Legitimacy

Building Legitimate Authority

The overall number of prisoners, particularly when compared to officers, makes it difficult to maintain order based solely on a Hobbesian model of surveillance and force. There are simply too many prisoners in any facility to control them all through coercion and physical control alone. Thus, staff must somehow persuade inmates to want to follow the rules on their own free will. To do this, prison administrators and other correctional staff attempt to enforce discipline and order in such a way that (1) the rules can be defended through political and moral arguments, (2) administrator and staff authority is exerted consistently and fairly based on a set principles, and (3) administrators and staff recognize prisoners' citizenship and humanity.

In large part, views about legitimacy rest on beliefs about the causes of disorder within prisons. If disorder is assumed to result from a few antisocial individuals who cause trouble and lead others into noncompliant behavior, then a security model that limits prisoners' movements and ability to congregate logically follows. But if disorder is understood instead to be a group phenomenon—as the result of widespread perceived injustice—then attempts to build legitimacy would be the more reasonable response.

In Prisons and the Problem of Order, criminologists Richard Sparks, Anthony Bottoms, and Will Hay (1996) tested the assumption that legitimate authority was more efficient at securing order than force and sanctions by comparing the regimes of two English prisons. One institution relied on a situational crime prevention model, in which prisoners' movements were rigidly restricted (termed here a security model). The other attempted to limit noncompliance by allowing prisoners greater mobility and autonomy (legitimacy model). While there were greater rates of minor noncompliance in the prison operating according to a legitimacy model, there also were fewer major disturbances. The researchers conclude that recognizing the need to improve social conditions helped build legitimate authority and thereby maintained order more efficiently than a security-only model.

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