Pace Law Review
Volume 30
Issue 5 Fall 2010
Opening Up a Closed World: A Sourcebook on
Prison Oversight

Article 8

11-18-2010

Professionalism in Corrections and the Need for
External Scrutiny: An International Overview
Andrew Coyle
University of London

Recommended Citation
Andrew Coyle, Professionalism in Corrections and the Need for External Scrutiny: An International
Overview, 30 Pace L. Rev. 1503 (2010)
Available at: http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/plr/vol30/iss5/8
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Law at DigitalCommons@Pace. It has been accepted for inclusion in Pace Law
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Professionalism in Corrections
and the Need for External
Scrutiny: An International
Overview
Andrew Coyle
This paper argues that external scrutiny of prisons and
correctional institutions can be of assistance to those who
manage these institutions.
The Use of Imprisonment
As a preface to that discussion, it is worth noting a few
facts about the context of imprisonment in the world today.
The International Centre for Prison Studies in King’s
College of the University of London collects data on prison
systems from virtually every country.1 From this data, we can
deduce with some assurance that there are well over nine
million men, women and children in prisons around the world.2
Almost half of these are in just three countries: United States
(2.29 million),3 China (1.57 million),4 and Russia (0.89 million).5
The rate of people in prison in each country is usually
quoted per 100,000 of the entire population.6 On that basis, the


Andrew Coyle is Professor of Prison Studies in the University of
London and previously was for many years a warden in the prison services of
the United Kingdom.
1. See International Centre for Prison Studies, King’s College, London,
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/law/research/icps (last visited Mar. 9, 2010).
2. See ROY WALMSLEY, INT’L CTR. FOR PRISON STUDIES, WORLD PRISON
POPULATION
LIST
1
(8th
ed.
2009),
available
at
http://wwwcache1.kcl.ac.uk/news/wmprint.php?news_id=396&year=2005
(stating that “[m]ore that 9.8 million people are held in penal institutions
throughout the world”).
3. Id. at 3.
4. Id. at 4.
5. Id. at 5.
6. See id. at 1.

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world average is about 145.7 In the United States there are
currently around 2.3 million people in prisons and jails.8 With
a population of just over 304 million, the United States has just
less than five percent of the population of the world, but it has
approximately twenty-three percent of its prisoners.9 In Texas
there are over 1,000 prisoners per 100,000 citizens: one percent
of the whole population of the State.10
In the United Kingdom, there are about 90,000 men,
women and children in prison.11 That is 151 people in prison or
jail for every 100,000 in the population.12 According to the
figures from the British Crime Survey for 2008-2009, since
1995, overall crime in the United Kingdom has fallen by 45%,13
violent crime has fallen by 49%,14 and domestic burglary has
fallen by 58%.15 Yet during the same period the number of
people in prison and jail in the United Kingdom has increased
by almost 70% (from 53,000 to 80,000).16
According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics,17 serious
violent crime levels have been decreasing since 1993, property
crimes have been decreasing for many years, and firearmsrelated crimes have plummeted since 1993 (but showed a slight

7. Id.
8. Adam Liptak, Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations, N.Y.
TIMES, Apr. 23, 2008, at A1.
9. Id.
10. Id.
11. See International Centre for Prison Studies, World Prison Brief,
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/law/research/icps/worldbrief/wpb_stats.php?area
=all&category=wb_poptotal (last visited Mar. 9, 2010) (stating that the prison
population of England and Wales is 83,378).
12. Liptak, supra note 8. See also International Centre for Prison
Studies, World Prison Brief, Prison Brief for United Kingdom: England &
Wales,
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/law/research/icps/worldbrief/wpb_country.php?co
untry=169 (last visited Mar. 9, 2010) (stating that the number is 152 per
100,000).
13. HOME OFFICE, STATISTICAL BULLETIN 1: CRIME IN ENGLAND AND
WALES 2008/09, at 3 (Alison Walker et al. eds., 2009), available at
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs09/hosb1109vol1.pdf.
14. Id.
15. Id.
16. See International Centre for Prison Studies, supra note 12 (stating
that the UK prison population numbered 50,962 in 1995 and 80,216 in 2007).
17. BUREAU OF JUST. STATS., U.S. DEP’T OF JUST., www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/
(last visited Mar. 16, 2010) (home page).

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increase in 2005).18 Yet during the same period the number of
people in prison and jail has increased by 77% (1.3 million to
2.3 million).19
As Timothy Lynch of the Cato Institute’s Project on
Criminal Justice famously expressed, “one needs to put the 2million-prisoner factoid into context. It . . . took more than 200
years for America to hold 1 million prisoners all at once. And
yet we have managed to incarcerate the second million in only
the past 10 years.”20 So, what is going on here?
Statistics such as these are a notorious minefield for
academic and political debate and I do not wish to go too far
down that path. But there are some conclusions that we can
draw with respect to both the United States and the United
Kingdom. Despite the fact that overall levels of crime have
been going down for a number of years, rates of imprisonment
in both countries have continued to increase. There is no proof,
incidentally, that levels of crime have gone down because rates
of imprisonment have gone up.
It is notoriously difficult to make international
comparisons about levels of crime because of different legal
definitions and different methods of collecting statistics.
However, we can make broad comparisons between countries
which we might otherwise expect to be similar.
For example, we now know that the rate of imprisonment
in the U.S. is 751 per 100,000.21 Yet if we slip across the
northern border we find that the rate of imprisonment in
Canada is a comparatively low 116 per 100,000.22 Similarly in
Europe, we have learned that the rate of imprisonment in the
UK is about 150, while the rate in Germany is much lower at
88.23 The rate in Spain is 165 per 100,000,24 but nip across the
18. Id. (follow “Crime Type” hyperlink).
19. Id. (follow “Corrections” hyperlink).
20. Timothy Lynch, All Locked Up, WASH. POST, Feb. 20, 2000, at B7.
21. Liptak, supra note 8.
22. International Centre for Prison Studies, World Prison Brief, Prison
Brief for Canada,
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/law/research/icps/worldbrief/wpb_country.php?co
untry=188 (last visited Mar. 9, 2010).
23. Liptak, supra note 8; International Centre for Prison Studies, World
Prison
Brief,
Prison
Brief
for
Germany,
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/law/research/icps/worldbrief/wpb_country.php?co
untry=139 (last visited Mar. 9, 2010).

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border to France and the rate is only 96.25
These discrepancies cannot be explained by any differences
in crime rates.
The message that we learn from around the world is that
rates of imprisonment bear little relevance to crime rates. Put
bluntly, the number of its citizens a country imprisons is a
matter of political and social choice. It is essential that
legislators at all levels be involved in the debate about the
number of persons in prison. If they are to be involved, they
need to be aware of these statistics.
Independent Scrutiny Can be an Aid to Good Prison
Management
Having set the scene, we can now turn to the main subject
of this paper, the contribution that external inspection can
make to improving professionalism in prison management. At
the beginning of the 1990s I was asked to become Warden of
Brixton Prison in London. Brixton was one of the biggest
prisons in the country at that time, with around 1,200
prisoners. It had the largest budget of all the prisons in the
system because of the number of staff it needed to carry out an
unusually wide variety of tasks. It was the oldest prison in
London, having been opened in 1819.26 Many of its buildings
were unreconstructed and not fit for purpose. Its resources
were very limited. Shortly before I went there two prisoners
accused of terrorist offences managed to have a gun smuggled
in and they shot their way out of the prison.
Just before my arrival, there had been two separate
independent inspections of Brixton Prison. The first was
carried out by the independent Chief Inspector of Prisons. He
24. International Centre for Prison Studies, World Prison Brief, Prison
Brief
for
Spain,
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/law/research/icps/worldbrief/wpb_country.php?co
untry=165 (last visited Mar. 9, 2010).
25. International Centre for Prison Studies, World Prison Brief, Prison
Brief
for
France,
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/law/research/icps/worldbrief/wpb_country.php?co
untry=138 (last visited Mar. 9, 2010).
26. Brixton Prison “Recycling’ Prisoners”, POLITICS.CO.UK, Oct. 22, 2008,
http://www.politics.co.uk/news/policing-and-crime/brixton-prison-recyclingprisoners--$1245810.htm.

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published a damning report which factually listed all that was
wrong with the prison.27 The only good thing he had to say
about it was that there was some fine lead work on the roof of
the administration block. The second inspection was by the
European Committee for the Prevention of Torture.28 This is a
regional committee which has the right of unsupervised entry
to all places of detention in the forty-seven member countries of
the Council of Europe. After its visit to Brixton in 1990, this
committee concluded that the combination of overcrowding,
poor sanitary facilities and lack of activities for the prisoners
amounted to “inhuman and degrading treatment.”29
At one level, these two reports were a shattering blow for
an incoming warden. They resulted in a tremendous amount of
negative coverage in the media and, in the short term, were
very damaging for the morale of staff. However, they were
both factually correct. I had been aware upon taking my
command that there was a mountain to climb and that I
needed to quickly develop a strategy to manage the radical
change which would be necessary in the prison. These two
objective and independent reports provided me with tools that I
could use to convince staff of the need for change, to
demonstrate to government ministers and national officials
that the prison had set impossible targets, and to demand that
sufficient resources be provided so that we deliver decent and
humane care to prisoners. The reports also provided an
opportunity to engage with the media and local public about
what was going on in the prison, what could be expected of it,
and what should not be expected of it. This latter initiative
carried a great deal of risk, but it bore fruit when one of the
national daily newspapers carried a major feature headed, “The
shame of Brixton is the shame of the nation.”30 The article
describes the unacceptable conditions in the prison, while at
the same time recognising the commitment and hard work of
27. HM Inspector of Prisons, Report of an Inspection of Brixton Prison
(London: Home Office) (1990) (on file with author).
28. Council of Europe, Report to the United Kingdom Government on the
visits to the United Kingdom carried out by the European Committee for the
Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment
(CPT) from 29 July 1990 to 10 August 1990, Doc. No. CPT/Inf (91) 15 [EN],
available at http://www.cpt.coe.int/documents/gbr/1991-15-inf-eng.pdf.
29. Id. at 37.
30. THE INDEPENDENT, Dec. 11, 1991 (newspaper) (on file with author).

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staff. It went on to question the purpose of sending so many
mentally ill, addicted, homeless and marginalised persons to
prison instead of dealing with them in other ways.31
The process of change and improvement which we began in
Brixton in 1991 was greatly assisted by these two independent
reports because they were able to draw public attention to all
the pressures which made it difficult to manage the prison
properly. These were pressures which everyone connected with
the prison were already aware of, but it took external
inspections to get them on the public agenda.
The Standards on which Independent Scrutiny Should be
Based
Sometimes the question is asked, “What happens if the
independent inspectors get it wrong?” One way of ensuring
that this does not happen is to have an objective set of
standards against which to inspect. Objective standards are to
be found from a variety of sources. In the first place, a number
of them have been agreed to at an international level, many of
them at the beginning of the second half of the twentieth
century, with the United States playing a leading role in their
drafting and in their international acceptance by individual
sovereign countries working together. Some of them are
contained in treaties, which are legally binding on the parties
which have signed and ratified them. One of the most
important of these is the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights, which has been ratified by every country
represented at the symposium and therefore has the force of
law in all of them. The most relevant article of that covenant is
Article 10, which states that, “All persons deprived of their
liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the
inherent dignity of the human person.”32
The broad principles contained in these binding treaties
are covered in greater detail in a variety of instruments which
have been approved by the General Assembly of the United

31. Id.
32. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights art. 10(1), G.A.
Res. 2200A (XXI), at 54, U.N. GAOR, 21st Sess., 1496th plen. mtg., U.N. Doc.
A/6316 (Dec. 16, 1966).

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Nations, of which the United States, Canada, Sweden, the
Netherlands and the United Kingdom are constituent
members. These instruments include:


The Standard Minimum Rules for the
Treatment of Prisoners33
 The Basic Principles for the Treatment of
Prisoners.34
 The Principles of Medical Ethics35
 The Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement
Officials36
There are also various standards which have been agreed
to by independent states operating on a regional basis. The
most obvious example for this region is the Inter-American
Convention on Human Rights,37 which the United States has
signed but not yet ratified. The most developed regional
standards are to be found within the greater European region.
They include binding treaties, such as the European
Convention on Human Rights38 and the European Convention
for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading
Treatment or Punishment.39 They also include standards
which individual countries have agreed to implement. One
relevant example is the European Prison Rules.40 Their latest
33. Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, U.N. Econ.
& Soc. Council [ESCOR] Res. 663 C (XXIV), at 11, ESCOROR, 24th Sess.,
994th plen. mtg., U.N. Doc. E/3048 (July 31, 1957), amended by ESCOR Res.
2076 (LXII), at 35, ESCOROR, 62nd Sess., 2059th plen. mtg., U.N. Doc.
E/5988 (May 13, 1977).
34. Basic Principles for the Treatment of Prisoners, G.A. Res. 45/111, at
199-200, 45 U.N. GAOR, 45th Sess., 68th plen. mtg., U.N. Doc. A/RES/45/111
(Dec. 14, 1990).
35. Principles of Medical Ethics, G.A. Res. 37/194, at 210-11, U.N.
GAOR, 37th Sess., 111th plen. mtg., U.N. Doc. A/RES/37/194 (Dec. 18, 1982).
36. Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials, G.A. Res. 34/169, at
185-87, 34th Sess., 106th plen. mtg., U.N. Doc. A/RES/34/169 (Dec. 17, 1979).
37. Inter-American Convention on Human Rights, Nov. 22, 1969, 1144
U.N.T.S. 123.
38. European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and
Fundamental Freedoms, Nov. 4, 1950, 213 U.N.T.S. 222.
39. European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or
Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Nov. 26, 1987, Europ. T.S. No. 126.
40. Council of Europe, Comm. of Ministers, Recommendation of the
Committee of Ministers to Member States on the European Prison Rules,
952nd
mtg.,
Doc.
No.
Rec(2006)2
(2006),
available
at

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revision was adopted in January 2006 by the Foreign Ministers
(equivalents of the U.S. Secretary of State) of the forty-seven
member countries of the Council of Europe. They begin with
the following set of basic principles:
1. All persons deprived of their liberty shall be
treated with respect for their human rights.
2. Persons deprived of their liberty retain all
rights that are not lawfully taken away by
the decision sentencing them or remanding
them in custody.
3. Restrictions placed on persons deprived of
their liberty shall be the minimum necessary
and proportionate to the legitimate objective
for which they are imposed.
4. Prison conditions that infringe prisoners’
human rights are not justified by lack of
resources.
5. Life in prison shall approximate as closely as
possible the positive aspects of life in the
community.
6. All detention shall be managed so as to
facilitate the reintegration into free society of
persons who have been deprived of their
liberty.
7. Co-operation with outside social services and
as far as possible the involvement of civil
society in prison life shall be encouraged.
8. Prison staff carry out an important public
service and their recruitment, training and
conditions of work shall enable them to
maintain high standards in their care of
prisoners.
9. All prisons shall be subject to regular
government inspection and independent
monitoring.41

https://wcd.coe.int/ViewDoc.jsp?id=955747&Site=CM&BackColorInternet=C3
C3C3&BackColorIntranet=EDB021&BackColorLogged=F5D383.
41. Id. at pt. 1, ¶¶ 1-9.

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Finally, in most countries there are standards that have
been set at the national level, and in the case of the United
States, at the state level.
These international, regional and national standards are
not merely theoretical, nor are they simply aspirational. They
are intended to be applied in practice in the day-to-day
management of prisons. In her contribution, Anne Owers
writes about the standards she applies in her inspection of
prisons in England and Wales.42 These are not standards that
she has thought up out of her own head. All of them are
referenced to the various human rights standards previously
mentioned. The International Centre for Prison Studies has
just worked with the Chief Inspector of Prisons for Scotland to
produce a set of standards that he will use in his inspections
and they are all referenced in a similar way.43
Conclusion
The problems that face prisons across the world are
broadly similar and the situation in the United States is no
different from other countries.
The common problems
generally relate to under-resourcing and overcrowding; poor
health (including mental health) of many prisoners; issues
relating to staff, such as low pay, poor training and little public
respect for what they do.
If indeed the problems of prisons are common, it may be
that the solutions also are common and that some of the
solutions are to be found in adherence to the objective sets of
standards that are described in this paper.

42. Anne Owers, Prison Inspection and the Protection of Prisoners’
Rights, 30 PACE L. REV. 1535 (2010).
43. See HM CHIEF INSPECTOR OF PRISONS FOR SCOTLAND, STANDARDS
USED IN THE INSPECTION OF PRISONS IN SCOTLAND (2006), available at
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/Doc/140391/0034521.pdf.

9