(Managing) Violence Across UK Prisons

About this event

We draw on a new panel dataset of all public prisons in England and Wales to document large and persistent differences in violence across facilities. We document these persistent differences in violence against staff, between inmates, and in self-attack and self-harm (including suicides). Variation in observable “inputs”, such as inmate composition, staffing, or physical infrastructure, plays a rather limited role in explaining observed variation in violence. To understand the role of management practices, we exploit the staggered implementation of prison inspections using a stacked difference-in-difference design. Inspections diagnose key areas of concern in prison conditions and practices and identify recommendations for which governors plan actions in response. We find that inspections lead to sustained reductions in violence, particularly self-inflicted violence among female inmates and all forms of violence in non-Victorian prisons.