Recent plans to expand and invest in the prison estate in England and Wales highlight the urgency of rethinking traditional penal approaches, emphasising rehabilitation, and empowering residents. With the growing prison population, the introduction of prisoner-led initiatives (PLIs) offers an innovative way to reconfigure the dynamics within these institutions and mitigate some of the pains of imprisonment. This research, forming part of ongoing doctoral work, critically examines the role of PLIs in fostering a more rehabilitative, less punitive environment, potentially enhancing staff-inmate relationships. The research aims to provide insights into the operation and transformative potential of PLIs, how staff and residents respond to them, and explore how they might reconfigure penal power.
Central to this study are critical reflections on the notion that empowering residents through PLIs can lead to improvements in prisoner behaviour, prison culture, and the perception of power dynamics. These programs are expected to foster a sense of responsibility and agency among residents, challenging and shifting traditional power structures within prisons. The research acknowledges the challenges in implementing PLIs across various prison categories but aims to understand their transformative impact in a category B prison in England and Wales.
For practitioners, this study offers evidence-based recommendations for implementing and supporting PLIs and contributing to a more humane and effective prison system. The overarching goal of this PhD project is to reveal the potential of PLIs as a mechanism to reform penal power, enhance relationships, empower residents, and ultimately influence recidivism rates. By service users’ ability to positively influence their environment, this research advocates for progressive, effective penal reforms. This proposal serves as a vital discussion platform, opening avenues for further exploration and implementation in penal reform.

Literature on citizenship during incarceration has focused predominantly on the formal rights of those incarcerated, or engagement in activities pre-defined as examples of ‘active citizenship’ within prison. However, little scholarly attention has been given to the importance of understanding ‘lived citizenship’ (Hall & Williamson, 1999), or the subjective meaning citizenship holds, for those who are criminalised, punished or imprisoned (MacIntyre et al., 2021). Despite a growing body of comparative work in relation to the formal consequences of punishment and conviction for individuals’ citizenship – particularly through disenfranchisement – there has also been little comparative discussion of how citizenship is subjectively understood or experienced by people imprisoned in different national contexts.

This paper will draw on work undertaken as part of the first comparative study of lived citizenship from the perspectives of imprisoned men, in the Republic of Ireland and England. Findings from this study highlighted three core themes intrinsic to participants’ understandings of ‘citizenship’: belonging to a self-defined community, opportunities for contributions to these communities, and a sense of identity beyond the ‘prisoner’ label, with national context being important to how these key elements of ‘citizenship’ were understood and experienced. Focusing on the first of these core themes, and drawing on qualitative interviews in both jurisdictions, this paper will explore the ways in which national context intertwines with the institutional context of imprisonment in shaping understandings of community identification, membership and belonging for imprisoned men.

This paper will discuss how the concept of ‘social infrastructure’, normally applied to the city and local communities, can be applied to daily life across different prison environments. Social infrastructure in prisons is an innovative concept that provides the foundation for allowing prisoners to try on different, future-oriented roles, which supports practice that aims to release people who can be good neighbours, by providing a physical and social platform that allows prisoners to practice responsibility and normalised human interaction.
The exploration of this concept if part of an ongoing research project funded by the Australian Research Council, building on previous comparative work focused on prison practice in Australia and Norway. That work included fieldwork inside 14 different prisons and semi-structured interviews with 240 staff and prisoners. I am proposing the concept of social infrastructure in prisons to capture the variables that might underlie a prison environment characterised by lower levels of violence, higher staff satisfaction, and lower rates of recidivism post-release. Social infrastructure in prisons can be conceptualised as a platform that promotes more normalised interactions, and as the connective tissue that is made up of the social interactions between prisoners and staff within the institution. What is has is common with its non-prison equivalent, is a focus on the places and spaces that facilitate and support such interactions.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, women make up around 6 percent of the prison population and are housed in three prisons around the country: Auckland Women’s, Arohata (near Wellington), and Christchurch Women’s. In 2022, in the face of a rising prison population and chronic staff shortages, Corrections New Zealand decided to close Arohata prison to sentenced women so that staff could be redeployed to prisons holding men. The sentenced women from Arohata were transferred to Auckland or Christchurch, substantially further away from their whānau¹, families and other forms of support, with additional consequences for their access to mental health and addictions treatment, rehabilitation programmes, and their prospects for parole. This paper will discuss how this decision affected the women who were transferred and, drawing on a recent legal case, will discuss how it represents unlawful discrimination on the basis of sex/gender in contravention of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990. Finally, it will reflect on how the closure of Arohata demonstrates the continuing marginalization of the needs of women in a system designed for men.

¹Indigenous Māori concept which broadly translates as extended family and supportive others