cjm 30: Prisons today

Roger Mathews, Julia Braggins and Tim Newburn edit this special edition focusing on Prisons.

We all suffer from selective amnesia. But it is important to keep reminding ourselves that during the 1980s the average daily population in prisons remained relatively stable at around 45,000, while the numbers of people sent to prison actually fell during the second half of the decade. It is, in fact, only since 1993, when Michael Howard set a course for its rapid expansion, that the prison population in this country really began to rise, increasing by some 40 per cent between 1993 and 1997. The question which now confronts penal reformers, and which is reflected throughout the pages of this special edition on imprisonment in England and Wales, is whether the recent growth in the use of imprisonment signals the beginning of a movement towards the American strategy of ‘mass incarceration’, or whether the scale of imprisonment will return over the next few years to pre-Howard levels.

Among articles in this edition, Stephen Shaw says Labour has kept some of its promises but is presiding over a marked deterioration in prison regimes; Sir David Ramsbotham talks to Mary Eaton about his proposals for improving prisons and Barbara Hudson reports on the Howard League’s investigation into the imprisonment of teenage girls.