Monitoring Prisons: A Manual on Prison Monitoring to Prevent Torture and Other Ill-Treatment is a publication of DIGNITY – Danish Institute Against Torture, a Danish human-rights organisation specialising in the prevention of torture and other forms of ill-treatment. The manual was principally drafted by DIGNITY staff members Brenda van den Bergh, Marie Brasholt, Kalliopi Kambanella, Jens Modvig and Therese Rytter, with earlier contributions from Nina Nordberg, Ilvija Puce and Walter Suntinger. It also benefited from extensive reviews by Malcolm Evans and Juliet Anango and was published this week.
Far from being merely a technical handbook for prison visitors, the volume is an ambitious attempt to redefine what preventive monitoring is supposed to accomplish. Its governing proposition is captured in the assertion that “Human dignity does not stop at the prison gate” (p. 11). That formulation is morally compelling, but it also opens the manual to a harder question: when monitoring moves beyond documenting abuse towards changing institutions, prison cultures and even the consequences of penal policy, where does independent scrutiny end and intervention begin?
The manual’s strongest intellectual move is to insist that torture prevention cannot be reduced to the detection of spectacular violations. Preventive monitoring is presented as a “proactive, forward-looking, continuous process” (p. 21), requiring monitors to identify risks before abuse becomes an established fact. This transforms the monitor from a conventional inspector into something closer to an investigator, ethnographer, risk analyst and institutional interlocutor. The breadth is one of the book’s considerable strengths. Yet it also creates a problem of mandate. The more the monitor is expected to understand institutional culture, power relations, staff behaviour, informal hierarchies and structural inequality, the harder it becomes to maintain a clean distinction between observing a prison and making normative judgements about how it ought to function.
The authors are equally prepared to question the institution of imprisonment itself. They insist that “Although imprisonment serves as punishment, it should never be imposed for punishment” (p. 42), and challenge the assumption that incarceration necessarily deters crime. The discussion goes further, arguing that “Prison increases crime by eroding community bonds and intensifying structural inequalities” (p. 44). This is a striking proposition for a manual ostensibly concerned with monitoring detention. It places the book within a much larger debate about penal policy, social exclusion and the purposes of punishment. At its best, this expansion is intellectually productive: one cannot fully understand ill-treatment without asking why people are imprisoned, whom imprisonment disproportionately affects and what institutional incentives shape prison life. But the move also raises a methodological question. A monitoring manual begins to shade into a critique of the penal system itself, and the boundary between evidence gathered through monitoring and broader conclusions about imprisonment becomes less distinct.
The chapter on prison climate is particularly revealing. The authors argue that “Values and relationships matter more in prisons than material conditions” (p. 47), defining prison climate as a combination of “material conditions, values, relationships, and the political and moral economies” surrounding imprisonment (p. 47). This is an important corrective to inspection regimes obsessed with measurable infrastructure. A clean cell does not necessarily indicate a humane institution; nor does a newly painted corridor tell us whether prisoners fear the officers who patrol it. Yet climate is notoriously difficult to measure. The manual acknowledges that it must be “sensed, observed and assessed” (p. 48), but this inevitably gives considerable interpretive authority to the monitor. The problem is not that professional judgement is avoidable—it is not—but that the more intangible the object being assessed, the more important it becomes to make the evidentiary basis of that judgement transparent and contestable.
The most serious tension in the manual, however, concerns the possibility that monitoring itself can cause harm. The authors acknowledge that “The more the monitoring work is perceived as effective, the more persons in prison may be at risk of intimidation and reprisals” (p. 97), and even state that “There is a direct correlation between the effectiveness of monitoring and the risk of reprisals” (p. 97). This is a remarkable admission. The people whom monitoring is intended to protect can become more vulnerable precisely because they have spoken to monitors. The manual responds with detailed discussion of informed consent, confidentiality, anonymisation, information security and risk assessment. These are essential safeguards. Yet the paradox cannot be completely solved procedurally. A monitoring body may take every reasonable precaution and still leave a prisoner exposed. Prevention therefore becomes an exercise not only in discovering hidden abuse but in calculating whether the act of discovery may itself produce new danger.
The treatment of prison officers is another area where the manual avoids an easy moral division between prisoners and perpetrators. Staff are described as playing a decisive role in prison conditions, while the authors emphasise that constructive relations between officers and prisoners can both reduce ill-treatment and improve institutional security. “The development of constructive and positive relations between prison officers and those in prison will not only reduce the risk of ill-treatment but will enhance control and security in the institution” (p. 245). This is more than conciliatory language. It reflects the manual’s wider understanding of the prison as a relational institution in which security and human rights are not necessarily opposing objectives. At the same time, the authors do not romanticise staff: negligence, abuse of authority, poor training, inadequate staffing and institutional pressures can all contribute to harm. The result is a more credible account than one that treats prison officers simply as instruments of state coercion.
The manual becomes most politically interesting when it reaches reporting and follow-up. The authors rightly caution that “The quality of the recommendations should be prioritised over the quantity” (p. 260). Yet they also insist that a monitoring body is “not only a visiting mechanism; it is also a ‘change agent’” (p. 269). That phrase substantially enlarges the institution’s implied political function. The discussion of stakeholder analysis, power mapping, advocacy, media engagement, public opinion and political circumstances—including elections and major incidents—shows that the authors understand reform as a political process rather than a purely administrative one. But this creates a tension with another categorical statement: “A monitoring body is neither an advocate for those in prison nor a defender or prosecutor” (p. 276). How, precisely, can an institution be a “change agent” while maintaining the distance required of an independent monitor? The manual recognises this dilemma but does not entirely resolve it.
That unresolved problem becomes sharper in the chapter on implementation. The authors declare that “The ultimate aim of preventive monitoring is to bring about systemic institutional and cultural change to prevent torture and other ill-treatment in detention” (p. 270). This is an admirable ambition, but it changes the standard by which monitoring is judged. If the purpose is systemic change, then producing accurate reports is no longer sufficient. The manual itself acknowledges the implementation gap and asks, in effect, what really works. Yet its practical guidance is stronger on identifying problems and constructing recommendations than on establishing a general causal theory explaining why some monitoring interventions transform institutions while others disappear into bureaucratic filing systems. The political will of governments, resources, institutional resistance, public pressure and changes in leadership may all matter, but these variables are difficult to control and even harder to attribute.
This is eventually what makes Monitoring Prisons more intellectually interesting than its utilitarian title suggests. Its practical instructions are extensive, but beneath them lies a substantial theory of human dignity, institutional power and prevention. The authors insist on person-first language, attention to intersectionality, sensitivity to trauma, meaningful confidentiality and respect for prison staff, while simultaneously demanding rigorous documentation, triangulation and professional discipline. The manual understands that prisons are not merely buildings in which violations occur; they are systems in which law, architecture, relationships, informal authority, institutional culture and political decisions interact.
Its central unresolved tension is therefore also its most productive one. Preventive monitoring is presented simultaneously as independent scrutiny and as an instrument for systemic transformation. The former demands distance; the latter demands engagement. The former seeks credible evidence; the latter requires strategic action. The former must avoid becoming an advocate, defender or prosecutor; the latter explicitly calls the monitoring body a “change agent”. Rather than weakening the manual, this contradiction exposes the real difficulty of torture prevention. Monitoring is not simply about seeing what happens inside prisons. It is about deciding what to do with what has been seen—and accepting that even the act of seeing can alter the behaviour of those being observed. In that sense, DIGNITY’s manual is most valuable not when it presents monitoring as a settled methodology, but when it reveals how unstable, consequential and politically charged the supposedly neutral act of inspection can become.
