Prisons and How to Get Rid of them
By: Professor David Wilson,
Centre for Criminal Justice Policy and Practice,
UCE in Birmingham
Centre for Criminal Justice Policy and Practice,
UCE in Birmingham
Let me start by quoting from two different sources - both taken from work published in 1990. The first is from the Labour Peer Baroness Blackstone (1990) in her book Prisons and Penal Reform, part of the Counterblast series published by Chatto and Windus at the height of Thatcherism.
Britain has a disastrously expensive and inhumane penal system, which is compounded by a huge injection of resources into building more prisons. Placing so much emphasis on building prisons is a sad reflection on the innovative abilities of the government. A little more imagination, rather more attention to the evidence in front of them, and greater political courage would have led ministers down a quite different path. It would have led them to a sustained effort to reduce substantially the prison population.
Indeed, reflecting the days before New Labour would become 'tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime' Baroness Blackstone ended her book with a demand that the prison population be cut by half - to something around 24,000 people.
The second quote comes from the Norwegian criminologist Thomas Mathiesen (1990) from his book, also published in 1990 called Prison on Trial, although I am using the second edition that was re-issued in 2000. In this quote Mathiesen echoes Baroness Blackstone and optimistically predicts that reason will eventually persuade policy makers that prison is illogical.
Victim work and offender work will certainly prove more satisfactory than prison, and we may envisage further contraction, possibly abolition. This would be congruent with the whole weight of evidence on prisons. In actual fact, anything else is tantamount to acceding towards irrationality.
Now, from our vantage point some 15 years after these quotes were made, we can see that Baroness Blackstone's party has presided over unparalleled growth in the penal system - indeed rather than the prison population falling by 24,000 since coming to power in 1997 New Labour has put around an extra 30,000 people behind bars. As a result of their enthusiasm for mandatory minimum sentencing, there are now more Life Sentenced prisoners in Britain than the whole of Western Europe combined; New Labour has presided over more penal privatisation than the sum total of their Tory predecessors, despite no less a person than Tony Blair himself claiming that Labour opposed prison privatisation 'in theory as well as in practice' (Blair, 1993); and we have, as well as our highest ever prison population, the déjà vu of our current Chief Inspector of Prisons echoing all of her predecessors about how awful the experience of incarceration actually is in this country.
No one, it would seem would currently agree with Mathiesen that there might come a day when contraction and eventual abolition of prison is possible, and that to do otherwise is 'irrational'.
Indeed "common sense" justifications of prison suggest that "prison works" by incapacitation - it takes people out of society and thus gives communities a rest from those who have broken the law; through individual and general deterrence - it makes those who might be thinking about committing a crime think again; by punishing those who do actually commit crimes; and, finally, by rehabilitating - it helps those who have committed crimes to think through the causes of their offending so as to change their behaviour by developing new skills, which they are then able to put to good use on release from custody.
These justifications are now so widespread and accepted amongst our politicians, media commentators and indeed many members of the public, that no one actually bothers to question whether they are actually true or not - whether they are "nonsense" rather than "common sense", and the one place that we can forget about "evidence-led practice" in relation to public policy is when prisons are discussed. After all, as a mountain of research testifies - much of it emanating from the Home Office, these justifications are at best aspirational and are at worst simply lies.
Here it would be easy to unmask these false justifications by patiently pointing out the realities about who gets imprisoned and who does not; the relationship - or otherwise between the crime rate and the rate of imprisonment; what happens to people when they are inside and especially what happens to them after they are released. We'd point to the fact that two out of every three young offenders are reconvicted within two years of leaving jail; that one out of every two adult men are similarly reconvicted; and, that just under one out of every two women suffer the same fate. Would a school that failed to teach two out of every three of its pupils to read and write, or a hospital that killed one out of every two of its patients continue to receive widespread political and popular support? However, we know all of this too; we know that prison fails by almost every measure that it sets for itself; we know that prison is a useless, outdated, bloated Victorian institution that is well past its sell-by-date; we know, in short, that prison is a fiasco. How then do we create a scepticism about what prison was, now is and what is claimed for it by its supporters?
I want to make a case in support of Mathiesen from the perspective of describing the pre-conditions that I think have to be present for contraction and abolition to take place. For whilst I absolutely agree that using prison is irrational, especially in relation to the numbers of people that we send inside, who, as all evidence shows, are largely minor property offenders who could be more effectively dealt with through community penalties, and whilst I agree that prison is counter-productive, or to quote a former Tory minister, "an expensive way of making bad people worse", what I feel has been absent from his debate is a "road map" of how we get from where we are to where we - or at least I would like to be. So, what I want to do is use an historical example of decarceration and analyse how that decarceration occurred in the hope that this might guide us in our own attempts to stop the seemingly inexorable growth in prison numbers. And here I acknowledge that I have been attempting to create this road map for some time, most recently in my book - Death at the Hands of the State, which is published by the Howard League for Penal Reform.
There are several historical examples of decarceration that I could choose. For example, the decline in prison numbers in the old West Germany in the 1980s, which for a time provided a great deal of hope for penal reformers in this country, or of the Netherlands between 1950-1975, when their prison population fell from 6,500 to 2,500, despite an increasing crime rate. Or, the decarceration of young offender institutions in Massachusetts in the 1970s, under the leadership of Jerome Miller during Michael Dukakis's tenure as State Governor. Indeed each of these examples offers insight into the debate that I seek to start today. For example, it is quite clear that Dukakis was seen as "soft on crime" during the Presidential campaign of 1980, and that subsequent Democratic candidates - most notably Bill Clinton were keen to establish their "toughness" about offenders, and many here will know of the story of Clinton leaving the campaign trail to return to Little Rock, Arkansas to sign the death warrant of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally retarded black man (Wilson et al, 2000).
However, I have chosen an example of decarceration from England and Wales and despite the fact that this example has been written about before (Rutherford, 1988) it seems to me that the decline in the prison population of England and Wales between 1908 and 1939 from 22,029 to 11,086 ? or in terms of the numbers of prisoners per 100,000 of the general population from 63 to 30 is a truly extraordinary period in our penal history and one that deserves greater scrutiny. For in effect our prison numbers halved, and as a result around 20 prisons had to close down despite the fact that the crime rate in this period actually increased by around 100 per cent. Lets look at these figures a little more clearly. [Overhead]
So how can this phenomenon be explained? I think that we have to consider three issues:
1.For decarceration to have begun to this extent there was a great deal of scepticism about what prison and imprisonment could do, and that scepticism was shared by a wide range of people who were able to exercise influence over the political process - an echo perhaps of what Mathiesen from our own day has described as creating "alternative public space",
2.Secondly, there was a credible, practical alternative to incarceration,
3.And finally prisons and prison staff responded to this changing sensibility, both prompting and supporting the drop in prison numbers.
In relation to the first of these three points one of the realities that characterises this historical period is that several politicians and several key social groups became absolutely convinced that prison was a corrupting and counter-productive experience. The most obvious example to give is Winston Churchill, who as Home Secretary between February 1910 and October 1911 set about reducing the use of imprisonment, especially for those who had hitherto been sentenced to very short sentences. He noted, for example, that in 1910 some two-thirds of sentenced prisoners had received sentences of two weeks or less, and he described this as ?a terrible and purposeless waste of public money and human character.- More famously, in July 1910 he also suggested [overhead] "the mood and temper of the public to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilization of the country". Just why Churchill was so against prison is a matter of conjecture, but perhaps we can trace his antipathy back to his own experience as a prisoner-of-war during the Boer War, and it is worth noting that those politicians who themselves have had direct experiences of incarceration - such as Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel, are usually the most ardent penal reformers when they come to power.
Churchill's scepticism was mirrored in this period by other key and influential groups and commentators, who created the right "mood music" for decarceration to take place. For example, Oscar Wilde was arrested in 1895 on charges of gross indecency and sent to gaol for two years. Whilst inside he wrote The Ballad of Reading Goal which had a tremendous popular impact when it was first published in 1898 and remains, as far as I am concerned, one of the best pieces of prison writing that this country has ever produced. Similarly, just prior to the First World War the incarceration of suffragettes and their treatment inside, and thereafter the imprisonment of conscientious objectors, created two powerful groups of people who were prepared to campaign for changes in relation to imprisonment. The most obvious example to give is the formation of the Howard League for Penal Reform in 1921, and two of the conscientious objectors who had been imprisoned - Stephen Hobhouse and Fenner Brockway conclude in their book about prisons, published in 1921 that:
"Our prison system, whilst it sometimes makes good prisoners, does almost nothing to make good citizens. It fails to restore the weak will or to encourage initiative; it reduces energy by the harshness of its routine and adds depression to the depressed..........and the more the system costs the country, the more highly it is organised, the more monumental must that failure be."
Having spent some time talking about the development of scepticism in this period, I only want to briefly discuss the second and third issues that I described above. The second development that I believe creates the preconditions for decarceration to take place in this period is the development a credible alternative to incarceration. Specifically it is during this period that we see the development of Probation. You will all appreciate that the roots of probation stem from the 1876 and The Church of England Temperance Society, and that by 1907 the Government had passed its first Probation Act giving probation a statutory footing. In short, imprisonment is not seen as the "only club in the golf bag" of policy options when it comes to responding to offenders, and allows the hegemony of incarceration to be challenged.
Thirdly, the Home Office, prisons and prison staff too responded to these changing social and policy developments. They were not the passive recipients of change, but rather both prompted and responded to change. Their response is perhaps best symbolised by The Gladstone Committee of 1898 which completely re-defined the purpose of imprisonment, and which, for example, stated that:
"We think that the system should be made more elastic, more capable of being adopted to the special cases of individual prisoners; that prison discipline and treatment should be more effectively designed to maintain, stimulate, or awaken the higher susceptibilities of prisoners, to develop their moral instincts, to train them in orderly and industrial habits, and whenever possible to turn them out of prison better men and women, both physically and morally than when they came in."
These challenges were admirably taken up in prisons and by prison staff through, for example, the development of the borstal regime for young offenders, and in relation to the introduction of psychologists and educationalists into prison regimes.
So, what lessons can we learn from this historical example about decarceration in our own day, at a time of not just record prison numbers, but also of the closer relationship between HM Prison Service and the National Probation Service (and thus where a credible alternative to imprisonment seems further away); the domination of our prison regimes by cognitive skills courses of various kinds which seem to promise - on the sketchiest evidence available, that prison can in some circumstances be "good for the offender"; and a seemingly never-ending procession of politicians who are prepared to see the prison population grow higher and higher and are thus prepared to ignore a mountain of evidence to the contrary?
The key lesson for me is that we have to re-create a sense of scepticism into the policy debate, and that scepticism has to be robust enough to transcend the party politics of the lowest common denominator, whilst at the same time creative enough to engage the public with the message that prison is costly, counter-productive and except in a very few cases in no one's interests. This seems like a pipedream, but there are various signs that this can be achieved. For example, from my own personal perspective I was impressed by, and a small part of Marion Janner's Payback initiative; I was involved with the Esme Fairbairn's Rethinking Crime and Punishment initiative; and remain committed to The Howard League for Penal Reform. Indeed their campaign against prisons at the last General Election, which saw them attempt to raise the level of debate about crime and punishment had various politicians on the "back foot" and resulted in Millbank having to guide their candidates in what to say if they were challenged about prisons on the doorstep. Inevitably, this Millbank advice was almost immediately leaked to The Howard League!
However, perhaps we could see the work of Payback - now disbanded, Esme Fairbairn and the continuing work of The Howard League for Penal Reform, which has become the official opposition to crime and punishment in this country, as part of the traditional response to imprisonment and prisons. In their different ways they all make a contribution to the "mood music" and to policy - some to a greater extent than others, but for different reasons they still fall short of creating the space in which a challenge to prison can be mounted. I say this because I think that the scepticism from our historical example was shared more widely than the scepticism about prisons that exists today. For that to take place we really do have to create the "alternative public space" that Mathiesen was describing, and again from my personal experience I think that that means that we have to be prepared to engage with the media. I say this because of my involvement with the Channel 4 series Buried, on which I acted as a consultant, and which generated more column inches about penal reform - and at a stroke a bigger audience for penal reform through the viewing public than any other event of the last five years. Buried - no matter what you might think of it as drama, and I am aware of several recent criticisms of the programme from penal "insiders" such as Jamie Bennett (Bennett, 2003), exposed the still largely closed world of prison to public scrutiny, and presented the violence, hopelessness, madness and pervading sense of decay that permeates prison for all to see. The tragedy here is that Buried did not get re-commissioned, despite a public appeal on behalf of the series by, for example, The Guardian and The Daily Mirror. Nonetheless, there will be other "Burieds", and the next time we should do what we can to support the space that programmes like this create, for it is that space which allows a challenge to imprisonment to take hold in an audience that does not normally think too much about prison or prisoners. Above all, and whilst not is now the time to debate the media's use and misuse of prisoners and imprisonment, Buried created that space because it seemed "real"; it seemed genuine, rather than the obvious fakery of Porridge and Bad Girls.
But we shouldn't just wait for another Buried to come along - things are too desperate for that, and so here I want to briefly allude to Death at the Hands of the State, my last book which was published by the Howard League for Penal Reform. For that book was consciously written with a reductionist/abolitionist agenda, and I had to think very carefully about how to go about engaging an audience with that agenda. In short, I didn't want to reproduce the same mountain of evidence that already exists about the irrationality of prison simply for that evidence to be ignored yet again. So how could an audience for penal abolition be created? Here I was influenced by the success of Buried. Why had that series been a success? What was it that sustained its audience? Now I have written about cinema's use of prisons and imprisonment before - in Images of Incarceration (with Sean O?Sullivan), and I don't intend to debate this too deeply here, although this might be something that we can take up in questions, but what struck me about Buried was the power of its emotional appeal to the audience. It told believable stories about believable people - prisoners - who were just like you and me, and who were worried about those things that you and I worry about too: families, relationships; finding work; surviving, consuming and simply progressing through life. So, in writing Death at the Hands of the State I wanted to tell stories - emotional stories, and infuse the argument with a narrative based on real people who ended up inside, or who had family members end up inside. More than this I used Death at the Hands of the State to tell stories about the scandal of the numbers of people who die whilst in our penal system - either through having committed suicide, or having been murdered, or dying as a result of old age, or inadequate health care.
I tell stories about people like Pauline Campbell - a modern day suffragette. Pauline is a former college lecturer in her late 50s, who during 2004 was arrested over ten times as a direct result of her own unique protest aimed at drawing attention to the deaths of women prisoners in British jails. Every time a woman died, Campbell would go to the prison where the death had occurred and stand in the road to prevent any prison van from bringing more women to that jail. The police would be called and Campbell would then be ordered by them to move out of the van's way. She'd refuse and then she'd be arrested. She describes this as her "one woman, self-funding protest", although it was not something that she had originally been drawn to and Campbell is honest enough to admit, "I had no idea about the appalling state of women's prisons before Sarah's death."
Sarah was Campbell's only child, who died aged 18 in January 2003 whilst "in the so-called care of HMP & YOI Styal". Sarah had spent six months on remand in 2002 and on the 17th of January 2003 was sentenced to a term of imprisonment and returned to Styal. The following day Sarah was taken unconscious to a local hospital and died later that evening without regaining consciousness. Campbell says that she protests to "demonstrate that prisons are unsafe places which constantly failed to uphold the duty of care that the Prison Service has to all prisoners. People must speak out. It's medieval." So she held her first demonstration outside of HMP Brockhill, following the death of Sheena Kotecha, then outside of HMP Holloway when Julie Hope died and a third outside HMP New Hall after the death of Louise Davis. Since then the demonstrations have kept on coming, for women in prison are 40 times more likely to kill themselves than women in the community (Rickford, 2003). Indeed in 2004 12 women - a new record, took their lives in English and Welsh jails and so, tragically, Campbell is rarely out of the news (see, for example, Allison 2004 & 2004b).
I use Pauline Campbell's emotional story - and many other stories about people like her in the book, to shamelessly connect the audience with the scandal of what happens behind our prison's walls, and in doing so I do not necessarily pretend to be objective, empirical or indeed logical. Rather I am emotional, partisan and passionate, and through that passion I hope to engage the reader with the cause of prison contraction and abolition. After all, prison and penal expansionists have been very adept at using logic and objectivity to mask their policy goals, and so tactically I didn't necessarily feel that these canons of the academic culture would work in this context, where the contours of alternative public space are still being shaped and defined.
Now having said all of this, I want to end with a plea and a challenge to this audience, an audience of academics. For the alternative space that needs to be created has also to be created by you. You are not the passive recipients of that space, but rather have a key and pivotal role at resisting the mass incarceration that is currently taking place in this country. After all, you are "real" in this debate too. But where has been your voice? Where has been your opposition? Too often fellow criminologists - and others, have seemed to me intent on re-legitimising the prison, by describing, for example, the circumstances in which the prison's moral performance can be assessed and then measured, or have been satisfied at investigating the culture and sub cultures of prisons, their drugs economy and the like. Too often colleagues have been prepared to take the Home Office's shilling and conduct evaluations of this or that regime or initiative, and stay silent about the scandal that goes on behind the prison's walls as more and more people are sent inside, for having committed fewer and less severe offences. Now that really is a scandal - and it is also the truth, and I want you too to be prepared to challenge that. But the truth can never be revealed through silence, and if that is what you do - stay silent, all that will happen is that our prison numbers will grow and grow again and again.
Britain has a disastrously expensive and inhumane penal system, which is compounded by a huge injection of resources into building more prisons. Placing so much emphasis on building prisons is a sad reflection on the innovative abilities of the government. A little more imagination, rather more attention to the evidence in front of them, and greater political courage would have led ministers down a quite different path. It would have led them to a sustained effort to reduce substantially the prison population.
Indeed, reflecting the days before New Labour would become 'tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime' Baroness Blackstone ended her book with a demand that the prison population be cut by half - to something around 24,000 people.
The second quote comes from the Norwegian criminologist Thomas Mathiesen (1990) from his book, also published in 1990 called Prison on Trial, although I am using the second edition that was re-issued in 2000. In this quote Mathiesen echoes Baroness Blackstone and optimistically predicts that reason will eventually persuade policy makers that prison is illogical.
Victim work and offender work will certainly prove more satisfactory than prison, and we may envisage further contraction, possibly abolition. This would be congruent with the whole weight of evidence on prisons. In actual fact, anything else is tantamount to acceding towards irrationality.
Now, from our vantage point some 15 years after these quotes were made, we can see that Baroness Blackstone's party has presided over unparalleled growth in the penal system - indeed rather than the prison population falling by 24,000 since coming to power in 1997 New Labour has put around an extra 30,000 people behind bars. As a result of their enthusiasm for mandatory minimum sentencing, there are now more Life Sentenced prisoners in Britain than the whole of Western Europe combined; New Labour has presided over more penal privatisation than the sum total of their Tory predecessors, despite no less a person than Tony Blair himself claiming that Labour opposed prison privatisation 'in theory as well as in practice' (Blair, 1993); and we have, as well as our highest ever prison population, the déjà vu of our current Chief Inspector of Prisons echoing all of her predecessors about how awful the experience of incarceration actually is in this country.
No one, it would seem would currently agree with Mathiesen that there might come a day when contraction and eventual abolition of prison is possible, and that to do otherwise is 'irrational'.
Indeed "common sense" justifications of prison suggest that "prison works" by incapacitation - it takes people out of society and thus gives communities a rest from those who have broken the law; through individual and general deterrence - it makes those who might be thinking about committing a crime think again; by punishing those who do actually commit crimes; and, finally, by rehabilitating - it helps those who have committed crimes to think through the causes of their offending so as to change their behaviour by developing new skills, which they are then able to put to good use on release from custody.
These justifications are now so widespread and accepted amongst our politicians, media commentators and indeed many members of the public, that no one actually bothers to question whether they are actually true or not - whether they are "nonsense" rather than "common sense", and the one place that we can forget about "evidence-led practice" in relation to public policy is when prisons are discussed. After all, as a mountain of research testifies - much of it emanating from the Home Office, these justifications are at best aspirational and are at worst simply lies.
Here it would be easy to unmask these false justifications by patiently pointing out the realities about who gets imprisoned and who does not; the relationship - or otherwise between the crime rate and the rate of imprisonment; what happens to people when they are inside and especially what happens to them after they are released. We'd point to the fact that two out of every three young offenders are reconvicted within two years of leaving jail; that one out of every two adult men are similarly reconvicted; and, that just under one out of every two women suffer the same fate. Would a school that failed to teach two out of every three of its pupils to read and write, or a hospital that killed one out of every two of its patients continue to receive widespread political and popular support? However, we know all of this too; we know that prison fails by almost every measure that it sets for itself; we know that prison is a useless, outdated, bloated Victorian institution that is well past its sell-by-date; we know, in short, that prison is a fiasco. How then do we create a scepticism about what prison was, now is and what is claimed for it by its supporters?
I want to make a case in support of Mathiesen from the perspective of describing the pre-conditions that I think have to be present for contraction and abolition to take place. For whilst I absolutely agree that using prison is irrational, especially in relation to the numbers of people that we send inside, who, as all evidence shows, are largely minor property offenders who could be more effectively dealt with through community penalties, and whilst I agree that prison is counter-productive, or to quote a former Tory minister, "an expensive way of making bad people worse", what I feel has been absent from his debate is a "road map" of how we get from where we are to where we - or at least I would like to be. So, what I want to do is use an historical example of decarceration and analyse how that decarceration occurred in the hope that this might guide us in our own attempts to stop the seemingly inexorable growth in prison numbers. And here I acknowledge that I have been attempting to create this road map for some time, most recently in my book - Death at the Hands of the State, which is published by the Howard League for Penal Reform.
There are several historical examples of decarceration that I could choose. For example, the decline in prison numbers in the old West Germany in the 1980s, which for a time provided a great deal of hope for penal reformers in this country, or of the Netherlands between 1950-1975, when their prison population fell from 6,500 to 2,500, despite an increasing crime rate. Or, the decarceration of young offender institutions in Massachusetts in the 1970s, under the leadership of Jerome Miller during Michael Dukakis's tenure as State Governor. Indeed each of these examples offers insight into the debate that I seek to start today. For example, it is quite clear that Dukakis was seen as "soft on crime" during the Presidential campaign of 1980, and that subsequent Democratic candidates - most notably Bill Clinton were keen to establish their "toughness" about offenders, and many here will know of the story of Clinton leaving the campaign trail to return to Little Rock, Arkansas to sign the death warrant of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally retarded black man (Wilson et al, 2000).
However, I have chosen an example of decarceration from England and Wales and despite the fact that this example has been written about before (Rutherford, 1988) it seems to me that the decline in the prison population of England and Wales between 1908 and 1939 from 22,029 to 11,086 ? or in terms of the numbers of prisoners per 100,000 of the general population from 63 to 30 is a truly extraordinary period in our penal history and one that deserves greater scrutiny. For in effect our prison numbers halved, and as a result around 20 prisons had to close down despite the fact that the crime rate in this period actually increased by around 100 per cent. Lets look at these figures a little more clearly. [Overhead]
So how can this phenomenon be explained? I think that we have to consider three issues:
1.For decarceration to have begun to this extent there was a great deal of scepticism about what prison and imprisonment could do, and that scepticism was shared by a wide range of people who were able to exercise influence over the political process - an echo perhaps of what Mathiesen from our own day has described as creating "alternative public space",
2.Secondly, there was a credible, practical alternative to incarceration,
3.And finally prisons and prison staff responded to this changing sensibility, both prompting and supporting the drop in prison numbers.
In relation to the first of these three points one of the realities that characterises this historical period is that several politicians and several key social groups became absolutely convinced that prison was a corrupting and counter-productive experience. The most obvious example to give is Winston Churchill, who as Home Secretary between February 1910 and October 1911 set about reducing the use of imprisonment, especially for those who had hitherto been sentenced to very short sentences. He noted, for example, that in 1910 some two-thirds of sentenced prisoners had received sentences of two weeks or less, and he described this as ?a terrible and purposeless waste of public money and human character.- More famously, in July 1910 he also suggested [overhead] "the mood and temper of the public to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilization of the country". Just why Churchill was so against prison is a matter of conjecture, but perhaps we can trace his antipathy back to his own experience as a prisoner-of-war during the Boer War, and it is worth noting that those politicians who themselves have had direct experiences of incarceration - such as Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel, are usually the most ardent penal reformers when they come to power.
Churchill's scepticism was mirrored in this period by other key and influential groups and commentators, who created the right "mood music" for decarceration to take place. For example, Oscar Wilde was arrested in 1895 on charges of gross indecency and sent to gaol for two years. Whilst inside he wrote The Ballad of Reading Goal which had a tremendous popular impact when it was first published in 1898 and remains, as far as I am concerned, one of the best pieces of prison writing that this country has ever produced. Similarly, just prior to the First World War the incarceration of suffragettes and their treatment inside, and thereafter the imprisonment of conscientious objectors, created two powerful groups of people who were prepared to campaign for changes in relation to imprisonment. The most obvious example to give is the formation of the Howard League for Penal Reform in 1921, and two of the conscientious objectors who had been imprisoned - Stephen Hobhouse and Fenner Brockway conclude in their book about prisons, published in 1921 that:
"Our prison system, whilst it sometimes makes good prisoners, does almost nothing to make good citizens. It fails to restore the weak will or to encourage initiative; it reduces energy by the harshness of its routine and adds depression to the depressed..........and the more the system costs the country, the more highly it is organised, the more monumental must that failure be."
Having spent some time talking about the development of scepticism in this period, I only want to briefly discuss the second and third issues that I described above. The second development that I believe creates the preconditions for decarceration to take place in this period is the development a credible alternative to incarceration. Specifically it is during this period that we see the development of Probation. You will all appreciate that the roots of probation stem from the 1876 and The Church of England Temperance Society, and that by 1907 the Government had passed its first Probation Act giving probation a statutory footing. In short, imprisonment is not seen as the "only club in the golf bag" of policy options when it comes to responding to offenders, and allows the hegemony of incarceration to be challenged.
Thirdly, the Home Office, prisons and prison staff too responded to these changing social and policy developments. They were not the passive recipients of change, but rather both prompted and responded to change. Their response is perhaps best symbolised by The Gladstone Committee of 1898 which completely re-defined the purpose of imprisonment, and which, for example, stated that:
"We think that the system should be made more elastic, more capable of being adopted to the special cases of individual prisoners; that prison discipline and treatment should be more effectively designed to maintain, stimulate, or awaken the higher susceptibilities of prisoners, to develop their moral instincts, to train them in orderly and industrial habits, and whenever possible to turn them out of prison better men and women, both physically and morally than when they came in."
These challenges were admirably taken up in prisons and by prison staff through, for example, the development of the borstal regime for young offenders, and in relation to the introduction of psychologists and educationalists into prison regimes.
So, what lessons can we learn from this historical example about decarceration in our own day, at a time of not just record prison numbers, but also of the closer relationship between HM Prison Service and the National Probation Service (and thus where a credible alternative to imprisonment seems further away); the domination of our prison regimes by cognitive skills courses of various kinds which seem to promise - on the sketchiest evidence available, that prison can in some circumstances be "good for the offender"; and a seemingly never-ending procession of politicians who are prepared to see the prison population grow higher and higher and are thus prepared to ignore a mountain of evidence to the contrary?
The key lesson for me is that we have to re-create a sense of scepticism into the policy debate, and that scepticism has to be robust enough to transcend the party politics of the lowest common denominator, whilst at the same time creative enough to engage the public with the message that prison is costly, counter-productive and except in a very few cases in no one's interests. This seems like a pipedream, but there are various signs that this can be achieved. For example, from my own personal perspective I was impressed by, and a small part of Marion Janner's Payback initiative; I was involved with the Esme Fairbairn's Rethinking Crime and Punishment initiative; and remain committed to The Howard League for Penal Reform. Indeed their campaign against prisons at the last General Election, which saw them attempt to raise the level of debate about crime and punishment had various politicians on the "back foot" and resulted in Millbank having to guide their candidates in what to say if they were challenged about prisons on the doorstep. Inevitably, this Millbank advice was almost immediately leaked to The Howard League!
However, perhaps we could see the work of Payback - now disbanded, Esme Fairbairn and the continuing work of The Howard League for Penal Reform, which has become the official opposition to crime and punishment in this country, as part of the traditional response to imprisonment and prisons. In their different ways they all make a contribution to the "mood music" and to policy - some to a greater extent than others, but for different reasons they still fall short of creating the space in which a challenge to prison can be mounted. I say this because I think that the scepticism from our historical example was shared more widely than the scepticism about prisons that exists today. For that to take place we really do have to create the "alternative public space" that Mathiesen was describing, and again from my personal experience I think that that means that we have to be prepared to engage with the media. I say this because of my involvement with the Channel 4 series Buried, on which I acted as a consultant, and which generated more column inches about penal reform - and at a stroke a bigger audience for penal reform through the viewing public than any other event of the last five years. Buried - no matter what you might think of it as drama, and I am aware of several recent criticisms of the programme from penal "insiders" such as Jamie Bennett (Bennett, 2003), exposed the still largely closed world of prison to public scrutiny, and presented the violence, hopelessness, madness and pervading sense of decay that permeates prison for all to see. The tragedy here is that Buried did not get re-commissioned, despite a public appeal on behalf of the series by, for example, The Guardian and The Daily Mirror. Nonetheless, there will be other "Burieds", and the next time we should do what we can to support the space that programmes like this create, for it is that space which allows a challenge to imprisonment to take hold in an audience that does not normally think too much about prison or prisoners. Above all, and whilst not is now the time to debate the media's use and misuse of prisoners and imprisonment, Buried created that space because it seemed "real"; it seemed genuine, rather than the obvious fakery of Porridge and Bad Girls.
But we shouldn't just wait for another Buried to come along - things are too desperate for that, and so here I want to briefly allude to Death at the Hands of the State, my last book which was published by the Howard League for Penal Reform. For that book was consciously written with a reductionist/abolitionist agenda, and I had to think very carefully about how to go about engaging an audience with that agenda. In short, I didn't want to reproduce the same mountain of evidence that already exists about the irrationality of prison simply for that evidence to be ignored yet again. So how could an audience for penal abolition be created? Here I was influenced by the success of Buried. Why had that series been a success? What was it that sustained its audience? Now I have written about cinema's use of prisons and imprisonment before - in Images of Incarceration (with Sean O?Sullivan), and I don't intend to debate this too deeply here, although this might be something that we can take up in questions, but what struck me about Buried was the power of its emotional appeal to the audience. It told believable stories about believable people - prisoners - who were just like you and me, and who were worried about those things that you and I worry about too: families, relationships; finding work; surviving, consuming and simply progressing through life. So, in writing Death at the Hands of the State I wanted to tell stories - emotional stories, and infuse the argument with a narrative based on real people who ended up inside, or who had family members end up inside. More than this I used Death at the Hands of the State to tell stories about the scandal of the numbers of people who die whilst in our penal system - either through having committed suicide, or having been murdered, or dying as a result of old age, or inadequate health care.
I tell stories about people like Pauline Campbell - a modern day suffragette. Pauline is a former college lecturer in her late 50s, who during 2004 was arrested over ten times as a direct result of her own unique protest aimed at drawing attention to the deaths of women prisoners in British jails. Every time a woman died, Campbell would go to the prison where the death had occurred and stand in the road to prevent any prison van from bringing more women to that jail. The police would be called and Campbell would then be ordered by them to move out of the van's way. She'd refuse and then she'd be arrested. She describes this as her "one woman, self-funding protest", although it was not something that she had originally been drawn to and Campbell is honest enough to admit, "I had no idea about the appalling state of women's prisons before Sarah's death."
Sarah was Campbell's only child, who died aged 18 in January 2003 whilst "in the so-called care of HMP & YOI Styal". Sarah had spent six months on remand in 2002 and on the 17th of January 2003 was sentenced to a term of imprisonment and returned to Styal. The following day Sarah was taken unconscious to a local hospital and died later that evening without regaining consciousness. Campbell says that she protests to "demonstrate that prisons are unsafe places which constantly failed to uphold the duty of care that the Prison Service has to all prisoners. People must speak out. It's medieval." So she held her first demonstration outside of HMP Brockhill, following the death of Sheena Kotecha, then outside of HMP Holloway when Julie Hope died and a third outside HMP New Hall after the death of Louise Davis. Since then the demonstrations have kept on coming, for women in prison are 40 times more likely to kill themselves than women in the community (Rickford, 2003). Indeed in 2004 12 women - a new record, took their lives in English and Welsh jails and so, tragically, Campbell is rarely out of the news (see, for example, Allison 2004 & 2004b).
I use Pauline Campbell's emotional story - and many other stories about people like her in the book, to shamelessly connect the audience with the scandal of what happens behind our prison's walls, and in doing so I do not necessarily pretend to be objective, empirical or indeed logical. Rather I am emotional, partisan and passionate, and through that passion I hope to engage the reader with the cause of prison contraction and abolition. After all, prison and penal expansionists have been very adept at using logic and objectivity to mask their policy goals, and so tactically I didn't necessarily feel that these canons of the academic culture would work in this context, where the contours of alternative public space are still being shaped and defined.
Now having said all of this, I want to end with a plea and a challenge to this audience, an audience of academics. For the alternative space that needs to be created has also to be created by you. You are not the passive recipients of that space, but rather have a key and pivotal role at resisting the mass incarceration that is currently taking place in this country. After all, you are "real" in this debate too. But where has been your voice? Where has been your opposition? Too often fellow criminologists - and others, have seemed to me intent on re-legitimising the prison, by describing, for example, the circumstances in which the prison's moral performance can be assessed and then measured, or have been satisfied at investigating the culture and sub cultures of prisons, their drugs economy and the like. Too often colleagues have been prepared to take the Home Office's shilling and conduct evaluations of this or that regime or initiative, and stay silent about the scandal that goes on behind the prison's walls as more and more people are sent inside, for having committed fewer and less severe offences. Now that really is a scandal - and it is also the truth, and I want you too to be prepared to challenge that. But the truth can never be revealed through silence, and if that is what you do - stay silent, all that will happen is that our prison numbers will grow and grow again and again.