Hester Paanakker

of the prison’s central management team, and six policy advisors at the ministerial department that constitutes the prison sector’s headquarters at the Ministry of Justice and Security. Value Convergence and Value Facilitation According to Prison Officers What stands out in the research findings is prison officers’ description of penal craftsmanship, which first and foremost adheres to a very compact set of four very distinct (ideal) values. To prison officers, penal craftsmanship is about humanity (putting care and support to the individual detainee center stage), security (minimizing aggression, violence, and tensions), reintegration (changing the detainee’s mentality and behavior through resocialization), and task effectiveness (being granted sufficient time, and an environment of sufficient peace and quiet, to conduct daily administrative and organizational penal tasks, such as cell inspections and mentor commitments). Despite the strong similarities, prison officers’ description of penal craftsmanship is best described as a mixed image of convergence. On the one hand, the results show that, among themselves, frontline prison officers adhere to the same types of (ideal) values in their profession, and that they prioritize them in a similar way. This is evident of a strong convergence in value identification and value prioritization : prison officers have a shared understanding of the values that matter most and of the most important ways to translate these values to concrete penal skills, knowledge and practices of their craft. On the other hand, the results show slightly more divergence in value interpretation. Underlying the similarities at the aggregated level, we see that prison officers mentioned a considerable variety of skills, knowledge, and practices that can produce different ways of behavior in practicing craftsmanship. Prison officers may thus differ in the way they apply skills within value categories, or in the way they combine skills from different value categories. For instance, some are strict and distant in their interaction with detainees (more emphasis on security and disciplining behavior), whereas others are informal and engaged (more emphasis on humanity and close and personal interaction with detainees). Furthermore, prison officers displayed strong convergence in their views on the institutional facilitation of craftsmanship values in practice. They depict a highly uniform picture of a strong institutional focus on efficiency measures and an overriding managerial fixation with task effectiveness, exemplified in an obsession for numbers and a box-ticking mentality. This is a first indication of value divergence between different hierarchical levels – one based on the idea 200 Summary in English