Approaches to care among prison officers in Germany

• In Event: Reintegration after imprisonment as a human right – but what does that mean in practice?

Abstract

Although Germany is a federal republic comprised of sixteen discreet states, the German constitution mandates that the legal right to resocialisation constitutes the primary aim of imprisonment (Lazarus 2004; Neubacher, Liebling & Kant 2021). Yet prison research has also established that practice within the prison walls can be removed from legal aspirations and instead run on its own practical logics (Brown 2023).
This paper is the result of a joint research project from the Universität zu Köln, Freie Universität Berlin, and Universität Bern titled: ‘Worauf es im Gefängnis wirklich ankommt: What Really Matters in Prisons? Measuring the Quality of Prison Life in Germany and Switzerland’. The project constitutes an in-depth examination of the cultural and moral climate of two German and one Swiss prison and combines the collection of both quantitative and qualitative data. It involves the administration of the MQPL (Measuring Quality of Prison Life) prisoner survey, and the SQL (Staff Quality of Life) staff survey developed at the Prisons Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, combined with ‘semi-ethnographic’ data collected through interviews and observation.
The paper draws on data from the two German prisons and explores staff attitudes to relationships with and care for prisoners.

Author

• Deborah Kant, Universität zu Köln