The abolitionist approach: a British perspective
by Joe Sim
"Among social scientists there seems to be considerable disillusionment, and, indeed, a turning away from the goal of abolition -more or less as if it were a youthful and confused prank from the late sixties which the middle aged and wise can hardly uphold. I have, however, never understood why a negative political trend -be it increased armaments or expanded prison systems - should lead one to conclude that the trend in question no longer constitutes a point of fundamental attack and final abolition from a radical position."
(Mathiesen, 1986, p. 84)
The title of this paper, 'The abolitionist approach: a British perspective',1 will probably seem like an anachronism to many. For those concerned with the daily grind of criminal justice and penal policy, abolitionism is likely to be regarded as an esoteric, academic luxury which is irrelevant to the delivery of penal services both to the confined and to the wider society. The British demand for 'facts' as opposed to historically, theoretically and philosophically grounded analysis, whether of an abolitionist nature or not, is as prominent in the prisons debate as it is in other social policy debates. A number of academics in the UK, no doubt, will have other, but no less critical views. Abolitionists are now regarded as sociological dinosaurs, unre-constituted hangovers from the profound but doomed schisms of the late 1960's, who are marginal to the 'real' intellectual questions of the 1990's. Like Marxism, abolitionism appears to have been left behind on the sandbank of history while the river of modernity - or as many intellectuals would have it, postmodernity - flows progressively forward producing wave after consumerist wave of choice, opportunity and desire. Social formations now need realistic economic and social policies in general, and penal policies in particular, to respond to the new times flooding the planet, which in turn require research that is relevant to the service orientation of the newly reformed state and its subject/customers both inside and outside the walls of the penitentiary.
Superficially, there appears to he strong sociological evidence to support this contention. Abolitionism, it seems, has failed to impact upon the direction of penal policy or the debate on crime and punishment. Indeed, the modern prison, despite 150 years of 'monotonous critique', as Michel Foucault put it, has not only endured but expanded to become materially and ideologically critical in the remorseless struggle to enforce law and maintain order. The institution's presence on the landscape of British society appears to be so deeply embedded that it has become almost naturalised in popular consciousness and state discourse as an immutable barrier, which despite crises and contradictions protects the law-abiding from the swamping encroachment of the desperate and degenerate in the same way that it was thought to protect the respectable from the ravages of first the parasitic delinquent, and then the dangerous classes in the nineteenth century (Garland, 1985). This conception of the prison has continued into the late twentieth century. Whatever social index is taken - the rate of imprisonment, numbers detained, expenditure, time served or judicial sentencing patterns - the prison, despite the occasional drop in the average daily population, is on a relentlessly expansionist course.
This perception was confirmed in 1991 by the former Home Secretary, Kenneth Baker. In an unwitting affirmation of Foucault's maxim that the prison 'is always offered as its own remedy' for its internal problems, Baker pointed to the steps involved in his government's 'programme of prison reform'. In England and Wales this included raising expenditure to £1.4 billion in 1992-93, recruiting an extra 4,100 prison officers and opening thirteen new prisons bv January 1994 at a cost of £900 million (Hansard, 1991, col. 168). Expenditure on law and order in general was expected to rise by 11 per cent in 1992-93 taking it up to £6 billion, still a clear exception to the prudent monetarist axe which successive Conservative governments have taken to public spending as the austere prerequisite for the economic, political and ideological resurrection of the nation. There has been a parallel growth in the range of alternatives to custody, which was supplemented in October 1992 by curfew orders and the cybernetic electronic tag (Muncie, 1990; Vass, 1990). By the year 2000 the number of prisoners will have increased by 25 per cent, reaching 57,500 in England and Wales. This figure includes a 44 per cent increase in the remand population (Home Office 1992, Table i)
.
Abolitionism also appears to have been further weakened by the state's strategy for reform, developed in the wake of the furious demonstrations by prisoners in the mid-1980's. Within this discourse the mistakes of the past have been recognised and prison regimes will be modified so that the disasters of the 1980's, such as those at Strange-ways (in Manchester, England) and Peterhead (in Scotland) will never be repeated. Even those on the left who might be broadly sympathetic to abolitionists have been highly critical, describing their 'anarcho-communist' position as 'preoccupied with abolishing or minimising state intervention rather than attempting to make it more effective, responsive and accountable' (Matthews, 1989, p. 5).
This paper will challenge this pessimistic reading of abolitionism by exploring three themes. First, I want to analyse the theoretical and political contribution of British abolitionists and to illustrate the hegemonic impact of this contribution on the traditional, more conservative reform lobby in this country. Second, the paper will explore the specificity of abolitionist thought in Britain and will illustrate the sociological influences on abolitionists here which took them along a different theoretical and political path to abolitionists in other countries. Finally, the paper will focus on the state of British prisons today and will discuss the reforms now being proposed to alleviate the perennial and debilitating crisis in the system. I will argue that these reforms will do little to alter 'the fiasco' that is the prison system (Mathiesen, 1990, p. 140). The paper concludes by reasserting the need for an abolitionist perspective in which the starting-point for changing prisons is changing the inequality in power, both at the micro and macro levels, in a society that is deeply and increasingly divided along the fault lines of class, gender, race and sexuality.
ORIGINS 1970-80
Willem de Haan's recent overview of abolitionism provides a useful starting-point for tracing its development in Europe and North America. It emerged at the end of the igGos as part of a destructuring movement whose main objective 'was to soften the suffering which society inflicts on its prisoners' (de Haan, 1991, p. 204). Since then abolitionism has developed along a number of different dimensions. Theoretically, it has rejected the claims made by defenders of the conventional criminal justice system that it protects people and controls crime. The prison is 'counter productive, difficult to control and [is] itself a major social problem', and crime should be understood as a complex, socially constructed phenomenon which 'serves to maintain political power relations and lends legitimacy to the expansion of the crrne control apparatus and the intensification of surveillance and control'. Strategies such as redress, compensation and reconciliation need to be introduced into a decentralised criminal justice system. Politically, abolitionism has called for the 'fundamental reform of the penal system [which] presupposes not only a radical change of the existing power structure but also of the dominant culture'. Finally, social problems, conflicts and troubles should be taken seriously bvit not as crime. This means arguing for 'social policy rather than crime control policy' within a framework of 'decriminalisation, depenalis-ation, destigmatisation, decentralisation and deprofessionalisation' (de Haan, 1991, pp. 205-14).
This general history of abolitionism's development is, I think, well known. However, there has been much less discussion about how-abolitionists have operated within the specific context of British politics, the issues they have confronted and perhaps most importantly, the nature of the interventions they and other radical prisoners' rights organisations have made in the last twenty years. Close examination of these issues highlights a number of significant theoretical, political and strategic differences between abolitionism in this country and elsewhere.
The first abolitionist group, Radical Alternatives to Prison (RAP), was established in Britain in 1970. As Mick Ryan has noted, RAP's initial position on prisons was straightforward: it was out to abolish them. For the group reform was highly problematic; 'by improving conditions prisons are made more acceptable, they are legitimised in the public mind' (Ryan, 1978, p. 138). It is important to recognise, however, that despite this hard-line position RAP was involved from (he beginning in a series of campaigns around specific issues. As I noted above, this point has rarely been discussed in the literature on abolitionism, yet it is critical for understanding the influence of British abolitionist thought and the nature of its political and humanitarian concerns.
In May 1971, RAP convened a conference on women in prison. From this meeting a campaign was organised against the rebuilding of Holloway women's prison as a secure hospital which would have minimal custodial facilities. There were demonstrations and exhibitions and a pamphlet, Alternatives to Holloway, was published in May 1972. The pamphlet pointed to the facts of female crime and argued that too many women were remanded unnecessarily in custody, that many offences could be dealt with by other means, and that women should not be imprisoned for offences such as alcoholism, child cruelty and petty theft. Instead, RAP suggested that community-based projects should be introduced which would 'make prison for women seem irrelevant'. The new Holloway was a £6 million 'folly' which would detain women 'unnecessarily labelled as criminal and then treat them in an institutional setting which was almost bound to fail' (Ryan, 1978, pp. 102-5).
What is interesting, I think, is the outcome of the campaign. At one level, it could be judged to have failed as the prison was rebuilt, though it is worth noting that it did nothing to alleviate the problems of confined women in the ensuing years. The repressive nature of the regime, particularly the notorious Ci wing, the 'Muppet House', resulted in a series of gruesome self-injuries as women responded to the particular pains of imprisonment they endured and the patriarchal discourses which underpinned diem (Padel and Stevenson, 1988, p. 72). At another level, 'there is very little doubt that the campaign made the problem of women in prison more visible that it had been in the past' (Ryan, 1978, p. 106). This visibility was to be reinforced and sustained over the next fifteen years, first in the proliferation of academic work in the area (Carlen, 1983; Dobash, Dobash and Gutteridgc, 1986); second, through the formation of the pressure group Women in Prison in 1983; and finally in the impact that these early campaigns had on the traditional reform groups, who had previously ignored this issue.
Ryan also points to a second early campaign which was mounted against the notorious psychiatric Control Units, secretly opened by the Home Office in July 1974 to discipline those labelled as subversive trouble-makers. Removed from the general population, they were kept in strict isolation twenty-three hours a day for ninety days, followed by a second ninety-day period when they were allowed to mix with; others in the Unit. If an individual prisoner broke any prison, rule, however minor, he went back to day one, stage one, to start again.
It is important to recognise that RAP campaigned for the closure of the Units alongside other, more traditional reform groups, including the government-sponsored National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders and the Howard League for Penal Reform. In October 1975 it was announced that the Units were to be discontinued. In one sense, this could be seen as a victory both for interventionist politics and for RAP's uncompromising position. On the other hand, as Ryan notes, the extent to which the campaign's pressure moved government policy 'is genuinely difficult to say since what actually happens inside our prisons is surrounded by secrecy, a secrecy which is well-served by the ambiguity of official statements' (Ryan, 1978, p. 137).
These initial campaigns were followed by a number of others which took place against a background of an ever-deepening crisis in Britain's prisons (Fitzgerald and Sim, 1982). They included highlighting the use of drugs to control prisoners, pointing to the role of the Prison Medical Sendee in this control, defending the philosophy and practices of the Barlinnie Special Unit and establishing alternatives to custody such as the Newham Alternative Project, which showed 'the possibilities of achieving genuinely humane as well as potentially negating reforms with the most limited resources' (Cohen, 1980, p. 6). In January 1979 RAP began publishing its journal, The Abolitionist, which was to run until 1987. Its first editorial pointed out that while the organisation did not have a blueprint for the future, it did believe that its:
ideas about and approach towards antisocial behaviour (as opposed to 'crime') arc much more relevant and credible than the established logic which reflects and only serves to perpetuate an unequal and exploitative social system. It follows thai we seek to remove such sentiments from the ephemeral regions they tend to inhabit and translate them into an effective force for social change.
(The Abolitionist, No. i, p. i)
This editorial position, which came very close to that of European abolitionism, was not to be sustained. By the beginning of the igSos RAP, while still maintaining that radical structural change was the key to dealing with crime and punishment, nonetheless underwent some important changes both in personnel and in its theoretical position, which in turn had repercussions for its political strategy. If the 1980$ was to be the decade of law and order, arguably it was also the decade in which a more theoretically sophisticated and politically astute organisation made a significant impact on many traditionalists involved in the debates around penal policy.
(Mathiesen, 1986, p. 84)
The title of this paper, 'The abolitionist approach: a British perspective',1 will probably seem like an anachronism to many. For those concerned with the daily grind of criminal justice and penal policy, abolitionism is likely to be regarded as an esoteric, academic luxury which is irrelevant to the delivery of penal services both to the confined and to the wider society. The British demand for 'facts' as opposed to historically, theoretically and philosophically grounded analysis, whether of an abolitionist nature or not, is as prominent in the prisons debate as it is in other social policy debates. A number of academics in the UK, no doubt, will have other, but no less critical views. Abolitionists are now regarded as sociological dinosaurs, unre-constituted hangovers from the profound but doomed schisms of the late 1960's, who are marginal to the 'real' intellectual questions of the 1990's. Like Marxism, abolitionism appears to have been left behind on the sandbank of history while the river of modernity - or as many intellectuals would have it, postmodernity - flows progressively forward producing wave after consumerist wave of choice, opportunity and desire. Social formations now need realistic economic and social policies in general, and penal policies in particular, to respond to the new times flooding the planet, which in turn require research that is relevant to the service orientation of the newly reformed state and its subject/customers both inside and outside the walls of the penitentiary.
Superficially, there appears to he strong sociological evidence to support this contention. Abolitionism, it seems, has failed to impact upon the direction of penal policy or the debate on crime and punishment. Indeed, the modern prison, despite 150 years of 'monotonous critique', as Michel Foucault put it, has not only endured but expanded to become materially and ideologically critical in the remorseless struggle to enforce law and maintain order. The institution's presence on the landscape of British society appears to be so deeply embedded that it has become almost naturalised in popular consciousness and state discourse as an immutable barrier, which despite crises and contradictions protects the law-abiding from the swamping encroachment of the desperate and degenerate in the same way that it was thought to protect the respectable from the ravages of first the parasitic delinquent, and then the dangerous classes in the nineteenth century (Garland, 1985). This conception of the prison has continued into the late twentieth century. Whatever social index is taken - the rate of imprisonment, numbers detained, expenditure, time served or judicial sentencing patterns - the prison, despite the occasional drop in the average daily population, is on a relentlessly expansionist course.
This perception was confirmed in 1991 by the former Home Secretary, Kenneth Baker. In an unwitting affirmation of Foucault's maxim that the prison 'is always offered as its own remedy' for its internal problems, Baker pointed to the steps involved in his government's 'programme of prison reform'. In England and Wales this included raising expenditure to £1.4 billion in 1992-93, recruiting an extra 4,100 prison officers and opening thirteen new prisons bv January 1994 at a cost of £900 million (Hansard, 1991, col. 168). Expenditure on law and order in general was expected to rise by 11 per cent in 1992-93 taking it up to £6 billion, still a clear exception to the prudent monetarist axe which successive Conservative governments have taken to public spending as the austere prerequisite for the economic, political and ideological resurrection of the nation. There has been a parallel growth in the range of alternatives to custody, which was supplemented in October 1992 by curfew orders and the cybernetic electronic tag (Muncie, 1990; Vass, 1990). By the year 2000 the number of prisoners will have increased by 25 per cent, reaching 57,500 in England and Wales. This figure includes a 44 per cent increase in the remand population (Home Office 1992, Table i)
.
Abolitionism also appears to have been further weakened by the state's strategy for reform, developed in the wake of the furious demonstrations by prisoners in the mid-1980's. Within this discourse the mistakes of the past have been recognised and prison regimes will be modified so that the disasters of the 1980's, such as those at Strange-ways (in Manchester, England) and Peterhead (in Scotland) will never be repeated. Even those on the left who might be broadly sympathetic to abolitionists have been highly critical, describing their 'anarcho-communist' position as 'preoccupied with abolishing or minimising state intervention rather than attempting to make it more effective, responsive and accountable' (Matthews, 1989, p. 5).
This paper will challenge this pessimistic reading of abolitionism by exploring three themes. First, I want to analyse the theoretical and political contribution of British abolitionists and to illustrate the hegemonic impact of this contribution on the traditional, more conservative reform lobby in this country. Second, the paper will explore the specificity of abolitionist thought in Britain and will illustrate the sociological influences on abolitionists here which took them along a different theoretical and political path to abolitionists in other countries. Finally, the paper will focus on the state of British prisons today and will discuss the reforms now being proposed to alleviate the perennial and debilitating crisis in the system. I will argue that these reforms will do little to alter 'the fiasco' that is the prison system (Mathiesen, 1990, p. 140). The paper concludes by reasserting the need for an abolitionist perspective in which the starting-point for changing prisons is changing the inequality in power, both at the micro and macro levels, in a society that is deeply and increasingly divided along the fault lines of class, gender, race and sexuality.
ORIGINS 1970-80
Willem de Haan's recent overview of abolitionism provides a useful starting-point for tracing its development in Europe and North America. It emerged at the end of the igGos as part of a destructuring movement whose main objective 'was to soften the suffering which society inflicts on its prisoners' (de Haan, 1991, p. 204). Since then abolitionism has developed along a number of different dimensions. Theoretically, it has rejected the claims made by defenders of the conventional criminal justice system that it protects people and controls crime. The prison is 'counter productive, difficult to control and [is] itself a major social problem', and crime should be understood as a complex, socially constructed phenomenon which 'serves to maintain political power relations and lends legitimacy to the expansion of the crrne control apparatus and the intensification of surveillance and control'. Strategies such as redress, compensation and reconciliation need to be introduced into a decentralised criminal justice system. Politically, abolitionism has called for the 'fundamental reform of the penal system [which] presupposes not only a radical change of the existing power structure but also of the dominant culture'. Finally, social problems, conflicts and troubles should be taken seriously bvit not as crime. This means arguing for 'social policy rather than crime control policy' within a framework of 'decriminalisation, depenalis-ation, destigmatisation, decentralisation and deprofessionalisation' (de Haan, 1991, pp. 205-14).
This general history of abolitionism's development is, I think, well known. However, there has been much less discussion about how-abolitionists have operated within the specific context of British politics, the issues they have confronted and perhaps most importantly, the nature of the interventions they and other radical prisoners' rights organisations have made in the last twenty years. Close examination of these issues highlights a number of significant theoretical, political and strategic differences between abolitionism in this country and elsewhere.
The first abolitionist group, Radical Alternatives to Prison (RAP), was established in Britain in 1970. As Mick Ryan has noted, RAP's initial position on prisons was straightforward: it was out to abolish them. For the group reform was highly problematic; 'by improving conditions prisons are made more acceptable, they are legitimised in the public mind' (Ryan, 1978, p. 138). It is important to recognise, however, that despite this hard-line position RAP was involved from (he beginning in a series of campaigns around specific issues. As I noted above, this point has rarely been discussed in the literature on abolitionism, yet it is critical for understanding the influence of British abolitionist thought and the nature of its political and humanitarian concerns.
In May 1971, RAP convened a conference on women in prison. From this meeting a campaign was organised against the rebuilding of Holloway women's prison as a secure hospital which would have minimal custodial facilities. There were demonstrations and exhibitions and a pamphlet, Alternatives to Holloway, was published in May 1972. The pamphlet pointed to the facts of female crime and argued that too many women were remanded unnecessarily in custody, that many offences could be dealt with by other means, and that women should not be imprisoned for offences such as alcoholism, child cruelty and petty theft. Instead, RAP suggested that community-based projects should be introduced which would 'make prison for women seem irrelevant'. The new Holloway was a £6 million 'folly' which would detain women 'unnecessarily labelled as criminal and then treat them in an institutional setting which was almost bound to fail' (Ryan, 1978, pp. 102-5).
What is interesting, I think, is the outcome of the campaign. At one level, it could be judged to have failed as the prison was rebuilt, though it is worth noting that it did nothing to alleviate the problems of confined women in the ensuing years. The repressive nature of the regime, particularly the notorious Ci wing, the 'Muppet House', resulted in a series of gruesome self-injuries as women responded to the particular pains of imprisonment they endured and the patriarchal discourses which underpinned diem (Padel and Stevenson, 1988, p. 72). At another level, 'there is very little doubt that the campaign made the problem of women in prison more visible that it had been in the past' (Ryan, 1978, p. 106). This visibility was to be reinforced and sustained over the next fifteen years, first in the proliferation of academic work in the area (Carlen, 1983; Dobash, Dobash and Gutteridgc, 1986); second, through the formation of the pressure group Women in Prison in 1983; and finally in the impact that these early campaigns had on the traditional reform groups, who had previously ignored this issue.
Ryan also points to a second early campaign which was mounted against the notorious psychiatric Control Units, secretly opened by the Home Office in July 1974 to discipline those labelled as subversive trouble-makers. Removed from the general population, they were kept in strict isolation twenty-three hours a day for ninety days, followed by a second ninety-day period when they were allowed to mix with; others in the Unit. If an individual prisoner broke any prison, rule, however minor, he went back to day one, stage one, to start again.
It is important to recognise that RAP campaigned for the closure of the Units alongside other, more traditional reform groups, including the government-sponsored National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders and the Howard League for Penal Reform. In October 1975 it was announced that the Units were to be discontinued. In one sense, this could be seen as a victory both for interventionist politics and for RAP's uncompromising position. On the other hand, as Ryan notes, the extent to which the campaign's pressure moved government policy 'is genuinely difficult to say since what actually happens inside our prisons is surrounded by secrecy, a secrecy which is well-served by the ambiguity of official statements' (Ryan, 1978, p. 137).
These initial campaigns were followed by a number of others which took place against a background of an ever-deepening crisis in Britain's prisons (Fitzgerald and Sim, 1982). They included highlighting the use of drugs to control prisoners, pointing to the role of the Prison Medical Sendee in this control, defending the philosophy and practices of the Barlinnie Special Unit and establishing alternatives to custody such as the Newham Alternative Project, which showed 'the possibilities of achieving genuinely humane as well as potentially negating reforms with the most limited resources' (Cohen, 1980, p. 6). In January 1979 RAP began publishing its journal, The Abolitionist, which was to run until 1987. Its first editorial pointed out that while the organisation did not have a blueprint for the future, it did believe that its:
ideas about and approach towards antisocial behaviour (as opposed to 'crime') arc much more relevant and credible than the established logic which reflects and only serves to perpetuate an unequal and exploitative social system. It follows thai we seek to remove such sentiments from the ephemeral regions they tend to inhabit and translate them into an effective force for social change.
(The Abolitionist, No. i, p. i)
This editorial position, which came very close to that of European abolitionism, was not to be sustained. By the beginning of the igSos RAP, while still maintaining that radical structural change was the key to dealing with crime and punishment, nonetheless underwent some important changes both in personnel and in its theoretical position, which in turn had repercussions for its political strategy. If the 1980$ was to be the decade of law and order, arguably it was also the decade in which a more theoretically sophisticated and politically astute organisation made a significant impact on many traditionalists involved in the debates around penal policy.
INTO THE LAW AND ORDER DECADE
The refinement in RAP's position took place against an intensification in the prison crisis which I mentioned earlier. The interlocking nature of the crisis was apparent in the overcrowded and appalling conditions in short-term prisons, in the challenges to the state's definition of penal truth mounted by radical prisoners' rights organisations, in the violent confrontations in long-term male prisons, and in the vociferous, widespread industrial action taken by prison officers. These, in turn, were underpinned by a more general crisis of penal legitimacy (Fitzgerald and Sim, 1982). More widely, the election of the new Conservative government in May 1979 underlined the collapse of the social democratic consensus, the emergence of a strong state and the consolidation of the new right as the hegemonic bloc in society, held there by the ideological cement of authoritarian populism (Hall, 1988). At the same time, those social movements which emerged at the end of the igGos and which stood outside of both organised left and state-defined political action had also consolidated their position, competing with and contradicting dominant discourses surrounding race, gender, sexuality and ecology (Gilroy, 1987).
RAP's response to these profound events was outlined in The Abolitionist by two members of its editorial collective. First, Tony Ward, the journal's editor, dealt with the perennial issue of reform and argued that the immediate priority was to 'gain support for reforms of the penal system which while making it more humane will also show up its inherent limitations and contradictions' (Ward, 1982, p. 22, emphasis in the original). Ward also wrote the editorial outlining the organisation's goals. He maintained that while many reforms amounted to 'a sugar coating on a toxic pill', it was nonetheless important to argue for the immediate reform and abolition of particular parts of the system, including the use of drugs as control mechanisms, solitary confinement, the system of security classification, secrecy and censorship. The Barlinnie Special Unit indicated, for WTard, what could be achieved by a 'less authoritative and restrictive approach'. He concluded by differentiating the politics of RAP from those in the traditional reform lobby, so that while many of RAP's medium term goals were shared by the traditionalists, they did not share 'our political outlook': 'RAP's fundamental purpose is, through research and propaganda to educate the public about the true nature, as we see it, of imprisonment and the criminal law; to challenge the prevailing attitudes to crime and delinquency; and to counter the ideology of law-and-order which helps to legitimate an increasingly powerful State machine' (Tlie Abolitionist, No.12, p2).
The second article, written by Jill Box-Grainger, critically evaluated R/P's first ten years, pointed to the recent sociological and political influences on the organisation and outlined RAP's developing strategy for changing prisons and the wider criminal justice process. This strategy included supporting 'negative' reforms such as disbanding (he Prison Medical Service, prohibiting the use of drugs to control prisoners, removing the disciplinary role from prison Boards of Visitors, abolishing parole and introducing greater accountability through ending prison secrecy and the censorship of mail. These reforms were underpinned by the demand for a moratorium on prison building, a reduction in maximum sentences, curtailing the power of scntencers, decriminalisation of certain offences and the implementation of radical alternatives to prison. Finally, and contrary to the ill-informed assertion that radicals have not been concerned about victims of crime, she pointed to RAP's call for a re-evaluation of the 'significance of criminal restitution [and of] the relationship between the offender and the victim' (Box-Grainger, 1982, pp. 17-18).
The article then moved on to discuss the perennial and key issues of serious offenders and dangerousness. This debate had been fuelled by two developments. First, there was the apparent bifurcation in llrhish penal policy which was leading to an expansion in (he numbers and rate of turnover in short-term prisons, and the simultaneous increase in the numbers and length of detention in long-term prisons. Second, (he deba(e was increasingly influenced by (he philosophical, epis(emological and political questions raised by the women's movement, particularly the demand to be protected from 'oppressive and gratuitous street and domestic violence'. RAP therefore was '(quite healthily) ... forced to consider "what should be done" with the serious offender if it is to be at all responsible to popular demands (albeit that RAP continues to underline the fact that serious offenders constitute a very small proportion of all offenders)' (Box-Grainger, 1982, p. 21).
The organisation also began to reassess its position on radical alternatives, particularly the place of 'the community' within the framework of an alternative model of justice. Constructing the problem of prison abolition through community alternatives assumed a homogeneity of values within society in general and in working-class communities in particular. It was therefore important to distinguish between (he long-term interests of working-class people, where there 'may be enormous similarity', and short-term interests, which were 'frequently antagonistic'. This had serious implications for women: '[community] has always involved the re-assertion of the role of the family, the basic unit of the community and ultimately the containment of women in the home. That in the short term the interests of a son may be in conflict with a mother's own interests is not only a theoretical problem but potentially a barrier against "community" support for radical alternatives' (Box-Grainger, 1982, p. 16).
RAP's consideration of this issue was underlined by the formation of a Sex Offences Group within the organisation. The group maintained that it was hazardous to attempt to construct a definition of dangerous individuals. Rather it argued for a policy of exemplary or retributive punishment 'as an appropriate response to sow offences. The important thing then is the viciousness of the act not the actor . . .' (The Abolitionist, No. 10, p. 4, emphasis in the original). It also argued for a radical restructuring of both sentencing policy and wider social relationships. Again influenced by the impact of feminism, the group confronted the sentencing issue in its evidence to the Criminal Law Revision Committee's Working Paper on Sexual Offences. It asked 'how can the law emphasise the unacceptable nature of rape and indecent assault without resorting to excessively long prison sentences for rapists who are not representative of the majority of those who rape?' Additionally, could sentencing protect women from rape at all? The group made ten proposals to deal with sentencing and imprisoned rapists and concluded:
"RAP recognizes that the above proposals are only a brief outline of a possible sentencing practice for convicted rapists, where all custodial sentences are shorter and where custody is not so debasing and destructive as at present. And again we would stress that this type of sentencing can only be effective if it is used against a background of real equality of opportunity for women - an equality that offers women economic independence, political, ideological and sexual determination."
(The Abolitionist, No. 10, pp. 6?7)
THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS
It is important to recognise that the change in RAP's strategy and political orientation was mirrored in a series of more general theoretical debates that occurred at the beginning of the igSos. In particular, the question of reform as initially discussed in Mathiesen's seminal Politics of Abolition (1974) was addressed as a theoretical and political problem. In 1982, Mike Fitzgerald and I, while arguing for an abolitionist position as the answer to the enduring crisis in British prisons, also maintained that the 'positive' and 'negative' distinction made by Mathiesen did not address the subtleties and ramifications of particular reforms. For us 'reform by its very nature contain both positive and negative possibilities' (Fitzgerald and Sim, 1982, p. 164, emphasis in the original). In 1985, Dave Brown and Russell Hogg developed a similar critique. Pointing to the issue of legal rights, they asked if introducing due process was a positive or negative reform. The answer was not straightforward:
"reform measures or lines of advance cannot necessarily be adequately specified or evaluated a priori by reference either to some positive/ negative calculus or to some general theory of law. . . state . . . capital . . . legitimation . . . legal right etc. Ii is not necessary to embrace (lie ambiguous assumptions of 'the justice model' . . . or 'rights' discourse ...to recognise that the introduction of legal representation, procedural and appeals rights into internal disciplinary hearings presents a possibility of 'bringing power to particular account' . . . On the other hand detailed practices of discipline and normalisation, surveillance, differentiation, classification, assessment, segregation, deprivation within the site of the prison are not adequately contested simply through attempts to 'legalise' the prison.
(Brown and Hogg, 1985, p.73)
Brown and Hogg developed this analysis in a number of other papers which raised a series of theoretical questions about abolitionism. They pointed out that abolitionism tended to posit common political interests, usually built on class affiliation, between the unpro-ductivc (prisoners) and radical fractions of the working class. There were problems with constructing a unified class subject in this way in (hat this construction underestimated power networks which divided, differentiated and classified populations on the 'basis of sexual differentiation or grids of normality, age, health, etc.' (Brown and Hogg, 10,0,2). This differentiation had real effects: 'the success of the prison and other agencies such as the police at constituting an "alien and dangerous" criminal class is real and cannot be reversed by a simple assertion of common class interests. It is always a question of co/M/n;r(-m^allianccs often in very specific, localised and short-term ways. There is no necessary underlying unity waiting to be recognised' (Brown and Hogg, 10,0,2, pp. 154-5, emphasis in the original).
Tony Ward has also argued that within the specific context of Britain, struggles around and resistance to penal power are better understood by reference to Foucault's 'oppositional model of action' rather than Mathiesen's concept of 'contradiction'. He points to the strategy of opposition developed in the probation service and maintains that the clear division within abolitionist thought between control and welfare agencies, while 'theoretically attractive', is 'politically untenable in Britain'. The largest support for abolitionism has come from the voluntary agencies, social workers and probation officers whose everyday activity 'inescapably involves mixing care and control. To present these people with a stark choice between providing "pure" control within the penal system or "pure" help outside it could simply play into the hands of those in authority who are eager to reassert the importance of control as the system's primary role" (Ward, 1991, p. 161).
The refinement in RAP's position took place against an intensification in the prison crisis which I mentioned earlier. The interlocking nature of the crisis was apparent in the overcrowded and appalling conditions in short-term prisons, in the challenges to the state's definition of penal truth mounted by radical prisoners' rights organisations, in the violent confrontations in long-term male prisons, and in the vociferous, widespread industrial action taken by prison officers. These, in turn, were underpinned by a more general crisis of penal legitimacy (Fitzgerald and Sim, 1982). More widely, the election of the new Conservative government in May 1979 underlined the collapse of the social democratic consensus, the emergence of a strong state and the consolidation of the new right as the hegemonic bloc in society, held there by the ideological cement of authoritarian populism (Hall, 1988). At the same time, those social movements which emerged at the end of the igGos and which stood outside of both organised left and state-defined political action had also consolidated their position, competing with and contradicting dominant discourses surrounding race, gender, sexuality and ecology (Gilroy, 1987).
RAP's response to these profound events was outlined in The Abolitionist by two members of its editorial collective. First, Tony Ward, the journal's editor, dealt with the perennial issue of reform and argued that the immediate priority was to 'gain support for reforms of the penal system which while making it more humane will also show up its inherent limitations and contradictions' (Ward, 1982, p. 22, emphasis in the original). Ward also wrote the editorial outlining the organisation's goals. He maintained that while many reforms amounted to 'a sugar coating on a toxic pill', it was nonetheless important to argue for the immediate reform and abolition of particular parts of the system, including the use of drugs as control mechanisms, solitary confinement, the system of security classification, secrecy and censorship. The Barlinnie Special Unit indicated, for WTard, what could be achieved by a 'less authoritative and restrictive approach'. He concluded by differentiating the politics of RAP from those in the traditional reform lobby, so that while many of RAP's medium term goals were shared by the traditionalists, they did not share 'our political outlook': 'RAP's fundamental purpose is, through research and propaganda to educate the public about the true nature, as we see it, of imprisonment and the criminal law; to challenge the prevailing attitudes to crime and delinquency; and to counter the ideology of law-and-order which helps to legitimate an increasingly powerful State machine' (Tlie Abolitionist, No.12, p2).
The second article, written by Jill Box-Grainger, critically evaluated R/P's first ten years, pointed to the recent sociological and political influences on the organisation and outlined RAP's developing strategy for changing prisons and the wider criminal justice process. This strategy included supporting 'negative' reforms such as disbanding (he Prison Medical Service, prohibiting the use of drugs to control prisoners, removing the disciplinary role from prison Boards of Visitors, abolishing parole and introducing greater accountability through ending prison secrecy and the censorship of mail. These reforms were underpinned by the demand for a moratorium on prison building, a reduction in maximum sentences, curtailing the power of scntencers, decriminalisation of certain offences and the implementation of radical alternatives to prison. Finally, and contrary to the ill-informed assertion that radicals have not been concerned about victims of crime, she pointed to RAP's call for a re-evaluation of the 'significance of criminal restitution [and of] the relationship between the offender and the victim' (Box-Grainger, 1982, pp. 17-18).
The article then moved on to discuss the perennial and key issues of serious offenders and dangerousness. This debate had been fuelled by two developments. First, there was the apparent bifurcation in llrhish penal policy which was leading to an expansion in (he numbers and rate of turnover in short-term prisons, and the simultaneous increase in the numbers and length of detention in long-term prisons. Second, (he deba(e was increasingly influenced by (he philosophical, epis(emological and political questions raised by the women's movement, particularly the demand to be protected from 'oppressive and gratuitous street and domestic violence'. RAP therefore was '(quite healthily) ... forced to consider "what should be done" with the serious offender if it is to be at all responsible to popular demands (albeit that RAP continues to underline the fact that serious offenders constitute a very small proportion of all offenders)' (Box-Grainger, 1982, p. 21).
The organisation also began to reassess its position on radical alternatives, particularly the place of 'the community' within the framework of an alternative model of justice. Constructing the problem of prison abolition through community alternatives assumed a homogeneity of values within society in general and in working-class communities in particular. It was therefore important to distinguish between (he long-term interests of working-class people, where there 'may be enormous similarity', and short-term interests, which were 'frequently antagonistic'. This had serious implications for women: '[community] has always involved the re-assertion of the role of the family, the basic unit of the community and ultimately the containment of women in the home. That in the short term the interests of a son may be in conflict with a mother's own interests is not only a theoretical problem but potentially a barrier against "community" support for radical alternatives' (Box-Grainger, 1982, p. 16).
RAP's consideration of this issue was underlined by the formation of a Sex Offences Group within the organisation. The group maintained that it was hazardous to attempt to construct a definition of dangerous individuals. Rather it argued for a policy of exemplary or retributive punishment 'as an appropriate response to sow offences. The important thing then is the viciousness of the act not the actor . . .' (The Abolitionist, No. 10, p. 4, emphasis in the original). It also argued for a radical restructuring of both sentencing policy and wider social relationships. Again influenced by the impact of feminism, the group confronted the sentencing issue in its evidence to the Criminal Law Revision Committee's Working Paper on Sexual Offences. It asked 'how can the law emphasise the unacceptable nature of rape and indecent assault without resorting to excessively long prison sentences for rapists who are not representative of the majority of those who rape?' Additionally, could sentencing protect women from rape at all? The group made ten proposals to deal with sentencing and imprisoned rapists and concluded:
"RAP recognizes that the above proposals are only a brief outline of a possible sentencing practice for convicted rapists, where all custodial sentences are shorter and where custody is not so debasing and destructive as at present. And again we would stress that this type of sentencing can only be effective if it is used against a background of real equality of opportunity for women - an equality that offers women economic independence, political, ideological and sexual determination."
(The Abolitionist, No. 10, pp. 6?7)
THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS
It is important to recognise that the change in RAP's strategy and political orientation was mirrored in a series of more general theoretical debates that occurred at the beginning of the igSos. In particular, the question of reform as initially discussed in Mathiesen's seminal Politics of Abolition (1974) was addressed as a theoretical and political problem. In 1982, Mike Fitzgerald and I, while arguing for an abolitionist position as the answer to the enduring crisis in British prisons, also maintained that the 'positive' and 'negative' distinction made by Mathiesen did not address the subtleties and ramifications of particular reforms. For us 'reform by its very nature contain both positive and negative possibilities' (Fitzgerald and Sim, 1982, p. 164, emphasis in the original). In 1985, Dave Brown and Russell Hogg developed a similar critique. Pointing to the issue of legal rights, they asked if introducing due process was a positive or negative reform. The answer was not straightforward:
"reform measures or lines of advance cannot necessarily be adequately specified or evaluated a priori by reference either to some positive/ negative calculus or to some general theory of law. . . state . . . capital . . . legitimation . . . legal right etc. Ii is not necessary to embrace (lie ambiguous assumptions of 'the justice model' . . . or 'rights' discourse ...to recognise that the introduction of legal representation, procedural and appeals rights into internal disciplinary hearings presents a possibility of 'bringing power to particular account' . . . On the other hand detailed practices of discipline and normalisation, surveillance, differentiation, classification, assessment, segregation, deprivation within the site of the prison are not adequately contested simply through attempts to 'legalise' the prison.
(Brown and Hogg, 1985, p.73)
Brown and Hogg developed this analysis in a number of other papers which raised a series of theoretical questions about abolitionism. They pointed out that abolitionism tended to posit common political interests, usually built on class affiliation, between the unpro-ductivc (prisoners) and radical fractions of the working class. There were problems with constructing a unified class subject in this way in (hat this construction underestimated power networks which divided, differentiated and classified populations on the 'basis of sexual differentiation or grids of normality, age, health, etc.' (Brown and Hogg, 10,0,2). This differentiation had real effects: 'the success of the prison and other agencies such as the police at constituting an "alien and dangerous" criminal class is real and cannot be reversed by a simple assertion of common class interests. It is always a question of co/M/n;r(-m^allianccs often in very specific, localised and short-term ways. There is no necessary underlying unity waiting to be recognised' (Brown and Hogg, 10,0,2, pp. 154-5, emphasis in the original).
Tony Ward has also argued that within the specific context of Britain, struggles around and resistance to penal power are better understood by reference to Foucault's 'oppositional model of action' rather than Mathiesen's concept of 'contradiction'. He points to the strategy of opposition developed in the probation service and maintains that the clear division within abolitionist thought between control and welfare agencies, while 'theoretically attractive', is 'politically untenable in Britain'. The largest support for abolitionism has come from the voluntary agencies, social workers and probation officers whose everyday activity 'inescapably involves mixing care and control. To present these people with a stark choice between providing "pure" control within the penal system or "pure" help outside it could simply play into the hands of those in authority who are eager to reassert the importance of control as the system's primary role" (Ward, 1991, p. 161).
Along with Mick Ryan, Ward has also highlighted other theoretical currents which influenced abolitionism in the 1980's, including feminist theory and the campaign around rape launched by Women Against Rape. It was from this 'difficult but productive debate' that a range of other questions arose concerning the role of the state, the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy and, following Foucault, the problem of denning the nature of power and crimes of the powerful:
"No longer did the world appear to be neatly divided between the 'powerful' and the 'powerless', nor were 'crimes of the powerful' the sole prerogative of the ruling class, once the concept was extended (o take account of the power of men over women, of white people over black and of adults over children. (RAP was one of the first groups in the lobby to engage seriously with the issue of child sexual abuse)."
(Ryan and Ward, 1990, p. 7)
CRIMINOLOGY FROM BELOW
The theoretical debates outlined above were reflected in RAP's interventionist strategy in the 1980's. As in the previous decade, the organisation was involved in a series of campaigns, often with other mainstream groups, to lobby for "an agreed programme of reform' (Ryan and Ward, 1990, p. 9). This meant supporting those in the traditional lobby who argued for a reductionist strategy as a response to the prison crisis. At the same time, RAP also pointed to issues which until then had been neglected by traditional reformers. The scandal surrounding deaths in custody is a good example of this process. RAP was involved in the formation of the pressure group Inquest, established in 1980 to draw attention to those who had died 'suddenly, violently or inexplicably in police and prison custody' (Benn and Worpole, 1986, p. i). Twelve years on, the work of the group has become central to this debate. The issue has also become a cause for concern in the mainstream lobby and for the Chief Inspector of Prisons himself. It also inspired the formation of a similar group in Australia in 1984, which was concerned with the general question of deaths in custody and the disproportionate number of Aboriginal deaths in particular (Hogan, Brown and Hogg, 1988). Inquest's work extended across a range of areas throughout the igHos and can be seen as part of the hegemonic process mentioned earlier. Its members picketed police stations and coroner's courts, organised meetings, arranged legal support for the families of the deceased, who scandalously were and are denied legal aid, highlighted the unaccountable and often unacceptable practices of the coroner's courts and helped to sponsor a number of legislative changes, including the Administration of Justice Act 1982 and the Coroner's Juries Act 1983. This work also began to raise broader theoretical questions, particularly around the nature of state power and the processes of institutionalised violence (Sim, Scraton and Gordon, 1987, pp. 14-15). Both Inquest and RAP worked closely with a number of other radical prisoners' rights organisations, including Women in Prison, whose goal was 'to redress the injustices presently suffered bv Britain's hitherto neglected women prisoners'. In 1986 these organisations gave evidence to the House of Commons Social Services' Committee on the Prison Medical Service which was directly linked to the Committee's recommendation which 'called for the abolition and complete replacement of Hollo-way's C Wing' (Sim, Scraton and Gordon, 1987, pp. 15-16).
The ongoing campaign for the abolition of the Prison Medical Service (PMS) in England and Wales provides another example of this joint endeavour. As I noted above, it was RAP and the National Prisoners' Movement who, because of their close contact with the confined, first raised this issue in the 19705. Both groups pointed to the role of medicine inside, not as a neutral dispenser of medical care but as a set of interlocking, disciplinary discourses built on 'less eligibility', control and regulation (Sim, 1990). By the mid-ig8os the issues involved had become so contentious that they were taken up by a range of mainstream groups, including the Howard League for Penal Reform, The National Association for Mental Health, The Royal College of General Practitioners and The Royal College of Psychiatrists (Sim, 1990, pp. 122-3). ^n April 1991 the National Association of Probation Officers and Inquest introduced into the House of Commons the Health Care of Prisoners Bill, which contained provisions for the abolition of the PMS. As I have noted elsewhere, this Bill could be seen as a 'highly symbolic measure for achieving radical change . . . which if accepted will not solve all of the problems concerning the psychological and physical health of prisoners but is a realistic starting point for raising other, more fundamental questions regarding the treatment of the confined' (Sim, 1991, p. 38). Similar themes can be identified in relation to the campaign around the privatisation of prisons, where abolitionists have supported the moves by groups as diverse as The National Association of Probation Officers, The Civil and Public Servants' Association and The Prison Officers' Association to prevent further spread of the privatised network in Britain. The points raised by this campaign, which include the unethical nature of privatisation in relation to punishment and the non-accountability of those operating private prisons, directly parallel the issues raised by two of the leading members of the abolitionist movement in Britain in the book they published on the subject in 1989 (Ryan and Ward, 1989).
These campaigns, seen alongside those discussed earlier, indicate that abolitionism has not been the marginalised and irrelevant discourse claimed by its critics. Rather, it should be understood as a hegemonic force which has been generated by and responded to the 'contingent [and] fundamentally open-ended nature of polities'. In that sense it can be seen as part of the struggle to develop a radical discourse around penality, in Gramscian terms attempting to replace 'common sense' with 'good sense' in relation to crime and punishment (Hall, 1988, p. 109). In making this argument I am not positing a simple, uni-dimensional, causal relationship between abolitionist thinking and penal reform, particularly in terms of policy as 'the emergence of policy reforms from below (as with those from above) is the result of a complex and often fractious process' (Sim, 1991, p. 33). Nor am I idealising the impact of abolitionism on the increasing authoritarianism of state power. Rather I am pointing to the specificity of the abolitionist project in Britain, which in utilising a complex set of competing, contradictory and oppositional discourses, and providing support on the ground for the confined and their families, has challenged the hegemony around prison that historically and contemporaneously has united state servants, traditional referm groups and many academics on the same pragmatic and ideological terrain. In a nvimber of areas discussed in this paper, such as deaths in custody, prison conditions, medical power, visiting, censorship and sentencing, these groups have conceded key points in the abolitionist argument and have moved onto a more radical terrain where they too have contested the construction of state-defined truth around penal policy. What this process means for the future is the subject of the last section of this paper.
THE AGE OF IMPROVEMENT
The debate about the future of the prisons and the criminal justice system in general is now dominated by the issue of state-inspired reforms. It is important to recognise, however, that the movement for reform has been generated not by state benevolence but by the demands made by prisoners in different demonstrations, by grassroots organisations unwilling to accept the 'truth' surrounding the appalling miscarriages of justice that have occurred in the last twenty years, and by pro-feminist organisations demanding changes in the definitions of- and responses to - male brutality towards women. In the light of the major disruption in the prisons during the igSos two significant reports have been published, Opportunity and Responsibility (Scottish Prison Service, 1990) and the Woolf Report (1991). These documents appear to herald a new beginning for prisons in this country. In recognising that change is needed if the deeply damaging events of the 19808 are to be avoided, they propose a number of reforms, including establishing a framework of justice for prisoners, improved conditions, increased contact with the outside, better staff training and, crucially, making the confined responsible for their behaviour through introducing prisoners' contracts. Both documents have been almost uncritically endorsed in the media, and by academics and politicians as the panacea for alleviating the crisis inside.
From an abolitionist perspective there are some serious theoretical and political problems in utilising these proposals as the basis for future penal arrangements. Space does not permit me to provide an in-depth analysis, although I have done this elsewhere (Sim, 1991; 1993). However, I want briefly to point to four distinct areas which would form part of an abolitionist critique of the rhetoric of reform contained in these reports.
First, both documents either marginalise or heavily qualify the experiences of the confined. This means that alternative definitions of penal reality remain hidden and subservient to orthodox and state definitions of events. This is important because it allows both reports to transform questions of power, domination and institutionalised intimidation, which have been central to the abolitionist position, into more benign problems of administrative malpractices or individual deviance. There is a classic passage in the Woolf report which illustrates this point. Woolf points out that after the demonstration in Pucklechurch Remand Centre (near Bristol) in April 1990, surrendering prisoners were told that their arms and legs would be broken. The report notes:
There is no doubt that at the time the inmates were very frightened (I use that word advisedly) and even if the remarks made to them when waiting on the lawn were made in jest, they could, and did, cause considerable fear to the inmates. When considering these criticisms the long hours that management and staff had been on duty should be taken into account. Each member of staff must have been extremely tired and . . . close to exhaustion.
(Woolf and Tumim, 1991, p. 271)
The second problem also relates to the politics of marginalisation, in this case the failure to deal with or respond to a number of key prison issues that have arisen in the last twenty years: the unfettered discretion of staff, prisoners' rights, the accountability of prisons within a liberal democracy, the financing and cost of the service, women in prison and the sentencing process. For both documents the alleviation of the crisis lies not in confronting these issues but in the development of the responsible prisoner/customer, tied to each establishment by an agreed individual contract. Through this construction the debate is shifted onto the narrow ledge of individualism and social administration and away from wider structural questions concerning power, collective rights and democratic control (Sim, 1993)
Third, the increasing emphasis on coercion and militarisation as strategies for maintaining order means that the proposed reforms, even if they are accepted on their own terms, are unlikely to marginalise the ideological and material support within the state for these strategies. Prisoners will now receive an extra ten years for what is quaintly described as 'prison mutiny'. As Kenneth Baker has maintained, they must learn that rioting is not a 'cost-free option' (cited in Sim, 1993).
Finally, current reformist rhetoric misses a central issue raised by abolitionists and others in the last two decades, namely that unconditional support for limited change mystifies broader structural questions around the prevailing definitions of criminality that operate in this society, and vvno is punished as a result of these definitions. The first national survey published by the Prison Reform Trust in December 10,0,1 showed that unemployment, homelessness, lack of education and psychiatric disorders were prevalent in the prison population, that prisoners were overwhelmingly males aged 17?40, that 16 per cent of males and 26 per cent of females came from Afro-Caribbean backgrounds, and that this group was serving substantially longer sentences than white prisoners, in the case of the women over twice as long. The report concluded that imprisonment 'exacerbates those very disadvantages which . . . led the person into crime in the first ' place' (Prison Reform Trust, 1991, p. 6).
Historically and contemporaneously, the prison has overwhelmingly contained the detritus generated by this society's hierarchical arrangements. In making this point T am not denying the impact that crimes committed by many of the imprisoned can have, nor am I positing a model of behaviour in which human beings are propelled in a positivist sense by forces outside of their control. Clearly, there are important philosophical and social psychological questions to be discussed concerning free will, responsibility and personal accountability, although given the abject recidivism rate in prisons the institution's supporters can hardly defend its track record in encouraging responsible behaviour in the confined. Having said that, I do want to make the point that today's age of penal improvement is simply reinforcing conventional definitions of criminality, and that the prison of the twenty-first century is likely to operate at an ideological and symbolic level in the active construction and reconstruction of very precise and narrow definitions of criminality and social harm. As abolitionists like Mathiesen have maintained, the prison has to be understood both as a material place of confinement and as an ideological signifier. Not only does the institution encourage and reinforce bifurcation, powerlessness and stigmatisation, but it also establishes 'a structure which places members of one class in such a situation that the attention we might pay to the members of another is diverted' (Mathiesen 1990, p. 138). Distracting attention away from crimes of the powerful and aclively constructing particular images of criminality, however fragmentary and contradictor that process might be is, in Mathiesen's view, central to the continuation of the prison and to the reinforcement of a 'pervasive ideological mystification' around crime (Mathiesen, 1990, p. 141). This argument is particularly relevant to the debates around dangerousness. One of the most depressing elements in recent academic debates in criminology, which in my view can be directly linked to the reformist rhetoric of the state, is that in the rush to take crime seriously and to rediscover aetiology, the symbolic place of institutions like prisons as cultural signifiers has been neglected. This continually allows the debate on dangerousness (and crime in general) to take place on a conventional terrain clearly marked out in the discourses of state servants, government ministers, most media personnel and in the common sense of popular consciousness. Consider the brief passages below, describing two events separated by only eighteen months that occurred in the late 1960's
"Tex's final thrusts were suddenly interrupted by a frantic shout from Katie. While Tex and Sadie had been focusing their attention on Frykow-ski, Folger had freed herself from the noose and was making an effort to escape. Katie caught her, but was losing the battle until Tex got there. He clubbed Folger with the pistol and then stabbed her until he thought she was dead. Between his dash from Frykowski to Katie, Tex saw Sebring moving, and paused long enough to make several knife thrusts into Sebring's body. Once Folger was down and apparently dead, Tex returned to finish the job on Frykowski."
(Emmons, 1988, pp. 244-5)
"When children came running to them for sweets, they scythed them down with automatic fire. They herded mothers and babies into bunkers and threw grenades in after them. They raped and sodomised Vietnamese girls and then sliced open their vaginas with bayonet or knife. They scalped old men and women, beheaded others, slit throats, cut out tongues, sliced off ears, and hacked off limbs . . . Some wanted the dubious honour of being a 'double veteran' -American army slang for raping a woman and then murdering her."
(Knightley, 1992, p. 40)
The first passage describes the murders committed by the Manson family, the second those committed at My Lai in March 1968. Despite the appalling brutality of both actions, the response to them was (and is) very different: Charles Manson is still serving a life sentence, William Callcy, one of 'C' company's officers, served four-and-a-half months. There are a number of significant sociological questions to be raised here, not least of which relates to the culture of masculinity within which these actions can be contextualised and perhaps understood. For the purpose of my argument it is important to recognise that twenty years on, the Manson case reverberates symbolically as a chilling example of how serious crime and dangerousness continue to be denned in conventional and narrow positivist terms, while the Calley case is effectively closed. As Barbara Hudson has noted, 'serious crimes and crimes which are taken seriously are not necessarily the same . . . seriousness of law enforcement. . . does not relate to seriousness of crime if the latter is to be judged by any rational calculus of harm as suggested by the more liberal justice model theorists' (Hudson, 1987, p. 126). This argument can clearly be extended to other activities that remain effectively unpoliced and unpunished: large-stale commercial fraud (Levi, 1987), the criminality of the state in terms of espionage, assassination and conspiracy (Barak, 1991; Gill, 1994); and at more micro levels, violent male behaviour underpinned by power, militarisation and the culture of masculinity (Tift and Mark-ham, 1991). Even when fraud cases are prosecuted, poorer and powerless offenders 'are more likely to be imprisoned, pound for pound stolen, than is a fraudster' (Levi, 1989, p. 107).
Critics of this position will no doubt say (as they always do) that even if the definition of crimes of the powerful is extended and recognised, abolitionists and other radical critics still fail to confront the fact that there are some dangerous individuals, overwhelmingly men, who in the conventional sense need to be confined. This view can be challenged at two levels. First, as I have already noted, many of those involved in the abolitionist movement in Britain have been confronting the issue of violence at least since the early ig8os and have been pointing to the problems that those defined as conventionally dangerous, for example, male rapists, have brought to the lives of particular groups. Second, British abolitionists have never advocated simply 'tearing down the walls' of the penitentiary Rather they have maintained that incapacitating conventionally dangerous individuals such as rapists through detention does not necessarily guarantee an alleviation of violence, either at an individual or collective level. Imprisoned rapists are likely to be confronted by a prison culture which will do little to change their behaviour, heighten their consciousness or the consciousness of those in the wider society concerning the 'intimate intrusions' which face women on a daily basis (Stanko, 1985). The first major study of imprisoned rapists in the UK supports this argument. Tt showed that only 32 out of 142 men believed that raped women had been harmed, while less than half displayed any compassion for their victims (The Guardian, 5 March 1991). While some exemplary work has been done with sex offenders in institutions such as Grendon Underwood and Wormwood Scrubs, supported by individually well-motivated prison officers, which perhaps will be consolidated by the newly formed national system for the treatment of sex offenders, it could be argued that there is a danager that at an ideological level this work and reform simply reassert the 'therapeutic discourse', which conceptualises 'male violence as an irrational act of emotional ventilation' rather than as behaviour based on intentional motivation and the will to dominate (Dobash and Dobash, 1992, p. 248). A similar point has been made in relation to the most recent proposals for reforming police practices concerning domestic violence, which are based on the reassertion of traditional family values (Radford and Stanko, 1991).
My scepticism towards these reforms does not mean resorting to incarcerating the powerful as a way forward. Clearly that would defeat the politics and the objectives of abolitionism by implying that the phenomenon of a 'fair incarceration rate' exists (Thomas and Boehle-feld, 1991, p. 249). It does mean, however, recognising that the oper-adonalisation of power, its interpersonal and structural abuse and its mediation by social class, gender, race and sexuality needs to be responded to; it is how we respond that remains the key question for abolitionism. I believe that current reformist proposals, because of their marginalisation of the issue of power, do not come close to addressing the philosophical, sociological, psychological and political nuances generated by this question.
CONCLUSION
This paper has quite deliberately covered a lot of sociological ground, because I wanted to illustrate the importance of abolitionist thought in this country and the diverse range of concerns of its supporters. I do not therefore take the pessimistic view that abolitionism has offered nothing or continues to offer nothing towards the prison debate. As Jim Thomas and Sharon Boehlefeld have noted: 'struggle is as long as history . . . the outcomes of our resistance to unjust forms of social control are rarely immediately visible' (Thomas and Boehlefeld, 1991, p. 249). Indeed, the abolitionist argument remains a powerful one, as Willem de Haan's critical dissection of traditional forms of punishment has indicated (dc Haan, 1990). Similarly, Pat Carlen's cogent argument for the abolition of women's prisons as 'one small step towards giving the criminal justice and penal systems the thorough shake up they so desperately need' also provides a clear theoretical and pragmatic view of the way forward in this still neglected area (Carlen, 1990, p. 125). As Thomas and Boehlefeld point out, a theoretically refined abolitionism can offer a new way of thinking about the world and a vision of the future which contrasts sharply with traditional methods of penality based on incapacitation, deterrence, punishment and rehabilitation. It directly confronts the 'cynicism and anomie' of postmodernism, it reaffirms the argument that prisons don't work 'either as punishment or as a means of ensuring the safety and stability of the commonweal' and it recognises that predatory behaviour needs to be responded to and dealt with within the structural and interpersonal contexts of power and politics (Thomas and Bochlefeld, 1991, pp. 246-49). That vision can be compared with the present situation here and elsewhere, which is evoked in the words of George Jackson: 'The ultimate expression of law is not order - it's prison. There are hundreds upon hundreds of prisons, and thousands upon thousands of laws, yet there is no social order, no social peace' (Jackson, 1975, p95). Jackson's posthumous thoughts provide a fitting description of both the politics of British prisons and the increasingly factious and divided nation they help to legitimate and sustain in the late twentieth century.
Thanks to Anette Rallinger, Dave Brown, Jenny Rurke, Russell Dobash, Paul Gilroy, Paddy Hillyard, Tony Jefferson, Mirk Ryan and Tony Ward for discussing different aspects of this paper with me.
"No longer did the world appear to be neatly divided between the 'powerful' and the 'powerless', nor were 'crimes of the powerful' the sole prerogative of the ruling class, once the concept was extended (o take account of the power of men over women, of white people over black and of adults over children. (RAP was one of the first groups in the lobby to engage seriously with the issue of child sexual abuse)."
(Ryan and Ward, 1990, p. 7)
CRIMINOLOGY FROM BELOW
The theoretical debates outlined above were reflected in RAP's interventionist strategy in the 1980's. As in the previous decade, the organisation was involved in a series of campaigns, often with other mainstream groups, to lobby for "an agreed programme of reform' (Ryan and Ward, 1990, p. 9). This meant supporting those in the traditional lobby who argued for a reductionist strategy as a response to the prison crisis. At the same time, RAP also pointed to issues which until then had been neglected by traditional reformers. The scandal surrounding deaths in custody is a good example of this process. RAP was involved in the formation of the pressure group Inquest, established in 1980 to draw attention to those who had died 'suddenly, violently or inexplicably in police and prison custody' (Benn and Worpole, 1986, p. i). Twelve years on, the work of the group has become central to this debate. The issue has also become a cause for concern in the mainstream lobby and for the Chief Inspector of Prisons himself. It also inspired the formation of a similar group in Australia in 1984, which was concerned with the general question of deaths in custody and the disproportionate number of Aboriginal deaths in particular (Hogan, Brown and Hogg, 1988). Inquest's work extended across a range of areas throughout the igHos and can be seen as part of the hegemonic process mentioned earlier. Its members picketed police stations and coroner's courts, organised meetings, arranged legal support for the families of the deceased, who scandalously were and are denied legal aid, highlighted the unaccountable and often unacceptable practices of the coroner's courts and helped to sponsor a number of legislative changes, including the Administration of Justice Act 1982 and the Coroner's Juries Act 1983. This work also began to raise broader theoretical questions, particularly around the nature of state power and the processes of institutionalised violence (Sim, Scraton and Gordon, 1987, pp. 14-15). Both Inquest and RAP worked closely with a number of other radical prisoners' rights organisations, including Women in Prison, whose goal was 'to redress the injustices presently suffered bv Britain's hitherto neglected women prisoners'. In 1986 these organisations gave evidence to the House of Commons Social Services' Committee on the Prison Medical Service which was directly linked to the Committee's recommendation which 'called for the abolition and complete replacement of Hollo-way's C Wing' (Sim, Scraton and Gordon, 1987, pp. 15-16).
The ongoing campaign for the abolition of the Prison Medical Service (PMS) in England and Wales provides another example of this joint endeavour. As I noted above, it was RAP and the National Prisoners' Movement who, because of their close contact with the confined, first raised this issue in the 19705. Both groups pointed to the role of medicine inside, not as a neutral dispenser of medical care but as a set of interlocking, disciplinary discourses built on 'less eligibility', control and regulation (Sim, 1990). By the mid-ig8os the issues involved had become so contentious that they were taken up by a range of mainstream groups, including the Howard League for Penal Reform, The National Association for Mental Health, The Royal College of General Practitioners and The Royal College of Psychiatrists (Sim, 1990, pp. 122-3). ^n April 1991 the National Association of Probation Officers and Inquest introduced into the House of Commons the Health Care of Prisoners Bill, which contained provisions for the abolition of the PMS. As I have noted elsewhere, this Bill could be seen as a 'highly symbolic measure for achieving radical change . . . which if accepted will not solve all of the problems concerning the psychological and physical health of prisoners but is a realistic starting point for raising other, more fundamental questions regarding the treatment of the confined' (Sim, 1991, p. 38). Similar themes can be identified in relation to the campaign around the privatisation of prisons, where abolitionists have supported the moves by groups as diverse as The National Association of Probation Officers, The Civil and Public Servants' Association and The Prison Officers' Association to prevent further spread of the privatised network in Britain. The points raised by this campaign, which include the unethical nature of privatisation in relation to punishment and the non-accountability of those operating private prisons, directly parallel the issues raised by two of the leading members of the abolitionist movement in Britain in the book they published on the subject in 1989 (Ryan and Ward, 1989).
These campaigns, seen alongside those discussed earlier, indicate that abolitionism has not been the marginalised and irrelevant discourse claimed by its critics. Rather, it should be understood as a hegemonic force which has been generated by and responded to the 'contingent [and] fundamentally open-ended nature of polities'. In that sense it can be seen as part of the struggle to develop a radical discourse around penality, in Gramscian terms attempting to replace 'common sense' with 'good sense' in relation to crime and punishment (Hall, 1988, p. 109). In making this argument I am not positing a simple, uni-dimensional, causal relationship between abolitionist thinking and penal reform, particularly in terms of policy as 'the emergence of policy reforms from below (as with those from above) is the result of a complex and often fractious process' (Sim, 1991, p. 33). Nor am I idealising the impact of abolitionism on the increasing authoritarianism of state power. Rather I am pointing to the specificity of the abolitionist project in Britain, which in utilising a complex set of competing, contradictory and oppositional discourses, and providing support on the ground for the confined and their families, has challenged the hegemony around prison that historically and contemporaneously has united state servants, traditional referm groups and many academics on the same pragmatic and ideological terrain. In a nvimber of areas discussed in this paper, such as deaths in custody, prison conditions, medical power, visiting, censorship and sentencing, these groups have conceded key points in the abolitionist argument and have moved onto a more radical terrain where they too have contested the construction of state-defined truth around penal policy. What this process means for the future is the subject of the last section of this paper.
THE AGE OF IMPROVEMENT
The debate about the future of the prisons and the criminal justice system in general is now dominated by the issue of state-inspired reforms. It is important to recognise, however, that the movement for reform has been generated not by state benevolence but by the demands made by prisoners in different demonstrations, by grassroots organisations unwilling to accept the 'truth' surrounding the appalling miscarriages of justice that have occurred in the last twenty years, and by pro-feminist organisations demanding changes in the definitions of- and responses to - male brutality towards women. In the light of the major disruption in the prisons during the igSos two significant reports have been published, Opportunity and Responsibility (Scottish Prison Service, 1990) and the Woolf Report (1991). These documents appear to herald a new beginning for prisons in this country. In recognising that change is needed if the deeply damaging events of the 19808 are to be avoided, they propose a number of reforms, including establishing a framework of justice for prisoners, improved conditions, increased contact with the outside, better staff training and, crucially, making the confined responsible for their behaviour through introducing prisoners' contracts. Both documents have been almost uncritically endorsed in the media, and by academics and politicians as the panacea for alleviating the crisis inside.
From an abolitionist perspective there are some serious theoretical and political problems in utilising these proposals as the basis for future penal arrangements. Space does not permit me to provide an in-depth analysis, although I have done this elsewhere (Sim, 1991; 1993). However, I want briefly to point to four distinct areas which would form part of an abolitionist critique of the rhetoric of reform contained in these reports.
First, both documents either marginalise or heavily qualify the experiences of the confined. This means that alternative definitions of penal reality remain hidden and subservient to orthodox and state definitions of events. This is important because it allows both reports to transform questions of power, domination and institutionalised intimidation, which have been central to the abolitionist position, into more benign problems of administrative malpractices or individual deviance. There is a classic passage in the Woolf report which illustrates this point. Woolf points out that after the demonstration in Pucklechurch Remand Centre (near Bristol) in April 1990, surrendering prisoners were told that their arms and legs would be broken. The report notes:
There is no doubt that at the time the inmates were very frightened (I use that word advisedly) and even if the remarks made to them when waiting on the lawn were made in jest, they could, and did, cause considerable fear to the inmates. When considering these criticisms the long hours that management and staff had been on duty should be taken into account. Each member of staff must have been extremely tired and . . . close to exhaustion.
(Woolf and Tumim, 1991, p. 271)
The second problem also relates to the politics of marginalisation, in this case the failure to deal with or respond to a number of key prison issues that have arisen in the last twenty years: the unfettered discretion of staff, prisoners' rights, the accountability of prisons within a liberal democracy, the financing and cost of the service, women in prison and the sentencing process. For both documents the alleviation of the crisis lies not in confronting these issues but in the development of the responsible prisoner/customer, tied to each establishment by an agreed individual contract. Through this construction the debate is shifted onto the narrow ledge of individualism and social administration and away from wider structural questions concerning power, collective rights and democratic control (Sim, 1993)
Third, the increasing emphasis on coercion and militarisation as strategies for maintaining order means that the proposed reforms, even if they are accepted on their own terms, are unlikely to marginalise the ideological and material support within the state for these strategies. Prisoners will now receive an extra ten years for what is quaintly described as 'prison mutiny'. As Kenneth Baker has maintained, they must learn that rioting is not a 'cost-free option' (cited in Sim, 1993).
Finally, current reformist rhetoric misses a central issue raised by abolitionists and others in the last two decades, namely that unconditional support for limited change mystifies broader structural questions around the prevailing definitions of criminality that operate in this society, and vvno is punished as a result of these definitions. The first national survey published by the Prison Reform Trust in December 10,0,1 showed that unemployment, homelessness, lack of education and psychiatric disorders were prevalent in the prison population, that prisoners were overwhelmingly males aged 17?40, that 16 per cent of males and 26 per cent of females came from Afro-Caribbean backgrounds, and that this group was serving substantially longer sentences than white prisoners, in the case of the women over twice as long. The report concluded that imprisonment 'exacerbates those very disadvantages which . . . led the person into crime in the first ' place' (Prison Reform Trust, 1991, p. 6).
Historically and contemporaneously, the prison has overwhelmingly contained the detritus generated by this society's hierarchical arrangements. In making this point T am not denying the impact that crimes committed by many of the imprisoned can have, nor am I positing a model of behaviour in which human beings are propelled in a positivist sense by forces outside of their control. Clearly, there are important philosophical and social psychological questions to be discussed concerning free will, responsibility and personal accountability, although given the abject recidivism rate in prisons the institution's supporters can hardly defend its track record in encouraging responsible behaviour in the confined. Having said that, I do want to make the point that today's age of penal improvement is simply reinforcing conventional definitions of criminality, and that the prison of the twenty-first century is likely to operate at an ideological and symbolic level in the active construction and reconstruction of very precise and narrow definitions of criminality and social harm. As abolitionists like Mathiesen have maintained, the prison has to be understood both as a material place of confinement and as an ideological signifier. Not only does the institution encourage and reinforce bifurcation, powerlessness and stigmatisation, but it also establishes 'a structure which places members of one class in such a situation that the attention we might pay to the members of another is diverted' (Mathiesen 1990, p. 138). Distracting attention away from crimes of the powerful and aclively constructing particular images of criminality, however fragmentary and contradictor that process might be is, in Mathiesen's view, central to the continuation of the prison and to the reinforcement of a 'pervasive ideological mystification' around crime (Mathiesen, 1990, p. 141). This argument is particularly relevant to the debates around dangerousness. One of the most depressing elements in recent academic debates in criminology, which in my view can be directly linked to the reformist rhetoric of the state, is that in the rush to take crime seriously and to rediscover aetiology, the symbolic place of institutions like prisons as cultural signifiers has been neglected. This continually allows the debate on dangerousness (and crime in general) to take place on a conventional terrain clearly marked out in the discourses of state servants, government ministers, most media personnel and in the common sense of popular consciousness. Consider the brief passages below, describing two events separated by only eighteen months that occurred in the late 1960's
"Tex's final thrusts were suddenly interrupted by a frantic shout from Katie. While Tex and Sadie had been focusing their attention on Frykow-ski, Folger had freed herself from the noose and was making an effort to escape. Katie caught her, but was losing the battle until Tex got there. He clubbed Folger with the pistol and then stabbed her until he thought she was dead. Between his dash from Frykowski to Katie, Tex saw Sebring moving, and paused long enough to make several knife thrusts into Sebring's body. Once Folger was down and apparently dead, Tex returned to finish the job on Frykowski."
(Emmons, 1988, pp. 244-5)
"When children came running to them for sweets, they scythed them down with automatic fire. They herded mothers and babies into bunkers and threw grenades in after them. They raped and sodomised Vietnamese girls and then sliced open their vaginas with bayonet or knife. They scalped old men and women, beheaded others, slit throats, cut out tongues, sliced off ears, and hacked off limbs . . . Some wanted the dubious honour of being a 'double veteran' -American army slang for raping a woman and then murdering her."
(Knightley, 1992, p. 40)
The first passage describes the murders committed by the Manson family, the second those committed at My Lai in March 1968. Despite the appalling brutality of both actions, the response to them was (and is) very different: Charles Manson is still serving a life sentence, William Callcy, one of 'C' company's officers, served four-and-a-half months. There are a number of significant sociological questions to be raised here, not least of which relates to the culture of masculinity within which these actions can be contextualised and perhaps understood. For the purpose of my argument it is important to recognise that twenty years on, the Manson case reverberates symbolically as a chilling example of how serious crime and dangerousness continue to be denned in conventional and narrow positivist terms, while the Calley case is effectively closed. As Barbara Hudson has noted, 'serious crimes and crimes which are taken seriously are not necessarily the same . . . seriousness of law enforcement. . . does not relate to seriousness of crime if the latter is to be judged by any rational calculus of harm as suggested by the more liberal justice model theorists' (Hudson, 1987, p. 126). This argument can clearly be extended to other activities that remain effectively unpoliced and unpunished: large-stale commercial fraud (Levi, 1987), the criminality of the state in terms of espionage, assassination and conspiracy (Barak, 1991; Gill, 1994); and at more micro levels, violent male behaviour underpinned by power, militarisation and the culture of masculinity (Tift and Mark-ham, 1991). Even when fraud cases are prosecuted, poorer and powerless offenders 'are more likely to be imprisoned, pound for pound stolen, than is a fraudster' (Levi, 1989, p. 107).
Critics of this position will no doubt say (as they always do) that even if the definition of crimes of the powerful is extended and recognised, abolitionists and other radical critics still fail to confront the fact that there are some dangerous individuals, overwhelmingly men, who in the conventional sense need to be confined. This view can be challenged at two levels. First, as I have already noted, many of those involved in the abolitionist movement in Britain have been confronting the issue of violence at least since the early ig8os and have been pointing to the problems that those defined as conventionally dangerous, for example, male rapists, have brought to the lives of particular groups. Second, British abolitionists have never advocated simply 'tearing down the walls' of the penitentiary Rather they have maintained that incapacitating conventionally dangerous individuals such as rapists through detention does not necessarily guarantee an alleviation of violence, either at an individual or collective level. Imprisoned rapists are likely to be confronted by a prison culture which will do little to change their behaviour, heighten their consciousness or the consciousness of those in the wider society concerning the 'intimate intrusions' which face women on a daily basis (Stanko, 1985). The first major study of imprisoned rapists in the UK supports this argument. Tt showed that only 32 out of 142 men believed that raped women had been harmed, while less than half displayed any compassion for their victims (The Guardian, 5 March 1991). While some exemplary work has been done with sex offenders in institutions such as Grendon Underwood and Wormwood Scrubs, supported by individually well-motivated prison officers, which perhaps will be consolidated by the newly formed national system for the treatment of sex offenders, it could be argued that there is a danager that at an ideological level this work and reform simply reassert the 'therapeutic discourse', which conceptualises 'male violence as an irrational act of emotional ventilation' rather than as behaviour based on intentional motivation and the will to dominate (Dobash and Dobash, 1992, p. 248). A similar point has been made in relation to the most recent proposals for reforming police practices concerning domestic violence, which are based on the reassertion of traditional family values (Radford and Stanko, 1991).
My scepticism towards these reforms does not mean resorting to incarcerating the powerful as a way forward. Clearly that would defeat the politics and the objectives of abolitionism by implying that the phenomenon of a 'fair incarceration rate' exists (Thomas and Boehle-feld, 1991, p. 249). It does mean, however, recognising that the oper-adonalisation of power, its interpersonal and structural abuse and its mediation by social class, gender, race and sexuality needs to be responded to; it is how we respond that remains the key question for abolitionism. I believe that current reformist proposals, because of their marginalisation of the issue of power, do not come close to addressing the philosophical, sociological, psychological and political nuances generated by this question.
CONCLUSION
This paper has quite deliberately covered a lot of sociological ground, because I wanted to illustrate the importance of abolitionist thought in this country and the diverse range of concerns of its supporters. I do not therefore take the pessimistic view that abolitionism has offered nothing or continues to offer nothing towards the prison debate. As Jim Thomas and Sharon Boehlefeld have noted: 'struggle is as long as history . . . the outcomes of our resistance to unjust forms of social control are rarely immediately visible' (Thomas and Boehlefeld, 1991, p. 249). Indeed, the abolitionist argument remains a powerful one, as Willem de Haan's critical dissection of traditional forms of punishment has indicated (dc Haan, 1990). Similarly, Pat Carlen's cogent argument for the abolition of women's prisons as 'one small step towards giving the criminal justice and penal systems the thorough shake up they so desperately need' also provides a clear theoretical and pragmatic view of the way forward in this still neglected area (Carlen, 1990, p. 125). As Thomas and Boehlefeld point out, a theoretically refined abolitionism can offer a new way of thinking about the world and a vision of the future which contrasts sharply with traditional methods of penality based on incapacitation, deterrence, punishment and rehabilitation. It directly confronts the 'cynicism and anomie' of postmodernism, it reaffirms the argument that prisons don't work 'either as punishment or as a means of ensuring the safety and stability of the commonweal' and it recognises that predatory behaviour needs to be responded to and dealt with within the structural and interpersonal contexts of power and politics (Thomas and Bochlefeld, 1991, pp. 246-49). That vision can be compared with the present situation here and elsewhere, which is evoked in the words of George Jackson: 'The ultimate expression of law is not order - it's prison. There are hundreds upon hundreds of prisons, and thousands upon thousands of laws, yet there is no social order, no social peace' (Jackson, 1975, p95). Jackson's posthumous thoughts provide a fitting description of both the politics of British prisons and the increasingly factious and divided nation they help to legitimate and sustain in the late twentieth century.
Thanks to Anette Rallinger, Dave Brown, Jenny Rurke, Russell Dobash, Paul Gilroy, Paddy Hillyard, Tony Jefferson, Mirk Ryan and Tony Ward for discussing different aspects of this paper with me.