Hester Paanakker

In terms of task effectiveness, the numeric focus also undercuts the time and space prison officers have to get their daily tasks done, undermining their professional autonomy, the quality of the detainee program, and resulting in mounting frustration and stress: If everything is prescribed, top-down, and you only have to score and gain your points and besides that nothing is taken into consideration, it does, it becomes an erosion of your work in my opinion. […] Your position in completely undermined. You kinda went from machinist to conductor or cleaner so to speak. (Prison officer 6, facility 2) However, the majority, 71% of respondents, in this case study did not experience these dilemmas, nor large dilemmas between other values. Although most respondents have experienced frustration with the reporting burden and, in their eyes, problematic cutbacks, they tend not to experience the severe undercutting of other values to the extent that they can no longer realize these values. This can be explained by the two distinct coping mechanisms that respondents employ to deal with the implementation problems and potential moral stress that result from value divergence. Coping Strategy 1: Street-level Workers Use Cognitive Distancing and Indifference First, a clear coping strategy that prison officers are found to revert to in dealing with value divergence is a strategy of cognitive distancing through an attitude of indifference . The following quotes well illustrate what this coping strategy is about: Interviewer: Do you mind the focus on numbers and having to account for what you do? Respondent: No. I don’t see them , I don’t hear them, they are not my responsibility. No. (Prison officer 2, facility 2) I think the prison officer parks the differences in vision. And at a certain point switches to a mode of ‘I will just execute what I think my work is about, and I will just let changes pass.’ (Middle manager 4, facility 1) When street-level workers do not have an influence on a situation and they do not have the 151 The Effect of Value Divergence