Are prisoners Clients?

The concept of the involuntary client is very familiar to those people working in statutory agencies—the social work literature has explored this. those working in child protection, community corrections and juvenile justice rely on it for the development of their philosophical and theoretical models for intervention. There are many people for whom the services of the state are their only option because of the nature of the service or the lack of other suppliers in the market place. To consider that people should lose the benefits of client status because of these limits is to deny them dignity and to assume it lies only within the area of financial transaction — therefore for those who can afford to pay. The dignity of the client and the consequent practices and behaviours expected of people who deliver a human service are well documented and the concept has been around a lot longer than the recent literature on customer service.