Hester Paanakker

systemic world, that operates to the glorification of measurable outputs and undermines the professional autonomy of prison officers. In this rhetoric, the reporting obligations are clearly believed to have a dampening impact on task effectiveness and on the quality of organizational tools that are supposed to safeguard humanity, security, and rehabilitation. Prison officers and middle managers often feel pressured to produce false and meaningless reports: a tactic of simply reaching the target without paying much, if any, attention to content. With respect to the required cell inspections, they go ‘yes, I haven’t even been there, but I just filled it out. At least my list is ticked. […]’ And if I put all the reports of the team meetings next to each other, I notice they have just copied that same meeting three times and registered it under different dates. Just to tick the box of the required number of meetings. That really defeats its own purpose. (Managing director 2, facility 1) Now, each day it costs you two hours, by yourself, to report everything. I think that’s a lot. And what they are doing now is in fact just working the numbers. If the list is there, everything is fine. Do you have to check if it has been filled out correctly? No, the list is there, so it is all good. (Prison officer 7, facility 1) Moreover, number obsession is said to translate to systems that are numerically too rigid, and that do not take account of the human factor, giving rise to conflicts between effectiveness, and the four intrinsic values involved in serving prison inmates on the work floor. To prison officers, and to a lesser extent also to middle managers, such systems render situations unworkable because they lack the time and staffing to fully manage the many different daily tasks of detainee care. Such implied measurability generates very narrow interpretations of humanity, security, reintegration and task effectiveness that many at implementation level seem not to agree with. The examples offered are rampant. They include a system that regulates meticulously what the detainees and prison officers have to do at specific times of the day, and prescribes how many minutes this should take, at the expense of humanity: Then they said: Ok, hear this: we have created time, white planes in the system [of the daily programs]. But that is impossible, it is still human work. Every day is different. I cannot foresee that a detainee will come to me crying that his mom has died. (Prison officer 7, facility 1) 147 The Effect of Value Divergence