Campaigning For and Campaigning Against Prisons: Excavating and Re-affirming the Case for Prison Abolition.
by: Mick Ryan and Joe Sim
Introduction
"An abolitionist approach....would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society. In other words, we would not be looking for prison-like substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment - demilitarization of schools, revitalisation of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care for all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance" (Davis, 2003: 107).
As we reach the mid-point of the first decade of the new millennium raising the possibility that prisons in their present form could (or should) be abolished is likely to be dismissed as the whimsical and outmoded fantasies of a few tired 1960s political activists and/or ivory tower, academic idealists. In Western Europe, North America and indeed throughout the world, the drive towards more intensive and intrusive forms of state and social control seem to be accelerating and with this acceleration has come an expanded public and private penal system. In 2003, more than 8.75 million people were confined in 205 countries with half of them detained in just three jurisdictions: The USA, China and Russia (Walmsley, 2003). Notoriously, England and Wales had by this point become the prison capital of Western Europe, with an imprisonment rate of 142 per 100,000. By July 2005, the average daily population had climbed to 76,500, a rise of 15% since 1999. Projected figures indicated that the average daily population would be 91,000 by 2010 (The Guardian, 27 June 2005, The Guardian, 27 July 2005). But more worrying than any projections, Home Office figures released in 2004 revealed that 111,600 people were sentenced to immediate custody and 186,500 were given community sentences in 2002. Both figures were the highest recorded (cited in Sim, 2004a). It is a population that is overwhelmingly drawn from the economically and politically powerless, disproportionately racialised and increasingly female.
While many complex factors are at work (Ryan, 2003), this punitive expansion has largely been driven and legitimated by a process of 'authoritarian populism' (Hall, 1988; Scraton, 1987) which, while not achieving hegemony, (as the surveys in England and Wales and elsewhere demonstrate, the public is less punitive than politicians claim), has nonetheless become central to the world views of politicians, judiciary and the wider population who have ideologically become locked into a deep rooted fear surrounding a risk-filled present and an equally deep rooted melancholic trepidation about an uncertain future (Garland, 2002: Young, 1999). At the same time, offenders have been confronted with alternatives to custody, built on a discourse of 'punishment in the community'. Taken together, the institutional and non institutional have created an edifice of punishment which appears to be both unshakeable and unyielding in the ongoing conflict to maintain law, restore order and reduce risk to communities beleaguered by the activities of feral atavists who, according both to the New Labour government and their Conservative opponents, are either unwilling or unable to 'responsibilise' themselves and participate in the multifarious benefits offered by twenty first century, globalised, consumer capitalism.
Accompanying this considerable expansion of the penal apparatus in Western Europe and North America has been the explicit requirement of the New Right that penal services should be delivered economically, if necessary by re-organising them into competitive markets, and that they function with full efficiency. That is to say, that state agencies and their new private partners should indeed 'responsibilise', 'redeem' and 'normalise' the socially excluded, working through a whole range of heavily promoted offender behaviour programmes which, allegedly, really do "work" with offenders including Reasoning and Rehabilitation, Enhanced Thinking Skills, Problem Solving and CALM (Controlling Anger and Learning to Manage It) (Sim, 2005).
In this chapter we want to consider these developments within the theoretical and political context of abolitionism. We will do this by concentrating mainly on England and Wales as a case study. The chapter is divided into five sections.
First, we provide a brief historical overview of the penal reform lobby as it existed in the immediate post war period and explore the challenges to that lobby that appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s which emanated from a number of newly formed radical prisoners' rights organisations. As we will demonstrate, this significantly altered the politics of penal reform. Second, we explore the role of the state both in abolitionist thought and with respect to the politics of the traditional penal reform lobby. This is, in part at least, an excavation of some of the debates that surfaced in the 1970s and 1980s. Third, we consider the pressures which helped to relegate this debate by producing a new choreography for reform around the Woolf report, privatization and managerialism. In section four we consider the recent work of Thomas Mathiesen and Angela Davies and their arguments for the retention of an abolitionist strategy in the 21st century. Finally, we conclude by challenging the caricatures that continue to surround abolitionist thought and argue for an abolitionist strategy that challenges the stultifying, political and intellectual culture of contemporary modernity that is dominated by short-term, pragmatic expediency with respect to law and order in general and crime and punishment in particular.
Penal Reform in the Post-War Period
One of the distinguishing features of the British system of government in the immediate post war period was its highly centralized nature. All roads led to Whitehall, where elected senior politicians in charge of the great departments of state worked with permanent civil servants, and accredited outside experts, to map out the details of Britain's post war Welfare State. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Home Office which, in the early 1960s, consolidated its already iron grip on the system by incorporating, the Prison Commission, the mid - Victorian quango ostensibly in charge of prisons, into its fiefdom. Those operatives who actually ran the prison system, for example, prison officers, medical officers and governors were rarely asked for their opinions on major issues of policy during these years. Or when they were asked, they were mostly ignored. (Thomas, 1972)
Given the highly centralized nature of policy making at this time it was inevitable that those campaigning around prisons should direct their attention towards Whitehall. The leading campaigners were mostly found in the Howard League for Penal Reform whose small, London based, and professionally educated membership had the inside track in terms of access to senior Whitehall civil servants and key members of the Prison Commission. Though close personal contacts (and family ties) with those in power, its overlapping membership on Home Office advisory bodies, its own, and not inconsiderable, body of legal expertise, the League played an important role behind the scenes in helping to shape Britain's post war penal policy. (Ryan, 1978; Loader, 2005)
"An abolitionist approach....would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society. In other words, we would not be looking for prison-like substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment - demilitarization of schools, revitalisation of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care for all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance" (Davis, 2003: 107).
As we reach the mid-point of the first decade of the new millennium raising the possibility that prisons in their present form could (or should) be abolished is likely to be dismissed as the whimsical and outmoded fantasies of a few tired 1960s political activists and/or ivory tower, academic idealists. In Western Europe, North America and indeed throughout the world, the drive towards more intensive and intrusive forms of state and social control seem to be accelerating and with this acceleration has come an expanded public and private penal system. In 2003, more than 8.75 million people were confined in 205 countries with half of them detained in just three jurisdictions: The USA, China and Russia (Walmsley, 2003). Notoriously, England and Wales had by this point become the prison capital of Western Europe, with an imprisonment rate of 142 per 100,000. By July 2005, the average daily population had climbed to 76,500, a rise of 15% since 1999. Projected figures indicated that the average daily population would be 91,000 by 2010 (The Guardian, 27 June 2005, The Guardian, 27 July 2005). But more worrying than any projections, Home Office figures released in 2004 revealed that 111,600 people were sentenced to immediate custody and 186,500 were given community sentences in 2002. Both figures were the highest recorded (cited in Sim, 2004a). It is a population that is overwhelmingly drawn from the economically and politically powerless, disproportionately racialised and increasingly female.
While many complex factors are at work (Ryan, 2003), this punitive expansion has largely been driven and legitimated by a process of 'authoritarian populism' (Hall, 1988; Scraton, 1987) which, while not achieving hegemony, (as the surveys in England and Wales and elsewhere demonstrate, the public is less punitive than politicians claim), has nonetheless become central to the world views of politicians, judiciary and the wider population who have ideologically become locked into a deep rooted fear surrounding a risk-filled present and an equally deep rooted melancholic trepidation about an uncertain future (Garland, 2002: Young, 1999). At the same time, offenders have been confronted with alternatives to custody, built on a discourse of 'punishment in the community'. Taken together, the institutional and non institutional have created an edifice of punishment which appears to be both unshakeable and unyielding in the ongoing conflict to maintain law, restore order and reduce risk to communities beleaguered by the activities of feral atavists who, according both to the New Labour government and their Conservative opponents, are either unwilling or unable to 'responsibilise' themselves and participate in the multifarious benefits offered by twenty first century, globalised, consumer capitalism.
Accompanying this considerable expansion of the penal apparatus in Western Europe and North America has been the explicit requirement of the New Right that penal services should be delivered economically, if necessary by re-organising them into competitive markets, and that they function with full efficiency. That is to say, that state agencies and their new private partners should indeed 'responsibilise', 'redeem' and 'normalise' the socially excluded, working through a whole range of heavily promoted offender behaviour programmes which, allegedly, really do "work" with offenders including Reasoning and Rehabilitation, Enhanced Thinking Skills, Problem Solving and CALM (Controlling Anger and Learning to Manage It) (Sim, 2005).
In this chapter we want to consider these developments within the theoretical and political context of abolitionism. We will do this by concentrating mainly on England and Wales as a case study. The chapter is divided into five sections.
First, we provide a brief historical overview of the penal reform lobby as it existed in the immediate post war period and explore the challenges to that lobby that appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s which emanated from a number of newly formed radical prisoners' rights organisations. As we will demonstrate, this significantly altered the politics of penal reform. Second, we explore the role of the state both in abolitionist thought and with respect to the politics of the traditional penal reform lobby. This is, in part at least, an excavation of some of the debates that surfaced in the 1970s and 1980s. Third, we consider the pressures which helped to relegate this debate by producing a new choreography for reform around the Woolf report, privatization and managerialism. In section four we consider the recent work of Thomas Mathiesen and Angela Davies and their arguments for the retention of an abolitionist strategy in the 21st century. Finally, we conclude by challenging the caricatures that continue to surround abolitionist thought and argue for an abolitionist strategy that challenges the stultifying, political and intellectual culture of contemporary modernity that is dominated by short-term, pragmatic expediency with respect to law and order in general and crime and punishment in particular.
Penal Reform in the Post-War Period
One of the distinguishing features of the British system of government in the immediate post war period was its highly centralized nature. All roads led to Whitehall, where elected senior politicians in charge of the great departments of state worked with permanent civil servants, and accredited outside experts, to map out the details of Britain's post war Welfare State. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Home Office which, in the early 1960s, consolidated its already iron grip on the system by incorporating, the Prison Commission, the mid - Victorian quango ostensibly in charge of prisons, into its fiefdom. Those operatives who actually ran the prison system, for example, prison officers, medical officers and governors were rarely asked for their opinions on major issues of policy during these years. Or when they were asked, they were mostly ignored. (Thomas, 1972)
Given the highly centralized nature of policy making at this time it was inevitable that those campaigning around prisons should direct their attention towards Whitehall. The leading campaigners were mostly found in the Howard League for Penal Reform whose small, London based, and professionally educated membership had the inside track in terms of access to senior Whitehall civil servants and key members of the Prison Commission. Though close personal contacts (and family ties) with those in power, its overlapping membership on Home Office advisory bodies, its own, and not inconsiderable, body of legal expertise, the League played an important role behind the scenes in helping to shape Britain's post war penal policy. (Ryan, 1978; Loader, 2005)
The orientation of that policy, at least in theory, was directed more towards welfare than punishment, (although how much this welfare orientation translated into practice on the ground given the harsh disciplinary ethos of the majority of prison officers is a matter of debate). The Labour Party, in particular, took the view that a good many of those who came into contact with the penal system had been victims of unbridled market forces, and were therefore, more in need of social support rather than simple punishment. However, this view was tempered by a cross- bench distrust in Parliament of "do gooders" who sought to extend this liberal sentiment to the "undeserving" rather than the "deserving poor". The consequence of this was a modest programme of penal reform which confidently re-affirmed the centrality of the prison as a vehicle for disciplining and reforming the poor and the powerless (Ryan, 1983).
This top down way of doing business around the welfare consensus was, as we have already suggested, not uncommon. Right across government in the immediate post-war decades it was grudgingly accepted that the "men from the Ministry" probably knew best, and buttressed by a highly restrictive Official Secrets Act, and latterly by the threat (and use) of the insidious libel laws, politicians and civil servants were able to create the framework of the modern Welfare State without the level of public scrutiny that we would now take for granted (Rose, 1965). This elite policy making style was compounded in penal matters by the conviction among the "great and the good" in both the major parties that penal reform was not popular with the public; that the more the public became involved in making policy the more repressive that policy would become. Public opinion therefore became something to be actively "managed" or "circumvented" rather than persuaded, while prisoners' opinions were non-existent in the political and policy debates as well as at the level of popular consciousness.
This picture of the post war penal lobby as a small coterie of privileged, well connected, self satisfied reformers who did little to engage with the public to secure significant changes in the prison system is not a flattering one. And perhaps it does less than justice to those reformers who joined forces across the political divide in an effort to push penal reform higher up the political agenda at a time when other social priorities, like health and education, were clearly more pressing. Nonetheless, while the 1948 Criminal Justice Act was not quite the dinosaur it has been painted, and the 1957 Homicide Bill was more of a breakthrough than the National Council for the Abolition of Capital Punishment would have cared to admit, there was little on the agenda of post - war penal reform to challenge the potential of the prison as a force dealing with those who had fallen outside of the progressive social democratic consensus. Indeed, all that was required was just a little more knowledge - as promised in the 1964 document - Crime A Challenge to Us All ? and the prison could fulfil its disciplinary and reforming promise.
The Fragmenting Consensus
As in many other areas on the political landscape, this cosy world of penal reform inhabited by politicians, civil servants and reform groups was severely disrupted and challenged in the 1960s. Partly prompted by Britain's perceived economic decline, the top down policy through which policy was constructed and delivered was challenged by a new generation of political activists who sought to secure more radical change by campaigning from below, bypassing the traditional machinery of central government with its array of obedient advisory committees. Instead of relying on civil servants, co-opted Whitehall experts and establishment pressure groups at the centre, these activist groups facilitated the development of new and alternative realities which were to be provided by those at the receiving end of the disciplinary network, by prisoners themselves, mental patients, benefit claimants and drug users, those, in other words, who had remained invisible and marginalised by the very process that was theoretically supposed to be offering them salvation and a road back to some kind of non-deviant normality. The emergence of new campaign groups such as the National Prisoners' Movement (PROP) with its call for the unionization of prisoners and direct action to defend prisoners' interests, Radical Alternatives to Prison (RAP), and Release was significant not only because they sought to empower those contesting state control on a routine basis but also because their message often had a wider political resonance.
In general, many of those involved in these groups sought to question the historic compromise between capital and labour which underpinned the post-war welfare consensus, viewing much of the existing disciplinary network, and not least prisons, as serving the interests of capital rather than empowering those at the margins (Ryan, 1978). This was unsettling for the privileged, liberal, metropolitan elite that had dominated the movement for prison reform through groups like the Howard League and NACRO, as it was for other architects of the wider Welfare State, including the Labour Party. More particularly, and arguably more challenging for the conventional penal lobby, was the growing belief among these new radical groups that prisons were incapable of being reformed, that the only strategy was to work for prison abolition. While the tactics to achieve this radical goal were a matter of much debate (Mathiesen, 1974), discussions about the theory and practice of abolitionism began to be seriously considered both in the UK and in Western Europe (van Swaaningen, 1997). These discussions can be seen as a response to a penal and criminal justice system whose commitment to welfare and rehabilitation was increasingly regarded as an ideological sham behind which lay a punitive system of disciplinary regulation which contributed however tangentially to the unequal distribution of power in a deeply divided and increasingly fragmented social order.
The consequence of these critical interventions, underpinned in Britain at an academic level by the sociologically driven National Deviancy Conference, was that by the early 1980s there was an enlarged, diverse and fractured policy network in England and Wales around imprisonment with some lobby groups campaigning for prisons, still believing that they could be improved to deliver reform, while other groups campaigned against prisons, arguing instead for alternatives to custody at every turn, even envisaging in some cases, A World Without Prisons (Dodge, 1979).
It is also important to acknowledge that all social movements contain elements of contradiction and overlap, nor are they static. Indeed, it could be argued that the emergence of these new, more critical groups had a counter hegemonic impact on the more traditional lobby, to some extent radicalising them. So, for example, during the 1970s, the Howard League engaged with RAP to argue through the strategic possibilities around abolition, while NACRO sought to promote a whole range of voluntary alternatives to prison. Furthermore, the official May Report (1979) questioned whether, on the basis of the government's own evidence, the objective of the prison system could still be said to be "reform", opting instead for "humane containment," while the Criminal Justice Act (1972) legislated for Community Service Orders which soon won great favour among liberal magistrates and judges, though arguably sometimes for the wrong reasons (Home Office, 1975). The prison system itself was also affected by these wider debates. For example, it was destabilised by the national prisoners' strike in 1972, and by the POA's uncompromising response to it (Fitzgerald, 1977), by the vigorous campaign against the notorious Control Units in 1974, and by the demonstration at Hull prison in 1976. The state's brutal and racist response to the demonstration, which was exposed by PROP in a public inquiry instigated by the organisation, and the legal challenges mounted on behalf of prisoners against the disciplinary hearings that took place in the aftermath of the demonstration, also presented a serious challenge to the state's ability to construct an 'objective truth' around prisons under the traditional blanket of secrecy that had prevailed since the early twentieth century.
As important as all these developments were, however, they did not seriously undermine the central role of the modern prison (Fitzgerald, 1977; Fitzgerald and Sim, 1979). Radical critiques of the penal apparatus had penetrated public discourse ensuring that its central disciplinary purposes were no longer entirely uncontested in the lobby, and some genuine radical alternatives to custody were pioneered (Dronfield, 1980). However, the prison retained its position as the symbolic, disciplinary institution at the centre of what was becoming an ever larger and increasingly complex penal network. (Cohen, 1985). Penal policy also remained firmly under state control, run by Whitehall civil servants who were theoretically accountable to Parliament through elected Ministers. In practice, the power of the prison to punish remained largely in the hands of a hidden and unaccountable group-the prison officers-whose discretionary capacity for often-violent interventions into the lives of the confined remained undiminished.
We shall return to the question of the impact of the radical prisoners' rights movement below, but before considering this we want to excavate (and elaborate on) the debate about reform at this time as this issue goes to the heart of the abolitionist critique of the traditional reform lobby.
Abolitionism, Reform and the State
"......'reform'..........is isomorphic, despite its 'idealism', with the disciplinary functioning of the prison....." (Foucault, 1979: 271).
Central to the abolitionist position has always been a critique of the penal reform lobby and its detrimental and deadening impact on the debates around prisons. Abolitionists, while recognising that some reforms at some historical moments may have enhanced the position of the confined, would also maintain that the prison reform movement more broadly has, however unintentionally, helped to reproduce the dominant discourses that the prison is the natural response to crime and deviance. As Angela Davis has noted:
As important as some reforms may be-the elimination of sexual abuse and medical neglect in women's prisons, for example-frameworks that rely exclusively on reforms help to produce the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond the prison (Davis, 2003: 20).
In some respects this should not be surprising for, as Michael Ignatieff pointed out in 1978, (Ignatieff, 1978) from its very inception the liberal penal reform movement led by the self-flagellating John Howard was caught in an ideological contradiction where humanising prisoners was undercut by the drive towards 'disciplining their bodies and reconstructing their minds' (Sim, 1990: 73). For Ignatieff, the rhetoric of reform was built on a process of mystification that legitimated 'the further consolidation of carceral power' (Ignatieff, 1978: 220). Ignatieff's work appeared at a rich moment for abolitionist thinkers. Mathiesen's The Politics of Abolition (Mathiesen, 1974) published four years earlier, was followed by Foucault's Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1975), Ryan's The Acceptable Pressure Group (Ryan, 1978), Fitzgerald and Sim's British Prisons (Fitzgerald and Sim, 1979) and Mathiesen's Law, Society and Political Action (Mathiesen, 1980) all of which raised a series of analytical questions about the politics of liberal reform, its relationship to the state and its role in the consolidation of penal power both historically and contemporaneously. These issues, in turn, were tied in with a broader consideration of the role of the prison in the maintenance of a deeply divided social order. If the prison worked at all, it worked in the reproduction of that order rather than for the salvation of the confined.
This critical work had an immense impact on those campaigning around the prison in the 1970s and 1980s. They also appeared at a key historical moment which saw the emergence and consolidation of the New Right and this bloc's electoral success in the UK and the USA. Beginning with the election of the first Thatcher government in May 1979, the British state's response to crime and disorder was built around an authoritarian discourse that hegemonically cemented the ruling new right bloc and the wider population into the politics of 'regressive modernisation', dragging the society forward by taking 'us backwards' (Hall, 1988: 164). The consequences of this for the penal system, and prisons in particular, are well known. By the early 1980s the government had committed itself to the biggest prison building system since mid - Victorian times. Sentences for many offences, already long, were substantially increased and parole made more difficult (Ryan and Sim, 1984). The Home Secretary went on to announce that there were to be no limitations on the size of the overall prison population and that the government was committed to imprisoning all those that the courts thought should be locked up. The intensification in punishment was reinforced in the 1980s ? a time of high unemployment, bitter strikes and inner city disturbances ? by a number of Parliamentary debates on the restoration of the death penalty and the popular demand that life sentences should ?mean life?.
At this time, key liberal campaign groups such as NACRO were further incorporated into the state?s expanding penal/disciplinary network. In one financial year alone, 1987/8, NACRO?S income (mostly derived from the government for re-training and re-settling offenders) reached a staggering £79 million. (Wilson, 2001) Less compliant lobby groups were mostly marginalized. Granted, the emergence of the Prison Reform Trust in 1981 went some way towards compensating for the Howard League whose certainties had been challenged by the debate over reform versus abolition, but its reform agenda as a self confessed ?creature of the liberal establishment? was timid (Wilson, 2001). In truth, neither those in charge of the Howard League at the time, nor those behind the new Prison Reform Trust, had any real appreciation of the weight of the ideological shift that was taking place. However, it quickly became clear to groups like RAP that Conservative politicians were more interested in listening to populist red top editors than to the traditional penal lobby?s ?pissing liberals? or self-proclaimed government ?experts? (Sim, 2000).
RAP's response to the intensification in state authoritarianism was to come back to the issue of reform and its relationship to abolitionism. For Tony Ward, the editor of The Abolitionist, RAP's journal, while many reforms were simply 'a sugar coating on a toxic pill' it was also important to 'gain support for reforms of the penal system which while making it more humane will also show up its inherent limitations and contradictions' (cited in Sim, 1994a: 269, emphasis in the original). This meant that it was possible to call for the immediate abolition of the secrecy and censorship that dominated the prison system or the abolition of the prison medical service (which eventually did happen) while simultaneously being able to defend institutions like the Barlinnie Special Unit as a model of confinement for the future. As Ward noted, while liberals and abolitionists shared a number of medium-term goals with regard to prison reform, the former group failed to 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 increasingly helps to legitimate an increasingly powerful State machine' (cited in Ibid: 269-270).
Unlike those involved in the traditional lobby, those involved with RAP also recognised that crime was a social construction in that acts and activities which were labelled as criminal, particularly those classified as violent and dangerous, depended on who had the power to label them as such. This position was further refined in the light of the work of feminist writers and activists such as Jill Box-Grainger, who forced the organisation to consider the impact of sexual violence on the lives of women individually and collectively (Ibid). For Ryan and Ward, this development raised crucial issues about the nature of power itself:
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 to 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 (cited in Ibid: 273).
The early 1980s also saw the emergence of two groups whose presence on the political landscape was to seriously challenge, not only the traditional lobby's emphasis on piecemeal reform, but also because of its acquiescent relationship to the state, its neglect of a range of key issues around prisons. First, the emergence of Inquest, founded in 1981, brought the disturbing issue of those who had died in the custody and care of the state to public and political prominence. (Ryan, 1996a). Second, the emergence of Women in Prison, in 1983, formed as a pressure group to focus on the desperate but invisible plight of women in prison also brought into the public and political domain a series of issues that had been neglected by the traditional lobby group and, more widely, by politicians and the mass media (Carlen et al, 1985). The radical orientation of these groups and, crucially, their adoption of a theoretical and political perspective that focussed on issues of power and powerlessness, ensured that a different, more challenging and more critical series of questions began to be asked about deaths in custody and women in prison. Significantly, these groups also began to exert a counter hegemonic influence on the more traditional reform groups by dragging them onto a more critical terrain.
Refurbishing Reform; Woolf, Privatisation and Managerialism
During the 1980s the critical debates about abolition/reform which we have sketched out were partly sidelined by the continuing, ongoing crisis in the prisons which was manifested around overcrowding, prison officer militancy and the challenge to the legitimacy of the system in the shape of disturbances by prisoners themselves. This latest crisis reached its apotheosis in April 1990 with the 25-day demonstration at Strangeways. For liberals in the penal lobby, the state's response to these disturbances in the form of the Woolf report appeared to herald a significant shift in the politics of reform in that a senior judicial figure was calling for a reappraisal in the philosophy and practice of the penal system and in the treatment of prisoners to the point where he argued that 'justice' was to be taken as seriously by the prison authorities as the twin pillars on which the prison system had traditionally rested which were 'security' and 'control' (Woolf, 1991).
This top down way of doing business around the welfare consensus was, as we have already suggested, not uncommon. Right across government in the immediate post-war decades it was grudgingly accepted that the "men from the Ministry" probably knew best, and buttressed by a highly restrictive Official Secrets Act, and latterly by the threat (and use) of the insidious libel laws, politicians and civil servants were able to create the framework of the modern Welfare State without the level of public scrutiny that we would now take for granted (Rose, 1965). This elite policy making style was compounded in penal matters by the conviction among the "great and the good" in both the major parties that penal reform was not popular with the public; that the more the public became involved in making policy the more repressive that policy would become. Public opinion therefore became something to be actively "managed" or "circumvented" rather than persuaded, while prisoners' opinions were non-existent in the political and policy debates as well as at the level of popular consciousness.
This picture of the post war penal lobby as a small coterie of privileged, well connected, self satisfied reformers who did little to engage with the public to secure significant changes in the prison system is not a flattering one. And perhaps it does less than justice to those reformers who joined forces across the political divide in an effort to push penal reform higher up the political agenda at a time when other social priorities, like health and education, were clearly more pressing. Nonetheless, while the 1948 Criminal Justice Act was not quite the dinosaur it has been painted, and the 1957 Homicide Bill was more of a breakthrough than the National Council for the Abolition of Capital Punishment would have cared to admit, there was little on the agenda of post - war penal reform to challenge the potential of the prison as a force dealing with those who had fallen outside of the progressive social democratic consensus. Indeed, all that was required was just a little more knowledge - as promised in the 1964 document - Crime A Challenge to Us All ? and the prison could fulfil its disciplinary and reforming promise.
The Fragmenting Consensus
As in many other areas on the political landscape, this cosy world of penal reform inhabited by politicians, civil servants and reform groups was severely disrupted and challenged in the 1960s. Partly prompted by Britain's perceived economic decline, the top down policy through which policy was constructed and delivered was challenged by a new generation of political activists who sought to secure more radical change by campaigning from below, bypassing the traditional machinery of central government with its array of obedient advisory committees. Instead of relying on civil servants, co-opted Whitehall experts and establishment pressure groups at the centre, these activist groups facilitated the development of new and alternative realities which were to be provided by those at the receiving end of the disciplinary network, by prisoners themselves, mental patients, benefit claimants and drug users, those, in other words, who had remained invisible and marginalised by the very process that was theoretically supposed to be offering them salvation and a road back to some kind of non-deviant normality. The emergence of new campaign groups such as the National Prisoners' Movement (PROP) with its call for the unionization of prisoners and direct action to defend prisoners' interests, Radical Alternatives to Prison (RAP), and Release was significant not only because they sought to empower those contesting state control on a routine basis but also because their message often had a wider political resonance.
In general, many of those involved in these groups sought to question the historic compromise between capital and labour which underpinned the post-war welfare consensus, viewing much of the existing disciplinary network, and not least prisons, as serving the interests of capital rather than empowering those at the margins (Ryan, 1978). This was unsettling for the privileged, liberal, metropolitan elite that had dominated the movement for prison reform through groups like the Howard League and NACRO, as it was for other architects of the wider Welfare State, including the Labour Party. More particularly, and arguably more challenging for the conventional penal lobby, was the growing belief among these new radical groups that prisons were incapable of being reformed, that the only strategy was to work for prison abolition. While the tactics to achieve this radical goal were a matter of much debate (Mathiesen, 1974), discussions about the theory and practice of abolitionism began to be seriously considered both in the UK and in Western Europe (van Swaaningen, 1997). These discussions can be seen as a response to a penal and criminal justice system whose commitment to welfare and rehabilitation was increasingly regarded as an ideological sham behind which lay a punitive system of disciplinary regulation which contributed however tangentially to the unequal distribution of power in a deeply divided and increasingly fragmented social order.
The consequence of these critical interventions, underpinned in Britain at an academic level by the sociologically driven National Deviancy Conference, was that by the early 1980s there was an enlarged, diverse and fractured policy network in England and Wales around imprisonment with some lobby groups campaigning for prisons, still believing that they could be improved to deliver reform, while other groups campaigned against prisons, arguing instead for alternatives to custody at every turn, even envisaging in some cases, A World Without Prisons (Dodge, 1979).
It is also important to acknowledge that all social movements contain elements of contradiction and overlap, nor are they static. Indeed, it could be argued that the emergence of these new, more critical groups had a counter hegemonic impact on the more traditional lobby, to some extent radicalising them. So, for example, during the 1970s, the Howard League engaged with RAP to argue through the strategic possibilities around abolition, while NACRO sought to promote a whole range of voluntary alternatives to prison. Furthermore, the official May Report (1979) questioned whether, on the basis of the government's own evidence, the objective of the prison system could still be said to be "reform", opting instead for "humane containment," while the Criminal Justice Act (1972) legislated for Community Service Orders which soon won great favour among liberal magistrates and judges, though arguably sometimes for the wrong reasons (Home Office, 1975). The prison system itself was also affected by these wider debates. For example, it was destabilised by the national prisoners' strike in 1972, and by the POA's uncompromising response to it (Fitzgerald, 1977), by the vigorous campaign against the notorious Control Units in 1974, and by the demonstration at Hull prison in 1976. The state's brutal and racist response to the demonstration, which was exposed by PROP in a public inquiry instigated by the organisation, and the legal challenges mounted on behalf of prisoners against the disciplinary hearings that took place in the aftermath of the demonstration, also presented a serious challenge to the state's ability to construct an 'objective truth' around prisons under the traditional blanket of secrecy that had prevailed since the early twentieth century.
As important as all these developments were, however, they did not seriously undermine the central role of the modern prison (Fitzgerald, 1977; Fitzgerald and Sim, 1979). Radical critiques of the penal apparatus had penetrated public discourse ensuring that its central disciplinary purposes were no longer entirely uncontested in the lobby, and some genuine radical alternatives to custody were pioneered (Dronfield, 1980). However, the prison retained its position as the symbolic, disciplinary institution at the centre of what was becoming an ever larger and increasingly complex penal network. (Cohen, 1985). Penal policy also remained firmly under state control, run by Whitehall civil servants who were theoretically accountable to Parliament through elected Ministers. In practice, the power of the prison to punish remained largely in the hands of a hidden and unaccountable group-the prison officers-whose discretionary capacity for often-violent interventions into the lives of the confined remained undiminished.
We shall return to the question of the impact of the radical prisoners' rights movement below, but before considering this we want to excavate (and elaborate on) the debate about reform at this time as this issue goes to the heart of the abolitionist critique of the traditional reform lobby.
Abolitionism, Reform and the State
"......'reform'..........is isomorphic, despite its 'idealism', with the disciplinary functioning of the prison....." (Foucault, 1979: 271).
Central to the abolitionist position has always been a critique of the penal reform lobby and its detrimental and deadening impact on the debates around prisons. Abolitionists, while recognising that some reforms at some historical moments may have enhanced the position of the confined, would also maintain that the prison reform movement more broadly has, however unintentionally, helped to reproduce the dominant discourses that the prison is the natural response to crime and deviance. As Angela Davis has noted:
As important as some reforms may be-the elimination of sexual abuse and medical neglect in women's prisons, for example-frameworks that rely exclusively on reforms help to produce the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond the prison (Davis, 2003: 20).
In some respects this should not be surprising for, as Michael Ignatieff pointed out in 1978, (Ignatieff, 1978) from its very inception the liberal penal reform movement led by the self-flagellating John Howard was caught in an ideological contradiction where humanising prisoners was undercut by the drive towards 'disciplining their bodies and reconstructing their minds' (Sim, 1990: 73). For Ignatieff, the rhetoric of reform was built on a process of mystification that legitimated 'the further consolidation of carceral power' (Ignatieff, 1978: 220). Ignatieff's work appeared at a rich moment for abolitionist thinkers. Mathiesen's The Politics of Abolition (Mathiesen, 1974) published four years earlier, was followed by Foucault's Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1975), Ryan's The Acceptable Pressure Group (Ryan, 1978), Fitzgerald and Sim's British Prisons (Fitzgerald and Sim, 1979) and Mathiesen's Law, Society and Political Action (Mathiesen, 1980) all of which raised a series of analytical questions about the politics of liberal reform, its relationship to the state and its role in the consolidation of penal power both historically and contemporaneously. These issues, in turn, were tied in with a broader consideration of the role of the prison in the maintenance of a deeply divided social order. If the prison worked at all, it worked in the reproduction of that order rather than for the salvation of the confined.
This critical work had an immense impact on those campaigning around the prison in the 1970s and 1980s. They also appeared at a key historical moment which saw the emergence and consolidation of the New Right and this bloc's electoral success in the UK and the USA. Beginning with the election of the first Thatcher government in May 1979, the British state's response to crime and disorder was built around an authoritarian discourse that hegemonically cemented the ruling new right bloc and the wider population into the politics of 'regressive modernisation', dragging the society forward by taking 'us backwards' (Hall, 1988: 164). The consequences of this for the penal system, and prisons in particular, are well known. By the early 1980s the government had committed itself to the biggest prison building system since mid - Victorian times. Sentences for many offences, already long, were substantially increased and parole made more difficult (Ryan and Sim, 1984). The Home Secretary went on to announce that there were to be no limitations on the size of the overall prison population and that the government was committed to imprisoning all those that the courts thought should be locked up. The intensification in punishment was reinforced in the 1980s ? a time of high unemployment, bitter strikes and inner city disturbances ? by a number of Parliamentary debates on the restoration of the death penalty and the popular demand that life sentences should ?mean life?.
At this time, key liberal campaign groups such as NACRO were further incorporated into the state?s expanding penal/disciplinary network. In one financial year alone, 1987/8, NACRO?S income (mostly derived from the government for re-training and re-settling offenders) reached a staggering £79 million. (Wilson, 2001) Less compliant lobby groups were mostly marginalized. Granted, the emergence of the Prison Reform Trust in 1981 went some way towards compensating for the Howard League whose certainties had been challenged by the debate over reform versus abolition, but its reform agenda as a self confessed ?creature of the liberal establishment? was timid (Wilson, 2001). In truth, neither those in charge of the Howard League at the time, nor those behind the new Prison Reform Trust, had any real appreciation of the weight of the ideological shift that was taking place. However, it quickly became clear to groups like RAP that Conservative politicians were more interested in listening to populist red top editors than to the traditional penal lobby?s ?pissing liberals? or self-proclaimed government ?experts? (Sim, 2000).
RAP's response to the intensification in state authoritarianism was to come back to the issue of reform and its relationship to abolitionism. For Tony Ward, the editor of The Abolitionist, RAP's journal, while many reforms were simply 'a sugar coating on a toxic pill' it was also important to 'gain support for reforms of the penal system which while making it more humane will also show up its inherent limitations and contradictions' (cited in Sim, 1994a: 269, emphasis in the original). This meant that it was possible to call for the immediate abolition of the secrecy and censorship that dominated the prison system or the abolition of the prison medical service (which eventually did happen) while simultaneously being able to defend institutions like the Barlinnie Special Unit as a model of confinement for the future. As Ward noted, while liberals and abolitionists shared a number of medium-term goals with regard to prison reform, the former group failed to 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 increasingly helps to legitimate an increasingly powerful State machine' (cited in Ibid: 269-270).
Unlike those involved in the traditional lobby, those involved with RAP also recognised that crime was a social construction in that acts and activities which were labelled as criminal, particularly those classified as violent and dangerous, depended on who had the power to label them as such. This position was further refined in the light of the work of feminist writers and activists such as Jill Box-Grainger, who forced the organisation to consider the impact of sexual violence on the lives of women individually and collectively (Ibid). For Ryan and Ward, this development raised crucial issues about the nature of power itself:
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 to 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 (cited in Ibid: 273).
The early 1980s also saw the emergence of two groups whose presence on the political landscape was to seriously challenge, not only the traditional lobby's emphasis on piecemeal reform, but also because of its acquiescent relationship to the state, its neglect of a range of key issues around prisons. First, the emergence of Inquest, founded in 1981, brought the disturbing issue of those who had died in the custody and care of the state to public and political prominence. (Ryan, 1996a). Second, the emergence of Women in Prison, in 1983, formed as a pressure group to focus on the desperate but invisible plight of women in prison also brought into the public and political domain a series of issues that had been neglected by the traditional lobby group and, more widely, by politicians and the mass media (Carlen et al, 1985). The radical orientation of these groups and, crucially, their adoption of a theoretical and political perspective that focussed on issues of power and powerlessness, ensured that a different, more challenging and more critical series of questions began to be asked about deaths in custody and women in prison. Significantly, these groups also began to exert a counter hegemonic influence on the more traditional reform groups by dragging them onto a more critical terrain.
Refurbishing Reform; Woolf, Privatisation and Managerialism
During the 1980s the critical debates about abolition/reform which we have sketched out were partly sidelined by the continuing, ongoing crisis in the prisons which was manifested around overcrowding, prison officer militancy and the challenge to the legitimacy of the system in the shape of disturbances by prisoners themselves. This latest crisis reached its apotheosis in April 1990 with the 25-day demonstration at Strangeways. For liberals in the penal lobby, the state's response to these disturbances in the form of the Woolf report appeared to herald a significant shift in the politics of reform in that a senior judicial figure was calling for a reappraisal in the philosophy and practice of the penal system and in the treatment of prisoners to the point where he argued that 'justice' was to be taken as seriously by the prison authorities as the twin pillars on which the prison system had traditionally rested which were 'security' and 'control' (Woolf, 1991).
Woolf's report 'transcended the divisions between politicians, penal reformers and media personnel and?.united the different interests of these groups on the ideological terrain of penal reform (Sim, 1994b: 42). However, for abolitionists, Woolf's recipe for reform was problematic. Not only was his agenda quickly subverted and undermined by the Conservative government's ongoing law and order drive but, more crucially, the proposed reforms did little to challenge the role and place of the prison as a punitive institution in a divided society. A further significant weakness in the report, and one which had been highlighted by radical prisoners' rights organisations over the previous two decades, was Woolf's failure to confront the deeply punitive and authoritarian tendencies that lay at the heart of prison officer culture and which continued to seriously undermine more enlightened policies and practices towards the confined (Ibid: 37-38).
Woolf?s agenda was also compromised by the struggle against private prisons. For those in the traditional lobby such as the Prison Reform Trust, the Howard League and NACRO, the prospect of private companies making a profit out of the unfortunate social necessity of inflicting pain was bordering on the unethical. Others, most notably the POA, saw privatization as a threat to their members' conditions of employment and ultimately, their job security in the competitive market's drive to reduce costs. More critical commentators, (Ryan and Ward, 1989) argued that privatisation would prove to be a vehicle for expanding the prison population. The private sector would at some stage offer to pick up the initial capital cost of building new prisons, thus enabling the Treasury to defer the full cost of its declared policy to provide even more prisons.
The fierce campaign against private prisons diverted resources away from the ongoing struggle to consolidate Woolf?s liberal agenda. Yet the lobby could not have ignored this fight, not least because privatization was presented by some of its Conservative supporters as yet another new vehicle for reform; the private sector would deliver what the state had demonstrably failed to achieve for over a century, namely, prisons that truly ?redeemed? their inmates (Ryan, 1996b). But the lobby was brushed aside on this issue, and it is arguable that the pace of prison privatisation was only slowed by a directive known as the European Transfer Undertaking Protection of Employment (TUPE), which provided that where a public service was transferred into the private sector, existing workers? conditions of service had to be protected (Ryan, 1996b). However, while this directive limited the market testing of existing prisons, contracting out the building and management of new prisons gathered momentum, and there was even a threat to privatise aspects of probation (Ryan and Ward, 1990/1).
In addition to introducing market forces, the Conservative government also sought to improve the accountability of the prison service through the implementation of New Public Management (NPM) techniques borrowed from the private sector These were aimed at allowing the government to dis-aggregate the prison service, while at the same time increasing its control over management by the introduction of Key Performance Indicators scrutinized by external audit. These indicators came to include auditing the number of escapes, the number of prisoner disciplinary offences and the time prisoners spent out of their cells. Like many other public sector workers and managers prison staff came to be far more worried by efficiency audits than they ever had been about visits from the Chief Inspector of Prisons. Indeed, a serving Director General of the Prison Service Agency was to claim that New Public Management techniques had done more to improve the performance of the prison service competition than any other innovation, including the arrival of private prisons. (Ryan, 2003). The persistent complaint by prison administrators that this improvement, if that is what it was, was being achieved in practice by taking away their freedom to manage the newly dis-aggregated prison system was naively to miss the point. Neo ? liberalism as embodied in NPM is about governing and controlling more, not less, as managers across the public sector have learnt to their cost as they scramble to meet centrally imposed targets on limited resources.
Taken together, the changes we have outlined helped to transform the prison service towards the new millennium. What had once been a highly centralized service, run by public servants on uniform lines, became instead a competitive, binary system in which a growing number of prisoners and prison managers/operatives worked under different conditions of employment (and imprisonment) and for different rates of pay. This changed the policy-making network surrounding prisons. In the first place, it became global. Groups like the Corrections Corporation of America and Wakenhut moved into the British (and Australian) penal market place, and the normative discourse of campaigns around the prison became driven, less by notions of reform, and more by questions about value for money. The discourse of reform around the Woolf report was not entirely rejected, it was simply overlaid. Inevitably too, the policy network became far more complicated as auditors and inspectors became prominent, sometimes helping to shape normative goals that had once been the prerogative of liberal elites in the immediate post-war period.
The establishment of the liberal Penal Affairs Consortium in the early 1990s can reasonably be interpreted as a rational response to this changing policy landscape; it was an attempt to create a concerted, united front in punitive times. However, internal differences over its reform agenda, (Wilson, 2001) and the changing nature of British governance towards the millennium meant that it never regained the inside, single track as a lobby group that had once been the privilege of the Howard League, nor did it ever stand much chance of stemming the hard edged, populist thrust of Thatcherism (and its ideological successor, Blairism) which was (and is) driven by much wider, and stronger, political considerations.
Woolf?s agenda was also compromised by the struggle against private prisons. For those in the traditional lobby such as the Prison Reform Trust, the Howard League and NACRO, the prospect of private companies making a profit out of the unfortunate social necessity of inflicting pain was bordering on the unethical. Others, most notably the POA, saw privatization as a threat to their members' conditions of employment and ultimately, their job security in the competitive market's drive to reduce costs. More critical commentators, (Ryan and Ward, 1989) argued that privatisation would prove to be a vehicle for expanding the prison population. The private sector would at some stage offer to pick up the initial capital cost of building new prisons, thus enabling the Treasury to defer the full cost of its declared policy to provide even more prisons.
The fierce campaign against private prisons diverted resources away from the ongoing struggle to consolidate Woolf?s liberal agenda. Yet the lobby could not have ignored this fight, not least because privatization was presented by some of its Conservative supporters as yet another new vehicle for reform; the private sector would deliver what the state had demonstrably failed to achieve for over a century, namely, prisons that truly ?redeemed? their inmates (Ryan, 1996b). But the lobby was brushed aside on this issue, and it is arguable that the pace of prison privatisation was only slowed by a directive known as the European Transfer Undertaking Protection of Employment (TUPE), which provided that where a public service was transferred into the private sector, existing workers? conditions of service had to be protected (Ryan, 1996b). However, while this directive limited the market testing of existing prisons, contracting out the building and management of new prisons gathered momentum, and there was even a threat to privatise aspects of probation (Ryan and Ward, 1990/1).
In addition to introducing market forces, the Conservative government also sought to improve the accountability of the prison service through the implementation of New Public Management (NPM) techniques borrowed from the private sector These were aimed at allowing the government to dis-aggregate the prison service, while at the same time increasing its control over management by the introduction of Key Performance Indicators scrutinized by external audit. These indicators came to include auditing the number of escapes, the number of prisoner disciplinary offences and the time prisoners spent out of their cells. Like many other public sector workers and managers prison staff came to be far more worried by efficiency audits than they ever had been about visits from the Chief Inspector of Prisons. Indeed, a serving Director General of the Prison Service Agency was to claim that New Public Management techniques had done more to improve the performance of the prison service competition than any other innovation, including the arrival of private prisons. (Ryan, 2003). The persistent complaint by prison administrators that this improvement, if that is what it was, was being achieved in practice by taking away their freedom to manage the newly dis-aggregated prison system was naively to miss the point. Neo ? liberalism as embodied in NPM is about governing and controlling more, not less, as managers across the public sector have learnt to their cost as they scramble to meet centrally imposed targets on limited resources.
Taken together, the changes we have outlined helped to transform the prison service towards the new millennium. What had once been a highly centralized service, run by public servants on uniform lines, became instead a competitive, binary system in which a growing number of prisoners and prison managers/operatives worked under different conditions of employment (and imprisonment) and for different rates of pay. This changed the policy-making network surrounding prisons. In the first place, it became global. Groups like the Corrections Corporation of America and Wakenhut moved into the British (and Australian) penal market place, and the normative discourse of campaigns around the prison became driven, less by notions of reform, and more by questions about value for money. The discourse of reform around the Woolf report was not entirely rejected, it was simply overlaid. Inevitably too, the policy network became far more complicated as auditors and inspectors became prominent, sometimes helping to shape normative goals that had once been the prerogative of liberal elites in the immediate post-war period.
The establishment of the liberal Penal Affairs Consortium in the early 1990s can reasonably be interpreted as a rational response to this changing policy landscape; it was an attempt to create a concerted, united front in punitive times. However, internal differences over its reform agenda, (Wilson, 2001) and the changing nature of British governance towards the millennium meant that it never regained the inside, single track as a lobby group that had once been the privilege of the Howard League, nor did it ever stand much chance of stemming the hard edged, populist thrust of Thatcherism (and its ideological successor, Blairism) which was (and is) driven by much wider, and stronger, political considerations.
New Labour and the Reformed Prison
After New Labour came to power in 1997, Woolf's liberal, reformist agenda was relegated still further. Instead what emerged were a series of proposals which affected the prison system at a number of different levels. First, private prisons were to remain. Second, the managerial reforms, which had dominated Conservative thinking, continued and arguably intensified in terms of the auditing of, and setting targets for, the public services. Third, and more recently, under the rubric of modernisation, the prison and probation services were amalgamated to create a National Offender Management Service (NOMS). This process began in 2004, and it is expected to be completed by 2009. Suggested by an internal Home Office review (Home Office, 2001), the amalgamation is designed to bring the two services together in order to reduce re-offending rates by 10%, (another flexible target?) by ensuring that the ?custody plus? sentences introduced by the Criminal Justice Act (2003) are more effectively managed. This reorganisation is intended to have a major impact on the way penal services are to be delivered.
A comprehensive regional structure is promised in which markets will ensure the efficient allocation of service delivery across the whole penal apparatus, from prisons to punishment in the community. In these new, ?joined ? up? times, it does not matter much whether the services in question are delivered by the State, by for-profit organisations or by voluntary providers. The more important point is to guarantee contestability, to ensure that in service provision value is added, and to conduct research in order to identify what works. Some lobby groups, NACRO for example, clearly see this blurring of the public/private boundary in the disciplinary network as providing further opportunities for the organisation's growth as it is already thinking hard about how to engage with the new market place (NACRO, 2004).
Thus, what has emerged from Blair?s government is a set of proposals that are designed once again to reform/integrate the prison on the ground without challenging its extraordinary capacity to deliver punishment and pain. These reforms are designed to shift the discourse around the prison from the less eligible, nineteenth century bleakness of Michael Howard' s philosophy of 'prison works' to the sleek, late twentieth century managerial smoothness of Jack Straw's 'working prison' built around:
a combination of joined-up policies practices and programmes. In official and expert discourses, the confined are socially constructed as socially excluded subjects whose reintegration will allow them to participate in the globalised marketplace, as opposed to individuals whose identities have been forged, and social subordination maintained through the dialectics of class, gender, 'race', age and sexual divisions. These programmes are being built into an expanding system through the construction of new institutions and in the 're-rolling' of former male prisons which are being transformed into female prisons. Thus the 21st century working prison has arrived (Sim, 2005: 222-223).
For Pat Carlen, this development can be understood through the concept of 'carceral clawback' where reforms are constantly being incorporated and reincorporated into the system to the point where 'there has been no serious attempt to develop strategies for a reduction in the use of imprisonment? (cited in Ibid: 223). New Labour is therefore the latest link in a punitive chain which stretches back two centuries and which continues to accept the inevitability and naturalness of the prison in the fight against crime. In that sense, to paraphrase Foucault, the New Labour prison is the reformed prison.
After New Labour came to power in 1997, Woolf's liberal, reformist agenda was relegated still further. Instead what emerged were a series of proposals which affected the prison system at a number of different levels. First, private prisons were to remain. Second, the managerial reforms, which had dominated Conservative thinking, continued and arguably intensified in terms of the auditing of, and setting targets for, the public services. Third, and more recently, under the rubric of modernisation, the prison and probation services were amalgamated to create a National Offender Management Service (NOMS). This process began in 2004, and it is expected to be completed by 2009. Suggested by an internal Home Office review (Home Office, 2001), the amalgamation is designed to bring the two services together in order to reduce re-offending rates by 10%, (another flexible target?) by ensuring that the ?custody plus? sentences introduced by the Criminal Justice Act (2003) are more effectively managed. This reorganisation is intended to have a major impact on the way penal services are to be delivered.
A comprehensive regional structure is promised in which markets will ensure the efficient allocation of service delivery across the whole penal apparatus, from prisons to punishment in the community. In these new, ?joined ? up? times, it does not matter much whether the services in question are delivered by the State, by for-profit organisations or by voluntary providers. The more important point is to guarantee contestability, to ensure that in service provision value is added, and to conduct research in order to identify what works. Some lobby groups, NACRO for example, clearly see this blurring of the public/private boundary in the disciplinary network as providing further opportunities for the organisation's growth as it is already thinking hard about how to engage with the new market place (NACRO, 2004).
Thus, what has emerged from Blair?s government is a set of proposals that are designed once again to reform/integrate the prison on the ground without challenging its extraordinary capacity to deliver punishment and pain. These reforms are designed to shift the discourse around the prison from the less eligible, nineteenth century bleakness of Michael Howard' s philosophy of 'prison works' to the sleek, late twentieth century managerial smoothness of Jack Straw's 'working prison' built around:
a combination of joined-up policies practices and programmes. In official and expert discourses, the confined are socially constructed as socially excluded subjects whose reintegration will allow them to participate in the globalised marketplace, as opposed to individuals whose identities have been forged, and social subordination maintained through the dialectics of class, gender, 'race', age and sexual divisions. These programmes are being built into an expanding system through the construction of new institutions and in the 're-rolling' of former male prisons which are being transformed into female prisons. Thus the 21st century working prison has arrived (Sim, 2005: 222-223).
For Pat Carlen, this development can be understood through the concept of 'carceral clawback' where reforms are constantly being incorporated and reincorporated into the system to the point where 'there has been no serious attempt to develop strategies for a reduction in the use of imprisonment? (cited in Ibid: 223). New Labour is therefore the latest link in a punitive chain which stretches back two centuries and which continues to accept the inevitability and naturalness of the prison in the fight against crime. In that sense, to paraphrase Foucault, the New Labour prison is the reformed prison.
Towards an Abolitionist Future
At the present moment the prison has achieved a hegemonic status that has made it virtually impregnable to sustained ideological and material attack. As politicians and media commentators have mobilised a deeply regressive and reductionist discourse around law and order, with a concomitant consolidation in the authoritarian clampdown discussed earlier, so the abolitionist critique of the prison is socially constructed as the idealistic ramblings of an unreconstructed, dislocated few who are out of touch with the 'real' feelings, fears and sensibilities of the hard working, respectable many.
It is in this febrile context that acquiescence towards the prison is constructed. It is an acquiescence, which as Thomas Mathiesen has noted, is organised around a process of 'political "silencing"' by which he means:
the attitudinal and behavioural subordination to political standpoints which are regarded as authoritative in the society or group, so that acquiescence follows and given standpoints are accepted without protest. 'Silence' in this sense is a continuum, from silence despite disagreement (grudgingly you go along) to silence as an accepting attitude (you accept the standpoint, not even noticing that silencing has taken place, or at least not taking the fact of silencing seriously) (Mathiesen, 2004: 9).
Mathiesen's insight is persuasive. To borrow a phrase from Foucault, (cited in Cohen, 1981: 220) - which he applied to the state of criminology - despite the 'garrulous discourse' around the prison - scores of official reports, numerous academic research projects and seemingly endless media discussions - which in turn lead to what appears to be a highly visible debate about penal policy, in reality there is also a deeply embedded acquiescence to state defined 'truth' which silences fundamentally radical solutions, particularly abolitionist solutions, to the problem of the prison.
How, therefore, can a critical perspective be developed and sustained towards prisons and criminal justice policy more generally which both challenges current common sense and political mentalities and offers credible policies that will respond positively to the offender and offer protection to the wider society? In other words, how can the current bleak situation be contested and overturned?
To begin with it is important to recognise, as Gramsci did, that while a bloc or an idea can strive for hegemonic domination that domination is never completely achieved. In short, hegemony is 'fought for, won, lost, resisted?' (Bennett, 1986: xv). This point can be applied to the question of penal power and to the typology of resistance which Mathiesen has developed. Within this typology he calls for 'the creation of an alternative public space in penal policy, where argumentation and principled thinking represent the dominant values' (Mathiesen, 2004: 106). There are three dimensions to securing this space.
First, there is what he terms 'liberation from the absorbent power of the mass media, especially television' (Mathiesen, op. cit: 106). In focussing on the issue of absorption he develops a theme he first identified in his 1980 text Law, Society and Political Action. Here he discussed the power of the absorbent state and in particular the processes which encouraged a reformist gradualism and consensual co-operation towards penal policy. For Mathiesen, absorption operated through a strategy of ?defining in? which allowed the state to co-opt those organisations concerned with the development of social policy in general and penal policy in particular. These organisations were allowed to comment on ?official reports, legislative bills etc? so that ??everyone is heard" - and thus everyone is involved? (Mathiesen, 1980: 286). At the same time, an equally powerful strategy 'defined out' those policies and practices that challenged the punitive fundamentals of the system. Critics of the system were ideologically constructed as irresponsible non-conformists, divorced from the realities of life, 'oppose[d] to short-term improvements', extremist in their beliefs and who were supported by extremist organisations (Ibid: 288-291). Taken together, these processes operate hegemonically to construct an ?objective truth? around prisons: ?the more absorbent and defining-in the state becomes, the more reasonable it will appear to define out those who nevertheless are unwilling to conform (Ibid: 288, emphasis in the original). Thus, while radicals are likely to find it impossible 'to refrain completely from media participation', Mathiesen counsels against gratuitous participation in these institutions as 'it is certainly possible to say "no!" to the many talk shows and entertainment-like "debates" which flood our various television channels, and, most importantly, it is certainly possible not to let the definition of our success and our very existence be dependent on our face being constantly on the television screen' (Mathiesen, 2004: 106).
Second, Mathiesen points to the enduring role of grass roots organisations which emphasise 'network organisation and solidarity' as pivotal to a continuing spirit of resistance to the operation of power. As he notes, these movements, through the baleful influence of the mass media, have lost faith in themselves and therefore need to engage in a process based on the 'restoration of self-esteem and feelings of self worth' (Mathiesen, 2004: 106). This point has been developed by Julia Sudbury who argues that 'an effective challenge to the interlocking systems of militarism, incarceration and globalisation demands the establishment of broad-based, cross-movement coalitions in the US and internationally' (Sudbury, 2004: 27). For her:
?cross-fertilization between movements will encourage activists to address wider issues that are not always made visible in issue-based campaigns. For example, intensified analysis of globalisation might encourage prison abolitionists to consider the need for anti-capitalist economic models as a prerequisite for a world without prisons (Ibid).
In the USA these strategies and links have been pursued by groups using the new communication technologies like the Internet to create their own 'alternative public space[s]' (Mathiesen, 2000: 193). These groups include Critical Resistance which is working 'to build an international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe' (www.criticalresistance.org). The organisation's web site lists a range of new policy enactments which a number of states, Democrat and Republic, have introduced:
to reduce their prison populations, create programs that productively meet the needs of individuals coming home from prison and find fiscal savings in their prison budgets. The over all message is clear: reducing the prison population and prison spending is the only way to create genuine public safety (Ibid).
In England and Wales, the links between different social movements are much less developed as 'prisoners are still ghosts who rarely haunt the consciousness of even the most well-informed radicals in these [broader social] movements' (Sim, 2004b: 47). However, what has transpired is the strategies pursued by groups like Inquest, which, as noted above, have direct interpersonal links with those who were involved with Radical Alternatives to Prison (Ryan, 1996) have illustrated how an abolitionist perspective can inform radical practice. To use Angela Davis' phrase Inquest (and Women in Prison) can be seen as providing an 'abolitionist alternative' (Davis, 2003: 105) for analysing and responding to deaths in state custody. The interventionist work of the group has impacted hegemonically on a number of liberal, state and non-state organisations including the Howard League, NACRO and the Prison Reform Trust, The Chief Inspectorate of Prisons as well as those involved in debating and framing legislation in Parliament. At the end of 2004, the Joint Committee on Human Rights, drawn from members of the House of Lords and House of Commons, published its report, Deaths in Custody (House of Lords, House of Commons Joint Committee on Human Rights, 2004). Arguably, the critical nature of this report, and the human rights discourse which underpinned it, would not have happened without the influence and impact of Inquest which 'as an organisation has successfully avoided state co-optation while providing a model for abolitionist praxis from which other radical groups in different countries could learn' (Sim, 2004b: 48).
Mathiesen's third point of resistance involves two dimensions: a 'restoration of the feeling of responsibility on the part of intellectuals' as well as an 'increase in a wide range of resources for victims of crime [which] would help the victims as well as ameliorate attitudes towards offenders' (Mathiesen, 2004: 106-107). In terms of intellectuals, Mathiesen argues that social scientists should attempt to 'revitalise research?' (Ibid: 107). This is a crucial issue perhaps easier to articulate than to implement. As a number of writers have pointed out (Hillyard et al, 2004; Walters, 2003; Tombs and Whyte, 2003), the funding crisis in higher education in the UK and the liberal empiricism of traditional criminology has meant that the discipline has been pulled onto a terrain in which obtaining grants from any source has become for many criminologists their raison d'être thus abrogating even further the discipline's moral responsibility in both critiquing the existing arrangements around crime and punishment and offering alternatives to the prevailing political discourses in the area. In short, it is a discipline that has become 'comfortably numb'.
A similar development can be seen in penology particularly with respect to the impact of the discourse of 'what works'. As politicians, state servants and academics have articulated this discourse and, in the case of the Home Office, allocated funds for research accordingly, so prison researchers, under pressure from an under-funded and often desperate higher education sector have been proactive in seeking these funds. This has had profound implications with respect to the development of a critical perspective on prisons in that the discussion concerning 'what works' with offenders has been restricted to an increasingly narrow and authoritarian terrain. Consequently, those programmes and policies which have worked, and continue to work with offenders, for example, the Barlinnie Special Unit, Parkhurst C Wing, Blantyre House resettlement prison, Grendon Underwood and the Carlford Unit for young offenders, which would be regarded as positive models of confinement, by abolitionists, have been mercilessly attacked, closed down or remained on the periphery of the prison estate, constructed as idealistic 'experiments' while the prisons get on with the 'real' business of punishing offenders.
Such attacks have been built on the fact that these institutions, and many of the staff involved with them, provide a fundamental challenge to the law and order discourse of successive governments and the narrow, punitive parameters on which their vision of penality is based. They provide a glimpse of a different way to respond to offenders which is humane, empathic and supportive. This, in turn, makes their worthiness ideologically suspect. As David Jones has noted, Grendon Underwood 'is a model of decency and respect. Yet as that, it inevitably stands as a criticism of every other prison in the service' (Jones, 2004: 5). In that sense, the discourse of 'what works' has had a profoundly conservative impact on the debate around penal policy, perpetuating a narrow, reformist and reductionist perspective on how to respond to the confined while simultaneously distracting attention away from debates around what does not work with offenders (Sim, forthcoming).
Continued.........
At the present moment the prison has achieved a hegemonic status that has made it virtually impregnable to sustained ideological and material attack. As politicians and media commentators have mobilised a deeply regressive and reductionist discourse around law and order, with a concomitant consolidation in the authoritarian clampdown discussed earlier, so the abolitionist critique of the prison is socially constructed as the idealistic ramblings of an unreconstructed, dislocated few who are out of touch with the 'real' feelings, fears and sensibilities of the hard working, respectable many.
It is in this febrile context that acquiescence towards the prison is constructed. It is an acquiescence, which as Thomas Mathiesen has noted, is organised around a process of 'political "silencing"' by which he means:
the attitudinal and behavioural subordination to political standpoints which are regarded as authoritative in the society or group, so that acquiescence follows and given standpoints are accepted without protest. 'Silence' in this sense is a continuum, from silence despite disagreement (grudgingly you go along) to silence as an accepting attitude (you accept the standpoint, not even noticing that silencing has taken place, or at least not taking the fact of silencing seriously) (Mathiesen, 2004: 9).
Mathiesen's insight is persuasive. To borrow a phrase from Foucault, (cited in Cohen, 1981: 220) - which he applied to the state of criminology - despite the 'garrulous discourse' around the prison - scores of official reports, numerous academic research projects and seemingly endless media discussions - which in turn lead to what appears to be a highly visible debate about penal policy, in reality there is also a deeply embedded acquiescence to state defined 'truth' which silences fundamentally radical solutions, particularly abolitionist solutions, to the problem of the prison.
How, therefore, can a critical perspective be developed and sustained towards prisons and criminal justice policy more generally which both challenges current common sense and political mentalities and offers credible policies that will respond positively to the offender and offer protection to the wider society? In other words, how can the current bleak situation be contested and overturned?
To begin with it is important to recognise, as Gramsci did, that while a bloc or an idea can strive for hegemonic domination that domination is never completely achieved. In short, hegemony is 'fought for, won, lost, resisted?' (Bennett, 1986: xv). This point can be applied to the question of penal power and to the typology of resistance which Mathiesen has developed. Within this typology he calls for 'the creation of an alternative public space in penal policy, where argumentation and principled thinking represent the dominant values' (Mathiesen, 2004: 106). There are three dimensions to securing this space.
First, there is what he terms 'liberation from the absorbent power of the mass media, especially television' (Mathiesen, op. cit: 106). In focussing on the issue of absorption he develops a theme he first identified in his 1980 text Law, Society and Political Action. Here he discussed the power of the absorbent state and in particular the processes which encouraged a reformist gradualism and consensual co-operation towards penal policy. For Mathiesen, absorption operated through a strategy of ?defining in? which allowed the state to co-opt those organisations concerned with the development of social policy in general and penal policy in particular. These organisations were allowed to comment on ?official reports, legislative bills etc? so that ??everyone is heard" - and thus everyone is involved? (Mathiesen, 1980: 286). At the same time, an equally powerful strategy 'defined out' those policies and practices that challenged the punitive fundamentals of the system. Critics of the system were ideologically constructed as irresponsible non-conformists, divorced from the realities of life, 'oppose[d] to short-term improvements', extremist in their beliefs and who were supported by extremist organisations (Ibid: 288-291). Taken together, these processes operate hegemonically to construct an ?objective truth? around prisons: ?the more absorbent and defining-in the state becomes, the more reasonable it will appear to define out those who nevertheless are unwilling to conform (Ibid: 288, emphasis in the original). Thus, while radicals are likely to find it impossible 'to refrain completely from media participation', Mathiesen counsels against gratuitous participation in these institutions as 'it is certainly possible to say "no!" to the many talk shows and entertainment-like "debates" which flood our various television channels, and, most importantly, it is certainly possible not to let the definition of our success and our very existence be dependent on our face being constantly on the television screen' (Mathiesen, 2004: 106).
Second, Mathiesen points to the enduring role of grass roots organisations which emphasise 'network organisation and solidarity' as pivotal to a continuing spirit of resistance to the operation of power. As he notes, these movements, through the baleful influence of the mass media, have lost faith in themselves and therefore need to engage in a process based on the 'restoration of self-esteem and feelings of self worth' (Mathiesen, 2004: 106). This point has been developed by Julia Sudbury who argues that 'an effective challenge to the interlocking systems of militarism, incarceration and globalisation demands the establishment of broad-based, cross-movement coalitions in the US and internationally' (Sudbury, 2004: 27). For her:
?cross-fertilization between movements will encourage activists to address wider issues that are not always made visible in issue-based campaigns. For example, intensified analysis of globalisation might encourage prison abolitionists to consider the need for anti-capitalist economic models as a prerequisite for a world without prisons (Ibid).
In the USA these strategies and links have been pursued by groups using the new communication technologies like the Internet to create their own 'alternative public space[s]' (Mathiesen, 2000: 193). These groups include Critical Resistance which is working 'to build an international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe' (www.criticalresistance.org). The organisation's web site lists a range of new policy enactments which a number of states, Democrat and Republic, have introduced:
to reduce their prison populations, create programs that productively meet the needs of individuals coming home from prison and find fiscal savings in their prison budgets. The over all message is clear: reducing the prison population and prison spending is the only way to create genuine public safety (Ibid).
In England and Wales, the links between different social movements are much less developed as 'prisoners are still ghosts who rarely haunt the consciousness of even the most well-informed radicals in these [broader social] movements' (Sim, 2004b: 47). However, what has transpired is the strategies pursued by groups like Inquest, which, as noted above, have direct interpersonal links with those who were involved with Radical Alternatives to Prison (Ryan, 1996) have illustrated how an abolitionist perspective can inform radical practice. To use Angela Davis' phrase Inquest (and Women in Prison) can be seen as providing an 'abolitionist alternative' (Davis, 2003: 105) for analysing and responding to deaths in state custody. The interventionist work of the group has impacted hegemonically on a number of liberal, state and non-state organisations including the Howard League, NACRO and the Prison Reform Trust, The Chief Inspectorate of Prisons as well as those involved in debating and framing legislation in Parliament. At the end of 2004, the Joint Committee on Human Rights, drawn from members of the House of Lords and House of Commons, published its report, Deaths in Custody (House of Lords, House of Commons Joint Committee on Human Rights, 2004). Arguably, the critical nature of this report, and the human rights discourse which underpinned it, would not have happened without the influence and impact of Inquest which 'as an organisation has successfully avoided state co-optation while providing a model for abolitionist praxis from which other radical groups in different countries could learn' (Sim, 2004b: 48).
Mathiesen's third point of resistance involves two dimensions: a 'restoration of the feeling of responsibility on the part of intellectuals' as well as an 'increase in a wide range of resources for victims of crime [which] would help the victims as well as ameliorate attitudes towards offenders' (Mathiesen, 2004: 106-107). In terms of intellectuals, Mathiesen argues that social scientists should attempt to 'revitalise research?' (Ibid: 107). This is a crucial issue perhaps easier to articulate than to implement. As a number of writers have pointed out (Hillyard et al, 2004; Walters, 2003; Tombs and Whyte, 2003), the funding crisis in higher education in the UK and the liberal empiricism of traditional criminology has meant that the discipline has been pulled onto a terrain in which obtaining grants from any source has become for many criminologists their raison d'être thus abrogating even further the discipline's moral responsibility in both critiquing the existing arrangements around crime and punishment and offering alternatives to the prevailing political discourses in the area. In short, it is a discipline that has become 'comfortably numb'.
A similar development can be seen in penology particularly with respect to the impact of the discourse of 'what works'. As politicians, state servants and academics have articulated this discourse and, in the case of the Home Office, allocated funds for research accordingly, so prison researchers, under pressure from an under-funded and often desperate higher education sector have been proactive in seeking these funds. This has had profound implications with respect to the development of a critical perspective on prisons in that the discussion concerning 'what works' with offenders has been restricted to an increasingly narrow and authoritarian terrain. Consequently, those programmes and policies which have worked, and continue to work with offenders, for example, the Barlinnie Special Unit, Parkhurst C Wing, Blantyre House resettlement prison, Grendon Underwood and the Carlford Unit for young offenders, which would be regarded as positive models of confinement, by abolitionists, have been mercilessly attacked, closed down or remained on the periphery of the prison estate, constructed as idealistic 'experiments' while the prisons get on with the 'real' business of punishing offenders.
Such attacks have been built on the fact that these institutions, and many of the staff involved with them, provide a fundamental challenge to the law and order discourse of successive governments and the narrow, punitive parameters on which their vision of penality is based. They provide a glimpse of a different way to respond to offenders which is humane, empathic and supportive. This, in turn, makes their worthiness ideologically suspect. As David Jones has noted, Grendon Underwood 'is a model of decency and respect. Yet as that, it inevitably stands as a criticism of every other prison in the service' (Jones, 2004: 5). In that sense, the discourse of 'what works' has had a profoundly conservative impact on the debate around penal policy, perpetuating a narrow, reformist and reductionist perspective on how to respond to the confined while simultaneously distracting attention away from debates around what does not work with offenders (Sim, forthcoming).
Continued.........