particular advocacy coalition.
25
19
cooperate to prevent competitive comparison of performance and the relationships
between prisons and ministries are very close and informal in some, especially smaller,
Länder. Informal methods for influencing behavior are used, with an official commenting
that ‘this is like being married, “love withdrawal” is the most effective instrument [of the
ministry to control prisons]’. Prisons exchange information in various ways, sometimes
across Länder, and sometimes to defend their autonomy against departments. Securityrelated experts of partnering institutions visit prisons and informally inspect security
arrangements, often informally reporting results to build ‘trust’ in the system. The
Strafvollzugsausschuss of the Länder heads of division responsible for the prison system
cooperate across Länder justice ministers. Shared commitment to the legal intent of the
federal law helps facilitate cooperation which extends to federal-Länder relationships,
where officials in the federal ministry are also often recruited from the Länder. A further,
mainly internal control within prisons, and particularly a veto position, is the work
council (Personalräte).26
Nevertheless, variety remains in control patterns. While some Länder have
increased movement of staff across the different levels of their prison systems, other
Länder, motivated by a political motivation to ‘toughen’ the prison regime, have moved
in a different direction, opening up the control activities in the ministries to ‘incomers’
with a legal background in the light of what are perceived to be overly close relations in
the prison domain. These divergent trends show how the legalistic state tradition is a
theme that can have numerous variations when it comes to the details of control.
Not much is known about the performance (in terms of goal achievement) of
German prisons. Similar to other Western prisons, the constraints on prison management
have changed as a result of a) increased overcrowding; b) worse public finances; c)
higher political sensitivity towards rehabilitation and early release, and; d) a “hardening”
population. Managerial reform may have accentuated certain control issues more than
others, but this was a move from one state of imperfection to another. Some scandals
occurred (most notably in Brandenburg), but they had nothing to do with NPM or its
absence.
The legitimacy of the prison system has come under pressure (as it has in most
Western countries). The 1977 settlement is under threat. There is a demand for more
private investment.27 Prison officials have grown disappointed with tighter financial
controls, a judiciary that puts more people behind bars, and politicians embracing ‘lock
them up’ approaches. This has undermined the tradition of mutuality and decentralized
decision-making, and has led to an increase in ad-hoc interventions; all this works to
decrease the quality of prisons, according to the advocacy coalition.
26
The work councils offer outlets for local staff dissatisfaction, and, with staff unions, can be influential in
shaping broader policy initiatives. However, institutions of ‘internal democracy’ by the prisoners
themselves do not appear to exert control over prisons.
27
Hesse will have a prison that is a private finance initiative in that everything but the control on the
prisoner will be done privately. This is the first private prison and it is under construction.
20
5. Conclusion: The promises of NPM reconsidered
We began this paper by outlining the promises that permeate the discourse on New Public
Management. These promises were formulated by believers, warmly welcomed by
practitioners, and remain largely unassessed by the academic community. In this paper,
we seek to provide such an assessment, specifically looking at the effects of NPM. We
selected three prison systems, two of which are self-described NPM adopters. All three
prison systems have encountered very similar increases in environmental constraints,
which makes for an interesting comparison that may help to answer the key question of
this paper: Does the adoption of NPM principles provide for better control over a prison
system?
This paper shows how difficult such an assessment is due to the differences in
interpretation of what NPM entails. Both the English and the Dutch prison systems have
introduced structural reform to bring in the New Public Management, but the differences
are stark. The British system saw the rise of private prisons and the design of external
control bodies; privatization was not even considered in the Dutch system and external
oversight of prisons was eroded rather than enforced. The German system, which is
widely seen as an NPM-avoider, introduced mechanisms (contractual relations) that in
other countries would be seen as NPM mechanisms. Overall, there is no clear evidence of
the development of a coherent ‘European’ model of prison control. The countries exhibit
national styles of control (with distinctive Lander styles complicating the German case).
Even though there has not been any NPM-related convergence, the three systems
exhibit considerable similarity in the broad features of their control forms, particularly in
operating extensive systems of formal oversight linked to administrative, executive,
legislative and judicial systems. Many of these structures are long-standing and reflect a
long history of exchange of ideas about control of prisons that does not appear to have
been primarily centered on European networks of exchange. Examples include the use of
the British idea of Boards of Visitors and, even further back, the international influence
of Jeremy Bentham’s authoritarian-rationalist blueprint for control in and over prisons
that was first developed in the 1790s (Bentham 1791, Letters II, VI and IX; see also
Freeman 1978; Vagg 1994).
When we look at the effects of NPM reform, it is, in fact, hard to identify any in
these prison systems. If the quality of British prisons improved spectacularly over the
years – and there is no real indication it has – this would have been due to the Woolf
inquiry that followed the Strangeways riots of 1994 (Resodihardjo, 2005). In the Dutch
prison system, NPM reform solidified the autonomy of prison governors; the quality of
detention, if anything, gradually but steadily deteriorated. The German system, on the
other hand, did not seem to suffer from the absence of NPM reform. All in all, it is hard
to see how NPM has lived up to its promises.
This is, of course, what we would predict on the basis of prison theory (discussed
in section 3). If we define control as the capacity to maintain a policy system in a certain
state and if we assume that the politicians in the three countries under study would not
object to assess that state in terms of quality, it becomes easier to see why NPM will not
do much to improve control capacity. The quality of detention is the resultant of ambition
and culture: prison organizations must be infused with the importance of detention
quality. The budget matters, but organizational culture matters more (DiIulio, 1990).
21
Control structures seem less important, at least from a theoretical point of view (Wilson,
1989). If control matters, prison theory suggests that traditional oversight does more for
detention quality than neat outprints of performance figures (prison experts scoff at the
notion that prison quality can be captured in figures).
The findings of this paper suggest at least two things. First, we may well wonder
what the New Public Management is all about. If the adoption of NPM principles do not
seem to make a difference in terms of enhanced control in the case of hugely expensive
and politically vulnerable systems such as corrections, we should begin to ask what the
opportunity costs of the introduction have been. We should contemplate the notion that
the introduction of NPM may have had negative consequences for control and quality.
Moreover, these findings suggest that NPM-reform should be assessed in other
policy systems as well. Police organizations and even courts have been subjected to
NPM-inspired reform, but few seem interested to learn how this reform has improved the
functioning of these systems. This may be understandable for those who adopted the
reform, but it remains a blind corner for the academic field of governance studies. An
approach that promises the stars and is embraced on a world-wide scale must be held to
the light.
22
Figures-
Figure 1: Four Types Of Control of Government
CONTRIVED
RANDOMNESS
OVERSIGHT
Works by unpredictable processes/combinations
of people to deter corruption, capture or antisystem behaviour
Works by: monitoring and direction
of individuals from a point of
authority
Example: selection by lot, rotation of staff
around institutions
Example: audit and inspection
systems
COMPETITION
MUTUALITY
Works by fostering rivalry among individuals
Works by exposing individuals to
horizontal influence from other
individuals
Example: league tables of better and worse
performers
Example: pairing police officers on
patrol
23
Figure 2 Oversight of Prisons in England & Wales
Cabinet Office, HM Treasury
Home Office
Prison and Probation
Ombudsman
Courts
Prison
Service HQ
National Audit Office
Parliament,
Parliamentary
Commissioner
for Administration
(Via MP)
CCG
Prison Service
Area Mgt.
Prisons Inspectorate
Independent
Monitoring Boards
Prisons
Controllers
Private
prisons
environmental
health regulators
private
companies &
shareholders
Figure 3 Oversight of Prisons in ‘Typical’ German Länder
Federal Ministry
of Justice
Ministry of Justice
Courts
Petitionsausschuss
Finance and audit
offices
Strafvollstreckungs
-kammer
Prisons
Beirat
societal
regulators
24
Figure 4 Oversight of Prisons in the Netherlands
Legislature &
associated
bodies
National
ombudsman
Department of Justice
Dept. of Finance,
Court of Audit
National Agency of
Correctional
Institutions (DJI)
Labour & Health
Inspectorates
prisons grouped in
clusters
Boards of Oversight
Courts
RSJ
CVT
25
References
Beier, M (1992) ‘“Aufsicht über den Strafvollzug” – eine Quelle des Miserfolgs’
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