Hester Paanakker

officers that take care of prisoners and provide everyday public service delivery on the ground. In comparison with many other countries, prison officers in the Netherlands have a great deal of discretionary power, and a wide range of responsibilities (including the roles of mentoring, being a first line of psychological support, and stimulating rehabilitation). This makes them pre-eminent street-level professionals. This will be further elucidated in the upcoming chapters of the thesis. In this introduction, the point I want to make is that the extensive societal effects of incarceration make the way the street-level craft of penal service delivery is viewed and practiced highly relevant to society, and makes the prison sector an exemplary case study of frontline craft. Second, in the prison sector, the articulation of craft is strongly related to values. The nature of the service delivery and the nature of its beneficiaries (i.e. prisoners) make the prison sector a sector in which good craftsmanship and the realization of public values as vital as it is vulnerable. The existence of multiple co-existing values becomes very apparent in every aspect of prison sector work (Liebling & Arnold, 2004; Liebling, Price, & Shefer, 2010). These complicate an unambiguous realization of frontline craftsmanship. Prison officers must continually combine repressiveness with humanity, trying to strike as good a balance as possible between such essentially different values (Liebling, 2000). Moreover, prison officials are required to display a constant and relatively large adaptive capacity. This holds for policy actors and correctional managers in responding to unanticipated situations or scandals (for instance prison escapes, riots, inhumane treatment of prisoners, and the concurrent call for immediate adaptation to and monitoring of more humane, or better secured, imprisonment) as well as for street-level workers in coping with the sometimes unpredictable, aggressive, or even violent behavior of prisoners, opening up space for different interpretation of and adherence to the values of penal craftsmanship. Third, and in contradiction, the prison system and its correctional facilities are also characterized by a strongly protocoled policy and work environment: strict hierarchy and stratification are core characteristics. In the prison system abiding authority is deeply embedded in both its functional structure and its organizational culture. This profoundly layered structure creates a fairly large gap between policy actors and executive actors. Values pertaining to the frontline craft may be differently identified, understood, or prioritized and enacted, depending on whether the public official operates closer to or further away from prisoners. The fact that, despite the highly protocoled environment and an overall command culture, individual prisons are known to develop their own fairly “closed” culture with a strong signature of “the way 22 Chapter 1