Improving Prisoner-Staff Relationships : Exporting Grendon's Good Practice

Early in 2009, the newly appointed Director of Offender Management, South-East Region, asked the Governor of Grendon to lead a flagship project to improve the quality of prisoner-staff relationships in the region's prisons. A recent HM Chief Inspector's report on Parkhurst had been highly critical, while Grendon has been repeatedly praised by HM Chief Inspector for its outstanding and excellent prisoner-staff relationships. The flagship project, now an innovation project, encompasses a wide range of initiatives throughout the South-East Region, one of which seeks to identify aspects of the Grendon regime which could be distilled and transferred to other prisons in order to assist in improving prisoner engagement and interactions with staff. This article describes how the Head of Psychology at Grendon, along with a group of Grendon prisoners, have set about distilling aspects of the Grendon regime with a view to exporting them to HMP Isle of Wight. This work forms part of a developing link between the two prisons