Contrary to Andy Burnham’s claim that his government will reject the political orthodoxy of the last 40 years, the ministerial response to the most recent prison crisis indicates that continuity, rather than discontinuity, is their favoured strategy.
Ministers have announced the biggest prison building programme since the Victorian era involving 14,000 new places costing billions.
Historical ignorance
In 1983, the Conservative government pursued a similar strategy with the biggest prison building programme of the 20th century. What happened? In 1990, the longest demonstration in British prison history erupted at Strangeways, together with demonstrations in over 20 other institutions. The crisis was not alleviated.
Their plan was based on the delusional belief that more prisons mean less crime, victimisation and recidivism. Not so. Nor do more prisons ensure the safety of people inside - as the appalling number of deaths and self-harm incidents indicate - or outside - as the dire levels of violence against women and girls illustrate.
Either Burnham’s ministers shamefully ignored, or were ignorant of, this history. If building more prisons is the answer, then ministers are asking the wrong questions.
Cuts
Ministers also blamed the abject state of prisons on cuts imposed by previous Conservative administrations. If this was the case, why did prisons experience perennial crises in the pre-cuts era? Why were recidivism rates so high? Why were rehabilitation rates so low? Why were prisons funded so generously despite how poorly they performed?
Cuts were not the cause of the crisis. They intensified an already bleak situation.
Overcrowding
Overcrowding was central to the crisis which gripped the system in 2026 and in 1978. More prisons were built, overcrowding continued.
And while people in prison clearly should not exist in dehumanising, vermin-infested dungeons, the political obsession with overcrowding, and the crisis in capacity, meant that other, corrosive issues were ignored: the preventable deaths and desperate levels of self-harm, particularly in women’s prisons; the failure to hold prison staff accountable; the systemic lack of purposeful activity; the racism; state violence against people in prison; the punitive sentencing culture resulting in too many people being sent to prison.
Again, as ever, these issues were consigned to the political margins by Labour ministers, if they were considered at all.
Victims
The outrage expressed about the early release of two of PC Harper’s killers, allowed ministers to insist, in overwhelmingly self-righteous terms, that ‘Victims must come first’. While correctly recognising the devastating, traumatic loss suffered by his family, ministers, like their predecessors, continued to focus on specific victims, then taking reactionary short-sighted action.
In marked contrast, there are victims who have not received the same, rapid response and sympathy from the state including: the victims and survivors of the infected blood and Post Office scandals; the Covid, Grenfell and Hillsborough dead and their families; those who die in state custody and at work; victims of miscarriages of justice; women and girls raped and sexually abused.
Beyond the platitudes and the hypocrisy, where is the political action for these and other cases? Where is the justice and accountability for these victims and survivors? Where is the long-term, radical thinking which transcends short-term, political expediency?
Dangerousness
According to ministers, the crisis in capacity threatened to generate an apocalyptic breakdown in the system “leaving vanloads of dangerous people circling the country with nowhere to go”.
In fixating on dangerousness, ministers ignored the well-established fact that the majority of those who are so often ignominiously ‘churned’ through the criminal injustice system are not dangerous. They are: the destitute, unemployed and homeless; or have mental health issues and drug and alcohol problems, have been physically and sexually abused and have been in care.
Like their predecessors, they ignored other questions. Who defines which individuals are dangerous and which are not? Who defines what actions have the most socially harmful impact? Who is responsible for the thousands of preventable deaths that occur yearly as a result of state action and inaction? What does safety and protection mean in the twenty first century?
The Future
Trapped by the penal orthodoxy of the past, and by the straightjacket of pragmatism - one of the Prime Minister’s favourite, though rarely defined terms - meant that expedient continuity rather than radical discontinuity - such as stopping the building programme and developing radical alternatives to custody - was the favoured, ministerial option.
Developing a strategy based on social justice rather than criminal injustice would have shown ministers were serious about breaking with the past. It was not to be.
There is one final continuity. State punishment will, as ever, continue its needle-sharp focus on the deviance of the poor and not on the social harms generated by the rich and powerful. They are shielded from legal accountability by an iron-clad culture of immunity and impunity. As ever, the rich will continue to get richer while the poor will get 14,000 additional places to serve their time.
