Staff-prisoner relationships are at the heart of the prison system and a stable prison life depends to a large extent on getting these relationships right, particularly in long-term maximum security establishments in the UK. Despite their significance, few studies have explored empirically how these relationships develop and operate. Understanding staff-prisoner interactions requires a detailed and firmly grounded appreciation of the broader tasks prison officers carry out and the nature of prison officer work. Staff-prisoner relationships are invested with an unusual amount of power. This power is, however, `held in reserve' most of the time, as Sykes argued in 1958. Previous studies have generally regarded prison staff superficially and critically. The study reported in this article employs an innovative `appreciative' methodology, seeking to allow staff to focus on the best aspects of their work and role, and the conditions in which they function especially well. Two important features of their work - the peacekeeping aspects and the use of discretion - must be considered in any attempt to describe how staff-prisoner relationships are accomplished.

Using the COVID-19 pandemic as an example of an existential threat, we conducted a nationwide survey in March 2020 asking 445 Americans about their hopes and fears, their opinions about the coronavirus pandemic, and their attitudes for getting through the public health crisis. In the present research, we examine the coronavirus pandemic as a complex problem and explore its effects on respondents’ levels of optimism to resolve the public health crisis. While much existing research examines the influence of risk perception on optimism, we specifically measure how respondents’ levels of empathy and trust affect social resilience and relate to hopes and fears for their personal health and public health in the United States. Specifically, we examine respondents’ levels of trust in government and their neighbors as well as their levels of empathy, alienation, and social isolation. Our research confirmed the importance of empathy to counter the spread of the virus while preventing economic collapse. In addition, we found that relational factors such as alienation and trust affect individuals’ levels of optimism or pessimism for getting through the public health crisis.

This article explores the use of appreciative inquiry [Al] in a number of prisons, with different outcomes. It considers the nature of the Al process, both as a mode of inquiry and a mode of transformation. There are some links, in terms of the underlying principles, between Al and restorative justice and these are explored by the authors. They conclude that Al constitutes a fair and inclusive research approach that generates a rich and faithful account of a prison to emerge. It generates energy among prison staff that can be harnessed in the direction of better practice. But there are dangers when highly motivated prison officers are frustrated by a lack of responsiveness by senior managers in their `wishes for the prison', however understandable the reasons for this. The mechanism at work is a normative process, which seems to engage the research participants in meaningful, constructive and ethically relevant dialogue about their practices and experiences. The special and complex moral environment of the prison makes Al especially relevant.

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