Feb
The Strangeways protest and aftermath
This is the second of five webinars, held to mark the 1990 Strangeways prisons protest and the official report on the protest, published in February 1991.
This webinar discusss the Strangeways protest in 1990 and its aftermath.
Watch the 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 second webinar in the series recounts what happened in those 25 days in April 1990 and the immediate and longer-term consequences.
Speakers include
- Stephen Akpabio-Klementowski, Associate Lecturer and PhD researcher at the Open University and former prisoner
- Joe Sim, Professor of Criminology at Liverpool John Moores University and leading author and researcher on prisons and imprisonment
- Eamonn Carrabine, Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex and Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal of Criminology
- Charlie Weinberg, Chair of Trustees, Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (chair)
About the other webinars in this series
- Monday, 22 February: Prisons before the Strangeways protest
- Wednesday, 24 February: Thirty years of failure in prison reform since Strangeways
- Thursday, 25 February: Thirty years of failure in tackling prison injustices since Strangeways
- Friday, 26 February: Beyond prison reform towards a future without prisons
