Feb
Thirty years of injustice in prisons
This is the fourth of five webinars, marking the 1990 Strangeways prisons protest and the official report on the protest, published in February 1991.
This webinar discusses the various injustices in and associated with the prisons system in the thirty years since the Strangeways protest.
Watch this webinar
About the webinar series
The 25-day protest in April 1990 at Strangeways prison in Manchester was the longest prison protest in British history. A report into the protests by Lord Justice Woolf, published the following year in February 1991, laid bare some of the dysfunctions of the prison system that gave rise to the protests. Welcomed by some, others considered it a missed opportunity.
Thirty years on, the dysfunctions and problems of the prison system that gave rise to the Strangeways protest are as pressing as ever. Indeed some would argue they are worse. Many prisons across Britain appear locked in a terminal spiral of decline and decay.
In five webinars over five days, we:
- Discuss the background to the Strangeways protest.
- Recount what happened in those 25 days in April 1990 and the immediate consequences.
- Review the failed attempts to reform the prison system, and address systemic injustices in prisons, since the Strangeways protest.
- Take a long view on 200 hundred years of failure in prisons and consider a future in which prisons are no longer a mainstay of our response to crime.
About this webinar
This fourth webinar in the series discusses why attempts to address the many injustices in, and associated with, prison in the thirty years since the Strangeways protest have so often proved fruitless.
Speakers
- Gloria Morrison, campaigner with JENGbA - Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association
- John Crilly, JENGbA Inside/Outside Campaigner
- Patrick Williams, Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, a leading research on racism and the criminal justice system
- Carolyne Willow, Article 39
- Steve Tombs, Professor of Criminology at The Open University and a leading researcher and author, including on state and corporate crime, and social harm
- Richard Garside, Director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (chair)
About the other webinars in this series
- Monday, 22 February: Prisons before the Strangeways protest
- Tuesday, 23 February: The Strangeways protest and aftermath
- Wednesday, 24 February: Thirty years of failure in prison reform since Strangeways
- Friday, 26 February: Beyond prison reform towards a future without prisons
