Prisons and politics

Starting with the short-lived stand-off between staff and prisoners in Parkhust prison in 1969, and ending with the COVID-19 crisis, the article, ‘Prisons and politics’, covers fifty years of political debate and policy developments. It forms part of a collection of articles in a special edition marking the 50th anniversary of Prison Service Journal.

During the 1970s, Richard explains, prisons were roiled by numerous disturbances conflict, a small part of a wider series of social conflicts in British society during that period.

The election of Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1979 was a significant moment, Richard argues, with a many of the social and political conflicts of the time being recast as law and order matters.

Challenging a number of accounts, which identify an early 1990s punitive turn, after decades of relative liberalism in prison policy, Richard argues that the long-term trend since the Second World War has been one of relentless prison growth.

Richard concludes by reflecting on the apparent inertia of current prisons policy, stuck in an endless cycle of prison expansion, and the relationship between the ideology of prisons and its wider social context:

Prisons create the conditions of their own existence, just as the societies that build prisons secrete the ideologies that sustain them. Untangling the web of politics and ideology, social antagonisms and division, that gives rise to and sustains the prison system; charting a path beyond the confines prisons impose our beliefs and practises, so that we might do something genuinely new and innovative; these are worthy and necessary tasks for the coming years.