Prisoners redesignated as residents

In official guidance for prison chiefs and probation officers, criminals serving time in jail have been rebranded "residents" and offenders released on probation have been renamed "supervised individuals."

It is part of a wider attempt to modernise prisons and focus efforts on rehabilitation, a programme which includes a £600,000 Government-funded project to assess whether reoffending can be reduced by rebranding and redesigning jails.

At HMP Berwyn in North Wales, the experiment has included renaming cells to "rooms", prison blocks as "communities" and holding cells as "waiting rooms" and where inmates are provided with laptops when they arrive and there are facilities for tea and sandwiches.

Joe Farrar, head of the prison and probation service, used "residents" in an announcement stating:  "All prison governors will be given funding to spend on in-cell activities and extra technology to help our incredible staff support residents to maintain family ties and access support services."

The prison lexicon includes the term "Residents" as part of the guidance, for example HMP Wandsworth, advising: "Residents have phones in their rooms and are able to make outgoing calls" and in the latest executive summary for the probation service's Target Operating Model, there is no mention of offenders - but "supervised individuals" are referenced four times.

The move is seen by officials as an attempt to avoid "labelling" people as offenders in an effort to help them move on from their lives of crime, however former prison governors have criticised it as evidence of "fashionable" and "hyper-liberal" theories that fail to force offenders to take responsibility for their crimes.

Even prison reform groups acknowledged they did not use the terminology and preferred to call offenders in jail either "people in prison" or "prisoners."

Former prison governor and Government adviser on extremism in jails, Ian Acheson, said: "Describing prisoners as 'residents' in places where you would sometimes hesitate to put livestock is just sophistry. Instead of parroting fashionable orthodoxies the prison service should concentrate its efforts on safe, ordered and purposeful prisons with staff clearly and confidently in charge. You can't change people's lives and stop them making further victims with labels."

Another former prison governor and emeritus professor of criminology at Birmingham University, David Wilson, commented that it was right that people should not be judged "by the worst thing they have done 30 or 40 years ago" and that everyone was entitled to "move on".

However, he said the use of "labels" was symptomatic of a "hyper-liberalism that doesn't want to be honest with itself about the fact that there are people who do harm and sometimes extreme harm to other people and to society, stating: "The people who laugh at this most of all are offenders themselves. The offenders themselves say: I think I should be like a resident or I am a person under supervision and I am not a drug dealer, or burglar or person who has caused grievous bodily harm."

A prison and probation service spokesman said: "Our staff are focused on keeping the public safe from dangerous offenders and preventing reoffending, regardless of the terminology they use." He said the term "resident" was sometimes used to collectively describe prisoners and children in custody, while the terms "offender" and "prisoner" continued to be used by staff.

The Johnson Partnership

Barnsley Crime Solicitors