18.07.2024
Crime and revenge
Eddie Ford welcomes the early release of prisoners, but the emphasis should be on rehabilitation, not crisis management
With Britain’s hellish prison system at breaking point, the new Labour government announced on July 12 emergency measures to release some prisoners early, as the situation had become a “ticking timebomb”. According to the new justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, this should free up spaces “in the low thousands”, and the policy is on top an early-release scheme started in October by the former Tory government, which has seen more than 10,000 prisoners freed up to 70 days early.
This is something that we communists cautiously welcome as an outbreak of sanity - though, of course, we would go a lot further, as far too many people are sent unnecessarily to prison, which should only be considered as a last resort in an extremely small minority of cases. That is, rather than the default option with the prison system effectively acting as an auxiliary arm of social services as part of a truly criminal and totally irrational punitive ‘justice’ regime - one to boot that is hugely expensive. Before the general election, the prison population was projected to hit 106,300 by March 2027, with the average cost of a place behind bars getting near to £50,000 a year. ‘Law and order’ in the UK comes with a heavy price tag for everyone.
Prisons have been operating at 99% capacity since the start of 2023. Mahmood, whilst visiting HMP Bedford and HMP Five Wells in Northamptonshire, declared that from September the government will be cutting the automatic release point for most standard sentences from 50% to 40% in England and Wales, though serious violent offenders - as well as those jailed for sex offences, terrorism and crimes associated with domestic abuse - will be excluded from the scheme. As of July 8, according to the latest available government figures, only 708 places remained in the adult male estate - that is, 83,755 out of a “usable operational capacity” of 84,463. For the prison system to run “smoothly and effectively”, we are told, it needs to keep a ‘buffer’ of 1,425 cell spaces free in men’s prisons to be able to cope with any sudden influx.
Safeguard
Showing the desperate state of affairs, officials fear that capacity will be overwhelmed by the end of August, if not earlier, but the change cannot come into force until September, because it requires secondary legislation to be voted on by parliament. Additionally, up to 200 police cells to hold inmates have been made temporarily available under Operation Safeguard - a scheme first implemented under a Labour government in 2006, when the prison population had only 125 spaces left.
The justice secretary has also vowed to strengthen probation by recruiting at least 1,000 trainee officers by the end of next March, while “tackling reoffending”. She said the new government would “speed up” prison-building and publish a 10-year “capacity strategy” this autumn. But these sticking-plaster measures are dwarfed by the scale of the problem. The likelihood of prisons running out of space before September still remains very high and, while early release as a measure might well buy some breathing space, this dire situation will keep recurring, because successive governments have introduced waves of laws to increase both sentences and the number of people sent to prison.
Shabana Mahmood said the policy would be reviewed after 18 months, although the measures were necessary - otherwise the police would be unable to arrest “dangerous criminals”, as there would literally be nowhere to put them. No mention, of course, of the horrendous plight of prisoners with almost half of them living in double cells designed for one man, with a significant minority in single cells with no internal sanitation - sometimes locked up for 23 hours in appalling conditions with many having exposed electric wires, glass missing from their windows, widespread infestations of vermin, and so on.
Inhuman
This inhuman treatment puts those with already fragile mental health at even greater risk, with the same going for the high proportion who suffer from an alcohol or drug problem. In fact, around half of prisoners are addicted to drugs, while crack and heroin addicts account for two-thirds of shoplifting offences and half of burglaries. And if you did not have a drug problem before you entered prison, you might develop one whilst banged up inside as a means of just surviving the nightmarish day, as the walls start to close in around you. Recreational drugs are plentiful within the system, of course.
But “prison works” - as infamously declared in 1993 by then home secretary Michael Howard, to rapturous applause at the Conservative Party conference in a perverse inversion of the truth. He announced that the government would “no longer judge the success of our system of justice by a fall in our prison population” and vindictively took away TVs from the inmates, making their miserable lives even more miserable - an approach that has been the cornerstone of Tory policy on ‘law and order’ for decades. Prisons are not a ‘holiday camp’, but somewhere where you are meant to suffer.
Now, the immediate crisis regarding capacity can be laid at the feet of the Tories. Leaked documents reveal that Rishi Sunak was warned by senior civil servants a week before he called the general election that he was at risk of breaching his “legal responsibilities” if he failed to take action over the prison overcrowding crisis, and the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, actually chaired emergency Cobra meetings himself on how to respond.1 Thus Alex Chalk, the previous justice secretary, also prepared plans to release some prisoners after 40% of their sentence, and to send fewer people to jail in the first place - going ‘woke’, as the right would call it - but these were blocked by Sunak’s key aides amid concerns in No10 they would not get the necessary secondary legislation through parliament, as the likes of Suella Braverman were likely to oppose it. The leaked letters also seem to show that, just two days before the election was called, Sunak finally agreed to meet the demands to release thousands of inmates early - cynically knowing the election would make it impossible to deliver and hence hand on the problem to the next government.
In that sense, Shabana Mahmood was right to accuse Sunak and former ministers of being “the guilty men”, who are responsible for “the most disgraceful dereliction of duty”. They did nothing as a result of the most venal political self-interest - happy to let the prison numbers stack up and for the suffering to continue. But, even if they manage to avert the current crisis confronting them over prison space, we can only expect the Labour administration to uphold the ethos of punishment and revenge.
‘Red ’un’
As the CPGB Draft programme (section 3.17: ‘Crime and prison’) points out, in class society crime is a product of “alienation, want or resistance”.2 Meaning that under capitalism the criminal justice system is “anti-working class, irrational and inhuman”, as property is considered primary, with “the person merely a form of property”.
It is well worth looking through this section. Our model is the early USSR, which even abolished the concept of ‘guilt’, replacing it with the notion of public danger - or not - with the emphasis being on rehabilitation.
Given what we have already described, prison officers are a group of workers who have to put up with an incredibly gruelling and sometimes dangerous working environment, often with next to no support from those above (and often hated by those below). Unlike what some on the left might stupidly say, the Prison Officers Association is not irredeemably reactionary - far from it. Indeed, its history reveals a perhaps unprecedented struggle to obtain recognition as a trade union.3 In short, the roots of the POA can be traced back to the launch in 1910 of the underground Prison Officers’ Magazine - otherwise known as the ‘red ’un’ after the colour of its cover (not its politics).
In the meantime, we had the police strikes of 1918-19 by the Police and Prison Officers’ Union, which led to the subsequent ban on any affiliation to Labour and the Trade Union Congress - followed by the subsequent lengthy struggle to get the right to re-affiliate and defy section 127 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which made it unlawful for prison officers to take industrial action
Oehlerites
Therefore it is, yes, stupid for anyone on the left to call for the POA to be expelled from the TUC - a demand we hear from Oehlerites such as the Spartacist League. Why would anyone on the left actively want prison officers, or any other group of workers, to be disorganised and thus vulnerable to reactionary politics? After 1984-85 and the defeat of the Great Strike, many former miners got jobs in the prison service. If you were unlucky enough to end up inside, who would you rather be greeted by - an ex-police/army or BNP type, or a politically aware ex-miner who is unionised? It is double stupid when you remember that the POA was once affiliated to the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, and in July 2015 it endorsed Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign in the Labour Party leadership election. What reactionary cads!