Locating trust in a climate of fear: Religion, moral status, prisoner leadership, and risk in maximum security prisons

High security prisons have fundamentally changed: at one, 40 per cent of its population are Muslim. Half of this number converted whilst in prison. 55 per cent are Black or mixed race; 97 per cent are serving sentences of over 10 years. Most are held many years beyond their tariff, or expected punishment. Many prisoners are starting to regard their sentences as unexpected and illegitimate. In a recent study, we described this prison as 'paralysed by distrust'. In theoretical shorthand, staff do not 'recognise' their 'audience' any more. It is impossible to 'place trust intelligently' among a population you are afraid of. Unvalidated 'intelligence' has replaced close connection between staff and prisoners. This is the opposite of 'dynamic security', on which order in prison depends. There are explanations for this transformation, related to social change outside: drastically lengthening sentences; the growing number of people imprisoned for offences related to terrorism, a changing political and policy climate, in which growth-related activities are regarded as 'pampering', and concerns about faith-related discrimination. Staff are not well informed about the differences between authentic faith practices and bids for power. Prisoners at early stages in long sentences undergo a kind of 'existential crisis', and the only part of the prison where life has not been severely constrained is at Friday prayers, which 120 men attend each Friday. One prisoner put it thus: The best way to be able to feel that you can trust anyone in here is to be a Muslim ... like I said, it's a proper temptation. It's the best thing in here, really... It's the only place in the prison where there's love, where there's trust, where there's real friendships, loyalty, any of them type of things. The other social change is managerialism, which has transformed the knowledge base of prison managers, and brought about an almost exclusive focus on risk. The prison could not be more relevant to the understanding of British society. Six of the cases of known terrorist acts in the UK have involved young men who converted to Islam in prison. On the other hand, many prisoners are drawn to faith in prison to resolve questions of meaning, hope and identity: faith scripts can be transformative. Networks and relationships in prison shape these dynamics. Our hypothesis is that in a risk-dominated, low trust climate in which meaning is scarce, faith scripts can become transformative in the wrong direction. Where some trust flows, faith can be part of a positive change trajectory. This territory is politically contested, risky and extremely difficult to study. The American author of the only credible study on radicalisation in prison says, this field is 'bereft of social science methodologies'. We think prison sociology - which has always explored prisoner sub-cultures, hierarchies and leadership, but rarely mentioned faith - needs theology, and that this bringing together of two disciplines would transform and humanise our understanding of the prison in ways that are of deep significance to our fractured inner city communities. Our argument is that risk dominance and exclusion is practically disastrous and efforts at recognition and intelligent trust, undertaken clear-headedly, improve most outcomes that senior managers and the public might reasonably care about. We have been developing highly effective methods for testing this hypothesis: ethnography-led measurement. It depends on slow entry into the field, the use of Appreciative Inquiry: a creative method aimed at soliciting peak experiences and capturing what is there (so where is respect or trust found) rather than what is missing; dialogue; and 'reserved participation'; gradually organised long interviews, and then this becomes measurement. Prisoners (and staff) help us to identify what matters, to find the right language, to operationalise and explore the relevant concepts.