Conceptualising and Measuring the Quality of Prison Life
Alison Liebling, ‘Conceptualising and Measuring the Quality of Prison Life ’, in: Academy for Justice Commissioning news bulletin (February 2011), Issue 13, pp.11–13
Alison Liebling and colleagues have spent around ten years considering how the social environment of a prison can be accurately assessed: what it is important to measure; and how we can capture distinctions between prisons.of prison life. Consistent with growing conceptual work on prison life, it was possible, using the survey data, to see that ‘scores’ on ‘staff-prisoner relationships’ and ‘fairness’, for example, were related to outcomes, like ‘order’ that some prisons were much better implementers of the safer custody strategy than others (even when they had received significant additional funding), with significant effects on outcomes.
