No, jail staff shouldn’t call prisoners ‘residents’

What do you call someone in prison? An inmate? Prisoner? How about a ‘resident’? That’s how those locked up in Britain’s jails are now described by the Ministry of Justice and the Prison Service. Apart from the cringing absurdity of labelling people whom the state has detained as if they had voluntarily checked into the care home from hell, what does this tell us about the culture of the Prison Service? And why does it matter?

The Ministry of Justice has form for assaults on the English language. Recent guidance on offenders, still under a prison sentence but being supervised in the community, has cancelled this apparently dangerously oppressive label replacing it with ‘supervised individuals’. I suspect that members of the public might prefer probation officers to focus more on reversing our eye watering reconviction statistics: over 60 per cent of those sentenced to 12 months and under in custody go on to offend again.