Preface

Writing this book was intended to be therapeutic. I needed to make sense of a professional lifetime in prisons research at a time when it looked to me as if a complete moral breakdown had occurred in prisons and in penal policy. I wanted to draw out the positive lessons learned from a long and sustained period of data collection in a series of replications with differences, all of which seemed to support the same argument: human beings need the virtues. We all require kindness, relationships, and recognition. Durkheim was right: there are moral laws in the universe. Not rigid, predictive, inviolable laws, but empirically substantiated trends that tell us something important about who we are. A great deal has happened between the publication of my last ‘big book’, Prisons and Their Moral Performance, and the completion of this one. The effects of the September 2001 terror attacks at the World Trade Centre, financial austerity, my return to a model prison now paralysed by distrust (a study I refer to here as ‘Whitemoor 2’), Brexit, an act of terrorism at Fishmonger’s Hall in London, and some deep personal losses challenged some of my optimism about human nature and about the role of social science. I reclaim some of that optimism here, despite the constant grounding and re-grounding of my work in the study of prison suicide. There lies the key. I am more certain than I ever have been of the ‘chemistry’ of survivability and human growth, in prison at least.1 I think there are good reasons to extend these findings to life outside.