© Sanchayan Nath 2013
Source – 1
I had the opportunity to attend a talk by Professor Ann Hoyt (henceforth referred to as the speaker) on the 14th of October, 2013 as a part of the Monday Colloquium Series of the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University Bloomington. The talk was titled “The Challenge of Offender Re-Entry: A Cooperative Response”.
During her talk, the speaker questioned the rationale behind the existing model of prison governance in the US, and then drew upon her studies of the social co-operative model of prison governance in Italy in order to analyze if lessons from Italy could be applied in the US.
Based on the talk, my understanding is that there are at-least three tiers of governance in the social-co-operative model prevalent in Italy. Prison inmates formulate some rules, there is a professional management which runs the prisons, and the local government (for instance, municipalities) too has a say in the decision making process. However, my understanding of the system is in-complete as I have no clarity on how the three tiers of governance interact with each other – are the three tiers nested within each other, or do the three tiers operate relatively independent of each other? What happens in case there are conflicts in the rules formulated at the three different tiers? What kind of conflict resolution mechanisms exist to handle such conflicts?
As the speaker highlighted during her talk, there appears to exist a policy of reservation in the manner in which inmates are allocated to different types of co-operatives. For instance, thirty percent of members in certain co-operatives appear to be from the “disadvantaged” communities. These communities could refer to mentally-special groups of individuals and could also refer to certain kinds of low-risk prison inmates. Thus, it appears that there is wide heterogeneity in the nature of community membership. The nature of heterogeneity within these communities raises a few questions – for instance, I have no clarity on whether differential rules exist for managing such heterogeneity? Does the heterogeneous nature of the membership mean that the outputs of the cooperatives too are differential in nature? How are such differentials handled by the cooperatives? It appears that special training programmes exist within a few of these co-operatives to ensure quality control of outputs. How effective have these programmes been? Are there differentials in the nature of such programmes? And, do such differentials affect the profits generated by the cooperatives? Are there differences in the rights and responsibilities of the different groups of members? … so on and so forth.
In response to one of the questions raised by a member in the audience, the speaker pointed out that the management of the cooperatives is very careful in ensuring that the dreaded Italian Mafia does not infiltrate these organizations. Only those prison inmates are allowed to be members of these cooperatives who are deemed to have demonstrated “good” behavior by the administrators. However, the filtering process appears to be driven by subjective procedures in the absence of clearly laid out guidelines. One could get into a debate on whether clearly laid out guidelines are effective and on whether subjective procedures are foolproof. A cynic would suggest that such cooperatives are a back door method for ensuring that certain types of prisoners lead a more comfortable life than what could have been possible within the otherwise feared conditions in the state-run prisons in the country.
However, the study does raise a few interesting questions – given such environmental barriers, is it possible to design a humane effective self-governed prison system, and what steps can be taken to make such a possibility a reality.
I congratulate the speaker for taking on such a challenging task, and I look forward to reading the answers to the above mentioned questions, in the near future.
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