Bureaucratised Risk: Ethical and Moral Blindness in Contemporary Penal Practice

This paper explores how risk bureaucracies that have come to dominate in contemporary penal practice can result in diverse forms of Ethical and Moral Blindness. These issues arise when the deployment of penal institutional aims related to risk, and administrative risk technologies, results in practices that are either blind to the impacts for individuals in prison (ethical) or in blindness to the very humans central to that risk work (moral). Here I explore three forms of risk practice that are foremost in the contemporary prisons of England and Wales to think through the implications of these issues for broader penal policy: 1. Forensic Psychology; 2. Prison Security; 3. the National Research Committee that oversees applications by external parties to conduct research in prisons. I will argue that for each of these bureaucratised risk processes there are resulting harmful, unethical, and immoral practices that arise out of institutional and system level risk obsessions.