Prison Police’s Action Strategy

Prison management is an important part of the social order.The state has formulated a large number of laws and regulations for it,and departments at all levels have formulated detailed norms and standards.However,the transformation of text into practice is not a direct and consistent input-output process.The system text needs to be divided by layers and executed with flexibility to achieve regulations landing.In this process,the selective use of discretion by the prison police affects the implementation of the prison regulations and the construction of prison order.This paper takes the work practice of the police in L prison as an example,and uses the "Working Environment-Action Strategy" of the street bureaucratic theory as the analysis framework to explore the working environment of the prison police and the action strategies behind it.According to the law enforcement reality of the prison police and the summary of the previous street bureaucratic theory on the "working environment" research,this article divides the working environment into three dimensions: Institutional environment,Task environment and Relationship environment.The Institutional environment constructs the external environment and the source of legitimacy for the use of discretion.The task environment that is difficult to program creates the realistic space for the exercise of discretion.The relationship environment produced by interaction between the prisoner and the police is an important motivation for the prison police to use their discretion.Based on the manifestation of the prison police’s discretion in the system,this paper divides the prison police’s discretion into three types: qualitative discretion,expansive discretion and the optional discretion.The core of the prison police action strategy is the selective use of different types of discretion.Specifically,when using qualitative discretion and expansive discretion,due to the lack of a clear range of behavior choices,prison police will partly abandon the use of such discretion and tend to comply with the rules to avoid law enforcement risks.When using optional discretion,the prison police will actively act in a legal and flexible way,but also will negatively respond to heavy work tasks and assessments in a perfunctory way.Faced with the dilemma that the street bureaucrats escape from the "street",how to exert the advantage of the discretion on the basis of controlling it? This paper puts forward three measures,setting up discretion criterion,setting up the precedent of discretion and improving the law enforcement protection mechanism,so as to realize the harmonious coexistence of system and discretion through the institutionalization of the exercise of discretion.