The First Initiatives

It is apparent from this list of 15 anchor projects that a great many initiatives had already started before we got to this point. Many of these initiatives were internal to the Prison Service and aimed at making the service more efficient, more focused and more aligned to the vision. I will just deal with one such initiative here, namely the ethics structure. In Chapters 2 and 3, where I touched on the origin of HUMANS, I mentioned the fact that there had been cases of prison officers being compromised by inmates. When we started to experiment with HUMANS, we were well aware that this problem might re-surface if we did not have a way to deal with the ethical dilemmas that a prison officer would inevitably face when he became familiar with his charges. How should he deal with the hard luck stories that inmates would come up with from time to time to seek his help beyond what was allowed? To an officer new to the service, this would be emotionally draining. We need to give him all the support possible to make the judgement call and if, indeed, some interventions beyond the rules were called for, we should re-examine the rules. What we must not do was to treat every hard luck story as an attempt to compromise our officer and reject it out of hand. The result of this line of thought resulted in the ethics structure.