Hester Paanakker

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Nijmegen, 18 August 2020 In addition to the valuable people I acknowledge below, I want to express my sincere gratitude to the members of the reading committee of this thesis for their time and willingness to read and evaluate my work, for their constructive feedback, and for being leading examples of good scholarship in the field of values, governance, and public management themselves: prof.dr . Willem Trommel (Vrije Universiteit, the Netherlands), prof.dr . Barry Bozeman (Arizona State University, USA), prof.dr . Tina Nabatchi (Syracuse University, USA), prof.dr . Zeger van der Wal (Leiden University, the Netherlands), and prof.dr . Trui Steen (KU Leuven, Belgium). Nijmegen, 18 May 2020 So here I am, writing the preface and acknowledgements to my thesis at eight in the evening with my four-year-old next to me on the couch, because she really wanted to go camping (in the living room) and it is not camping if you cannot stay up late, she assures me. It is illustrative of the slightly chaotic last couple of weeks of finalizing this thesis. Of course I anticipated it to be stressful, I saw it many times with many of my friends and colleagues (and yes, this covers as long a period as it sounds). But little did I know I would be writing my final chapters amidst a global pandemic that turned society upside down, combining working at home with remote teaching and the care of three little girls who no longer went to day care, school, on playdates, or to their grandparents. Let’s just say it was an excellent opportunity to further improve my multitasking skills. I want to thank quite a few people for different reasons. First, I want to acknowledge Ron Scherf (Custodial Institutions Agency), Toon Molleman (at that time employed at the Research and Documentation Centre, but later on also as senior policy advisor at the Custodial Institutions Agency, and, as this goes with careers that move too quickly to keep up with, managing director of different prisons) and Arie van den Hurk (Custodial Institutions Agency) –all at the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security- for helping me to obtain access to and knowledge of the prison sector in the Netherlands, and as such for their role in shaping the contours of this PhD research. Special thanks also go to the prison officers, prison managers and policy makers that shared their stories with me. Thank you for letting me access your world and finding the time even if 7