Integrity, Ethics and Professionalism
Integrity questions ask what you would do when honesty, boundaries and loyalty pull in different directions. Scoring rarely rewards loyalty to a colleague over duty; it rewards the choice you could defend in a report, a courtroom or a disciplinary hearing.
Concepts you must know
- Honesty in records: reports must be accurate, contemporaneous and complete, including your own errors.
- Boundaries: no personal relationships with prisoners or their families, no favours, no gifts, no contact outside work, no social media contact.
- Information security: you access and share records only for a legitimate work purpose.
- Contraband and corruption: the corruption continuum begins with small, rationalised exceptions ("just this once", "everyone does it").
- Conflict of interest: declare it early; a declared conflict is manageable, a hidden one is misconduct.
- Authority and force must be justifiable, not merely effective.
- Respectful treatment applies regardless of what a prisoner has done.
Traps
Offers that look trivial: accepting a coffee, passing a cigarette, carrying a message, "keeping an eye" on someone's property, softening a report to protect a colleague. Another trap is the noble-cause rationalisation: breaking a rule for a good outcome. A third is silence - seeing misconduct and deciding it is not your business.
Rule of thumb
The front-page test: would you be comfortable if this decision, text or favour appeared in a report or a newspaper? If you would need to hide it, do not do it. If you have already done it, disclose it immediately - early self-disclosure is treated very differently from discovery.
Worked example
A colleague asks you to bring a phone in for a prisoner who "just wants to call his mum". Refuse, do not carry it, and report the request through the correct channel. Doing the favour even once creates leverage over you and ends careers.