Andrew Groves

Crime victims’ self-medication: Findings from a study in South Australia

While considerable literature has explored the complex nature of victimisation, few empirical studies have examined the role of alcohol and other drugs (AODs) in victims’ experiences, specifically victims’ self-medication using AODs and its impact on ongoing health and welfare needs. Addressing the dearth of empirical research on the nature and extent of victims’ self-medication, and drawing upon quantitative data from a survey (n = 102) of victims from Adelaide, South Australia this article explores individuals’ experiences of victimisation and AOD use against type of victimisation, type of peer support network and type of consumption. The findings indicate support for the self-medication for trauma hypothesis, namely that victimisation is positively associated with considerable increase in AOD consumption. On the other hand, there is a lack of support for the supplementary hypothesis that network support is associated with victimisation/re-victimisation. The authors demonstrate that further empirical work is needed to deepen understanding of victims’ AOD use and expedite the development of evidence-based policy and support frameworks.

Tackling correctional corruption

Corruption is a problem in prisons about which we hear very little, except when there is an escape from custody or other scandal that makes the media. The closed nature of correctional institutions has made the activities that go on within them less visible to the outside world. While some persons might be inclined to dismiss correctional corruption as an issue, this view ignores the scale of criminality and misconduct that can go on in prison and the impact it can have upon not just the good order of the prison or the rights of prisoners but on the prospects for successful reintegration of ex-prisoners into society.This book is the first to examine the phenomenon in any detail or to suggest what might be done to reduce its incidence and the harms that can arise from it. Andrew Goldsmith, Mark Halsey and Andrew Groves argue that it is not enough to tackle corruption alone. Rather there should be a broader attempt to promote what the authors call ‘correctional integrity’.

Overview and Background

While researching this book, two of the authors undertook a number of visits to correctional centres across several Australian jurisdictions, the USA and the UK, in order to personally review the settings in which the types of corruption discussed in this book occur. During these visits, we were frequently drawn into conversation with prison staff. One of the most memorable comments we heard came from a prison manager during a visit to a large metropolitan prison, who said, in effect, “Eighty percent of staff of this prison should not be working here.” This comment could not pass without our asking why this was the case. The manager replied, “Because they’re scared to come to work.” Later in the book, we will return to this point, as it aptly characterises the nature of correctional settings as both places of work and places to become drawn into workplace-related corruption.

Promoting Correctional Integrity

We began this book with an anecdote about COs, in particular how many, it was claimed, found their work not only challenging, but threatening, or even dangerous. Officers were commonly afraid to go to work, it was said. The ramifications of such a statement being true are profoundly disturbing. It has integrity-threatening implications as well as broader consequences for prisoner and officer conditions. Most importantly for present purposes, such a story underlines the inextricable links among correctional structures, cultures and environments, as well as matters such as integrity. In this book, we have deliberately resisted the temptation to call simply for better management, more training or more situational measures as ways of mitigating the incidence of or harms from correctional corruption. Although each of such measures has a place in any coordinated effort, each such measure must also reference the correctional environment—in particular, the ways in which policies, resources, political and public expectations define the terrain within which correctional institutions and their officers operate.

Assaults, Use of Force and Control

Violence, it has been suggested, is “omnipresent in prison” (Kupers 1996: 189). The ability of a correctional facility “to protect prisoners and staff from physical harm is a fundamental measure of the success or failure of that institution,” Gibbons and Katzenbach (2006: 21) argue. Physical harm can occur within prisons at the hands of other prisoners or COs. Given the book’s focus on correctional integrity, this chapter is concerned primarily with the latter phenomenon. We shall argue that its prevalence and importance reflects the often tenuous nature of staff control over the establishments in which they work, as well as the strongly masculinist nature of many correctional settings. As the histories of penal establishments show, too often “cultures can develop…where staff [become] careless and occasionally brutal with the power they hold” (Liebling et al. 2011: 115). Violence, whether by officers or by clients, has been said to be a part of the “prison economy” (Copes et al. 2011). This latter description implies that violence rarely occurs in a vacuum and, more commonly, it is an expression or outcome of other factors affecting correctional settings. Consistent with our approach in this book, those factors may be situational, structural or environmental in nature. Yet despite there being considerable evidence that fear of being physically victimised in prison shapes many prisoners’ as well as officers’ perceptions of their environment (Toch 1992), staff-driven violence against prisoners has received little attention to date in comparison with the much larger prisoner-on-prisoner violence literature (see Wooldredge 1991, 1998; Copes et al. 2011; Hochstetler and DeLisi 2005; Liebling and Arnold 2012).

The Nature of Correctional Settings

This chapter considers the context for correctional corruption. In particular, it outlines an approach to analysing correctional settings that reveals key dynamics around, as well as within, correctional settings that have implications for preserving and restoring integrity.

Procurement, Kickbacks and Fiddles

It has been said that, “Few activities create greater temptations or offer more opportunities for corruption than public sector procurement” (Transparency International 2006: 13). Procurement of goods and services constitutes a common area for corruption in private and public sector settings (see Graycar and Prenzler 2013; CCC 2008; Ware et al. 2011). Transparency International (2006) has estimated that, worldwide, approximately US

Inappropriate Dealing with Client Information

400 billion per year is lost as a direct consequence of bribery, maladministration and corruption in public procurement. Procurement corruption in corrections means that money intended for expenditure on goods and services related to the purposes of correctional services is being spent either inefficiently or being diverted away into private hands. In an era of “mass incarceration,” the size of the correctional sector means that considerable amounts of money, often in the millions and tens of millions of dollars, can be involved in contracts entered into by correctional authorities with outside suppliers for building and leasing of prisons, jails and detention centres, and for supplying provisions and other goods and services essential for running these facilities. In sheer opportunity terms, the temptations for illicit profiteering (bribes, kickbacks, etc.) by officers and managers from exogenous relationships with outside providers are substantial, as we will see below.

Uncovering and Reporting Corruption

Information records play a highly significant role in correctional settings. One scholar has referred to the “supremacy that information has within the prison system” (McIlwain 2004: 254). This system dependence has grown greater as bureaucracy has intensified and psychological risk-management principles have come to play a greater part in institutional life (Crewe 2011b). The significance of written reports and other information collected by officers lies largely in their constitutive character—how information that enters the official record comes to represent, correctly or incorrectly, the identity/character of the prisoner (or probationer or parolee) for a variety of system decisions, including classification for accommodation purposes, as well as access to programs and to health-related treatment. How this information is shaped, in short, has material, and potentially prejudicial, consequences in the lives of correctional clients, and thus creates conditions for integrity breaches (see Ruppert 2013).

How to 'Melt the Ice' on the Streets: A Social-control Analysis on the Rise of Methamphetamine within Australia and the Need to Reduce Demand

In this chapter, we examine the primary factors that affect the uncovering (discovery) and reporting of correctional corruption, in particular by officers and contractors. It will be argued that, more broadly, there is a considerable organisational, cultural and political resistance to admitting to, or searching for, instances of correctional corruption. In addition, for the same reasons, it is typically very difficult for individual officers to report suspicions or evidence of corruption within correctional settings. Establishing organisational structures, cultures and climates conducive to reporting corrupt practices requires an acknowledgement of the difficult balancing act between integrity and current understandings of prison security and safety, and the need for a more open and honest discussion about priorities. If, as we argue, Sykes was correct about the inevitable corruption of authority associated with the smooth running of a prison system, then what is prioritised as unacceptable corruption needs to be clearly established, and the costs of uncovering and reporting it fully calculated and provided for in the structures, training and resourcing needed for pursuing those priorities.