Legitimacy and Order in Prisons

This paper attempts to theorise some aspects of problems of order in prisons in the light of recent contributions in the theory of legitimacy by Beetham (1991) and Tyler (1990). Previous work in the sociology of punishment has generall raised the problem of legitimation only implicitly, and often merely to deny its possibility. Drawing on fieldwork in two English maximum security prisons, we argue that while prisons present chronic problems of legitimacy, it may nevertheless be possible to specify circumstances under which prisoners are more or less likely to confer or withhold degrees of recognition of legitimate authority of prison staff and regimes. Such conditions include not only the regularity and efficiency of service delivery, but also perceived distributive and procedural fairness of treatment, as well as human qualities in the nature of routines. We deploy these considerations in analysing aspects of current British penal politics.