Prison staff you will deal with

Within the prison system there are lots of different people you’ll deal with day to day.

The information on this page is based on the law in England & Wales. If you’re in Scotland, click here for the guide for your jurisdiction. (Northern Ireland guide coming soon.)

• Firstly there are the uniformed staff, split roughly into Prison Officers and Operational Support Grade. If you’re in a privately run prison the job titles may be slightly different, but the roles work the same way.
• Prison officers can be told apart by the epaulettes they wear: a basic grade officer has one stripe, a supervising officer two, and a custodial manager three. Above these are various levels of governor, who aren’t in uniform – a typical prison will have 10 or more governors covering areas like security, residential, regimes and operations, all reporting up to the Governing Governor.
• Secondly there are the “service providers” who work within the prison but aren’t prison officers and won’t carry keys to most of the establishment. These are the people delivering education, courses, healthcare, workshops and employment.
• Thirdly there’s admin staff, who do exactly what the name suggests.
• Offenders with learning difficulties

Whatever their job title, all of these people have a real impact on your time inside. At a basic level, staff have access to a central computer system – still often called P-NOMIS from its old name, though the department running it is now HMPPS (His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service) rather than the old NOMS – which records comments about your behaviour and attitude, good and bad. This record is used to assess whether you’re suitable to move up from Standard to Enhanced status, and whether you can be trusted with a position of responsibility, such as an orderly job.

The better you treat prison staff, the better they tend to treat you. They’re dealing day to day with people from all walks of life and every kind of issue, and their job is essentially to carry out the instructions of the courts and keep the public protected – in practice, that means stopping you escaping, not making you happy. Most officers get plenty of hassle and hostility from the people in their care, so if you’re reasonable and polite you’ll usually find they do more to help you than someone who’s always complaining and difficult – that’s just human nature. That said, it would be dishonest to pretend every officer treats prisoners with respect; some don’t, and some won’t lift a finger to help you.

The convention in prison is that you’ll be addressed as Mr Smith or Miss Brown by staff, and you’re expected to address them by name too. Staff usually do know your name, but as a new prisoner it can take a while to learn theirs, so the common fallback is to call male uniformed staff “Boss” or “Sir”, and female uniformed staff “Miss”. Governors in plain clothes will usually answer to “Guv” or “Ma’am”. First names are rarely used by staff, and even among themselves, in front of prisoners, colleagues tend to stick to Miss Patel or Mr Green.

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