Celebrating the Life and Legacy of Mick Ryan

This event, celebrating the life and legacy of Mick Ryan, Emeritus Professor of Penal Law at the University of Greenwich, campaigner for justice, researcher and scholar, was hosted by the Centre for Transformative and Global Justice, a centre within Institute for Inclusive Communities & Environments (ICE) at the University of Greenwich.

Introduced and chaired by Richard Wild, the audience heard from several speakers, who spoke about Mick’s enduring contribution to penal law, his commitment to justice, and the lasting influence of his life’s work on both policy and practice. One of the speakers was Mike Nellis, Emeritus Professor of Criminal and Community Justice in the Law School at the University of Strathclyde.

Remembering Mick Ryan (1942-2024): A Story about Fenner Brockway (1888-1988) and Some Reflections on Political Longevity

Mike Nellis

Political conversations with Mick in the years I knew him best, 1978-82 – the final years of Radical Alternatives to Prison (RAP) – made a lasting impression on me. He was that kind of man. I have three of his books, and it has never occurred to me to part with any of them. But it’s not a book that I want to recall here, but rather a story he told me about a chance encounter he had with Lord Fenner Brockway in the House of Lords (or maybe the Commons) Library, while he (Mick) was researching something about labour movement history. I’m pretty sure this took place in 1980, when Mick was aged 38 and Fenner Brockway, who had joined the Independent Labour Party in 1907, aged 19, was still a tall, straight-backed and alert 92-year-old. I don’t remember the whole story word for word – only the punchline – but what Mick said went something like this:

We got talking about past and present crises of the Left in Europe – there was always a crisis! – and I was stunned by how erudite and up-to-date he [Brockway] was. We got really immersed in the conversation, which went on for a while, and I completely lost track of how old he was. It was only when I said something or other about a strategic way forward in the present – I forget exactly what – that he leaned towards me, put his hand on my arm, looked me in the eye, and earnestly exclaimed, "that’s exactly what I said to Rosa Luxemburg!" – that it suddenly struck me – shocked me to remember – how old he actually was, how long he’d been around, who he’d known.

Now, I’m pretty sure Fenner Brockway never met Rosa Luxemburg in person, so he must have meant something he said to her in writing. But it’s a good story all the same. He certainly corresponded with her and other German Socialists, in the early days of their pacifist opposition to the war breaking out in Europe in 1914. She was murdered by fascist paramilitaries in 1919.

As far as I could tell, Mick genuinely liked Fenner Brockway, and why wouldn’t he? Brockway was a lifelong socialist in the space between reform and revolution, a fellow humanist, an intellectual, an indefatigable activist on multiple fronts, an anti-colonialist, a supporter of women’s suffrage, an imprisoned pacifist in the First World War, a resolute opponent of fascism before and during the Second World War, a rancorous member of the Labour Party (and twice an MP), a critic of indefensible global poverty, and an anti-nuclear campaigner in the post-war world. He was a man whose political reputation was never erased – only dented, in the eyes of some – by his final 24 years in the House of Lords as Baron Brockway of Eton and Slough. He was appointed in 1964, after losing his seat in the Commons, aged 78, remaining there until his death in 1988 (just short of his hundredth birthday).

Mostly, today, I want to make some points about political longevity in darkening times, to which both Mick and Brockway’s long activist lives speak. But first, I’ll note the penal politics which link the two of them. In a piece he wrote on “the history of prison abolition” for Abolition Futures, Mick said:

Whilst abolitionists today often turn first to intellectuals from the United States like Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis, in the past British abolitionists have tended to look towards European thinkers such as Herman Bianchi, Nils Christie, Luc Hulsman, Thomas Mathiesen and Ambalavaner Sivanandan. RAP was also influenced by British pacifists, such as Fenner Brockway, whose critique of the prison was developed by their own imprisonment.

In terms of direct influence, in the minds of the people who founded RAP in 1970, that’s stretching things, but “in spirt” it’s correct. RAP did grow out of the same socialist tradition, well to the left of the Labour Party that Brockway mostly worked in. There was a link between the creation of RAP and CND, of which Fenner Brockway had been a co-founder in 1957, (explored in Mick’s book, The Acceptable Pressure Group) but Brockway’s much earlier involvement in the Prison System Enquiry Committee 1920-1922, set up by the ILP and the Fabians (specifically Beatrice and Sidney Webb) – and the brief moment in which abolition had impinged on it – was not much remembered in the late 1960s.

The Report of this Enquiry, English Prisons Today (1922), written by Quaker Stephen Hobhouse and ILP member Fenner Brockway, both of whom had been imprisoned conscientious objectors, was recalled – if at all – more for its reformist impact in the late 1920s and 30s than for its critical origins. In many ways, in 1970, what RAP – which was not initially abolitionist – was set up to react against was the still prison-centric penal system which the Prisons Enquiry report, co-opted by Prison Commission officials, had played a part in creating before 1939.

Socialist horizons on imprisonment might have looked different in 1970, had the internal, privately conducted debate on prison abolition at the Prison Enquiry, which took place towards the end of its deliberations, resulted in a different outcome a half century earlier. As Mick rightly says in The Acceptable Pressure Group, the publication of English Prisons Today was a “landmark” – although it had been compromised. The Prison System Enquiry Committee had initially been set up to collect the testimonies of First World War conscientious objectors (CO’s) and formerly imprisoned suffragettes. Stephen Hobhouse was appointed its secretary on the basis of his “conchie” experience and family connections – he was Beatrice Webb’s nephew. Partly because the task became so huge, and partly because his health had never recovered from his imprisonment, he was unable to complete the task alone, and Fenner Brockway was brought in to help him.

At some point the Enquiry made the decision to include prison staff and Prison Commission officials in advising on better prison regimes, and the mostly critical edge of the CO’s testimony was blunted.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), the renowned playwright, essayist and public intellectual had been asked to write a preface for the Report of the Enquiry by his fellow Fabians. He duly did so, producing 68 pages of hyperbole and incisive analysis, and explicitly promoting prison abolition. He disputed the official aims of imprisonment, repudiated retribution and deterrence and doubted the existence of a “criminal type”. A commitment to vindictive punishment, he insisted, corrupted public morals, and existing prison regimes made prisoners worse more often than they rehabilitated them. Neither Brockway nor Hobhouse actually balked at talking up prison abolition, but they divided completely on Shaw’s second main proposal – euthanasia for incorrigibly violent criminals (at least in the absence of Quakers, Catholics and Salvation Army soldiers who might be minded to look after them). Brockway, sceptical but non-committal on the death penalty, was willing to accept Shaw’s provocation, but Hobhouse – an uncommonly spiritual man and opponent of capital punishment in any form – threatened to resign if this went ahead. The preface was therefore  rejected, and recycled as the introduction to Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s book, English Prisons Under Local Government, also published in 1922, a historical companion volume to English Prisons Today.

By “prison abolition” Hobhouse and Brockway seemingly meant terminating institutions premised on retribution and deterrence, but were nonetheless open to residential and custodial forms of care and treatment. Brockway never gave up on this understanding of prison abolition within his broader view of what socialist strategy should entail. Six years after English Prisons Today, in A New Way with Crime (1928), a book intended to consider matters “insufficiently explored” by the Prisons Enquiry, Brockway made some points that were quite prescient in terms of what RAP, at least in its early years, was later to stand for: [In prison] Self-reliance is lost, personality is suppressed, memory deteriorates. The prison insanity rate is three times higher than outside, and the suicide rate six times higher.

The recent “reforms”, while easing the hardships of some prisoners, do not change the punitive and repressive character of the regime

AND LASTLY, …..

To abolish the prison system is not utopian. The daily average prison population has fallen from 30,000 to 10,000 during the last 50 years. This is due to the provision of alternatives. The need now is for a planned and scientific direction of this process.

And so, to the Iongevity question. In 1980, Mick Ryan found a great deal to admire in an old comrade who had lived much longer than most, and – inexorably – much longer with the failure to realise some (though not all) of his cherished socialist ambitions. Now many of us – still young compared to that particular old comrade – are in much the same boat, staring down a prison system in Britain that is bigger, stronger and in almost all respects worse than it was when we first got involved with RAP in the 1970s, exactly as we feared it would be if drastic changes were not set in motion then. How are we coping? And what should we be doing?

Here are four points which seem to have been true of Fenner Brockway’s incorrigible activism, and I infer to have been true of Mick also:

1. Never allow yourself or your ideals to feel vanquished: keep the faith. Don’t resent setbacks any more than is psychologically inevitable. Don’t fret over failures. If there are times when abolitionism can only be “a stance”, rather than a programme, so be it. Hold the stance. Hope and work for better. Begin again, always.

2. Keep writing, keep contesting. Some years ago, Mick and Tony Ward wrote a paper saying that penal abolitionism was a cause that dare not speak its name. To the extent that this is less true now, it is because they were part of a small, marginalised movement that kept ideas alive.

3. Adapt creatively to changed circumstances. No one could have told the young Fenner Brockway that nuclear weapons would have been built and used by the time he reached middle age, and that in the shadow of the mushroom cloud he would be setting up a campaign against disarmament, any more than any of us in RAP in 1980 (except maybe Stan Cohen) would have seen the coming of e-carceration from the small, marginal beginnings of electronic monitoring.

4. Always look forward, but don’t forget. Mick left a body of work that will remain “useful knowledge” for the abolitionists who come after – and they will sometimes need to glance back. If we cannot ever know how our unfinished political story ends, we can at least make the effort to learn why it began, how it unfolded, what failed and why it needs constant reinvention. Some of the moves the new generation may consider new may not be new at all. That’s the general point Fenner Brockway was possibly making to a younger Mick Ryan four decades ago (though not in respect of prisons), when he remembered what he’d said to Rosa Luxemburg.