A prison crisis or an opportunity?

One of the most thorny questions in anarchist theory is, “What do we do with all the criminals?” Many different answers have been offered over the years, from Kropotkin's views on the roots of antisocial behavior and possibilities for community rehabilitation to modern ideas for non-“punitive” (i.e. non-incarceral) approaches to combating violence.

In fact, there are as many views on the subject in anarchist thought as there are anarchists, based on people's diverse experiences. Few of us would say for a moment that we have the solution, partly because there is no single solution to an extremely complex social problem that often offers few paths to truth, let alone justice and healing. And partly because we live in an economic construct that prevents collectivity both in our everyday lives and in how we deal with the consequences of harm.

This complicated relationship to concepts such as wrongdoing, security, rehabilitation and reparations permeates our thinking on many issues, not least our relationship to the activities of the state. It is well known that anarchists tend to have an abolitionist view of state imprisonment (again, going back to the fierce criticism of Kropotkin, Berkman and many others) that constantly clashes with the dogmas of the right, centre and even left of traditional politics. In doing so, we stand in the way of the media posturing that wants to “lock them up longer”.

All this comes to the fore as we look into another round of the prison “overcrowding crisis” that has characterized the last two decades at least. Both before and immediately after the election, newspapers reported that (as the telegraph Notes) has been ‘solved’ at least three times in recent times, through the announcement of mega-prison projects to provide more places for the ever-growing British prison population, yet the problem has remained persistent.

The Telegraph's One criticism, of course, is that these earlier announcements were not followed by any significant government action. Pentonville and Brixton prisons, long earmarked for redevelopment, are still there, while plans for new giant prisons for prisoners have failed in the face of popular hostility. For right-wing pundits, Labour's challenge is simply to maintain production to cope with a projected prison population of 114,800 by 2028 (up from 87,400 last month).

So why are these numbers rising (from 75,000 in 2004)? Is it simply due to population growth? No, no. In fact, crime rates have fallen dramatically over the last 30 years, roughly in line with the rest of the Western world, while our imprisonment rate now stands at 0.141% of the UK population according to the Prison Reform Trust, compared to 0.106% in France and just 0.067% in Germany. The real culprit seems to be longer prison sentences, a direct result of all our years of policy being driven by comic tabloid attitudes. All those headlines wanting to lock people up for longer have prompted the government to act, and now we have a huge number of 'universities of crime' that no one in government seems to have much of a clue about.

Drain valves

In the medium term, despite its incredibly poor record of making recommendations, the right-wing press is likely to regain the upper hand with a little help from the civil service. There is nothing like the double pressure of frothing punishment advocates and the inertia of public institutions to keep a bad plan alive. So, with no other factors at play, we can probably expect Prisons Minister James Timpson to reluctantly announce new mega-prison projects in due course, citing his credentials at the Prison Reform Trust to score extra There Is No Alternative points.

So far, so unimaginative, and prison activists (sometimes even former top brass like Nick Hardwick) are left shouting into the void, waving their thick bundles of research in vain at polite, disinterested bureaucrats. What we are unlikely to see, given current trends, is a backtracking on sentencing guidelines, let alone a serious re-orientation, as Hardwick suggests, to prioritise alternatives. telegraph Columnist Philip Johnston states frankly of public costing programs: “It may sound good and enlightened, but it is expensive.” And if there is one group that no government will spend extra money on, no matter how much it serves the public good, it is prisoners.

In the short term, we are taking crisis measures to ease the pressures of overcrowding, particularly following recent far-right unrest. Interestingly, these run counter to Keir Starmer's natural inclination to throw away keys, and add extra punch to the right's popular narrative that Labour is too lenient on crime.

The announcements of early releases have caused a predictable minor moral panic (although they followed hot on the heels of the Tories doing the same thing last December), but most serious observers have described it as a simple necessity, not a choice. Overcrowding is now a serious problem in almost a third of the complex, and since the Strangeways riots of 1990, officers have been very, very cautious about simply cramming extra people into each cell. Emergency powers to use police cells have already been used.

If they want to jail political prisoners such as peace and climate activists and thugs from the Farage fan club, they need to make room. And to do that, existing prisoners need to throw out their hook. Given the lengthening of prison sentences in recent years, in many cases this effectively amounts to just a restoration of previous norms.

In a way, this is all slightly ironic. When XR was still looking to get arrested en masse to overwhelm the prison system, the government was smart enough not to allow that to happen. Instead, it stretched sentences, imposed heavy fines and made the process itself an ordeal. But now, at its weakest moment, it is actually sending non-violent activists to the depths because of the zero-tolerance policies of Starmer's predecessors, playing out the very strategy that XR once couldn't make work.

Opportunities for us

In electoral terms, this situation offers us a weakness that we can exploit in both the short and medium term. In the first case, we can say quite obviously that if Starmer wants to avoid prison overcrowding, he could start by reversing the move to sentence non-violent activists to multi-year prison terms, which was in any case just an obscene blow to civil liberties in response to relatively minor disruption.

And in the medium term, it has been clear for decades that the unpleasant reactionary dream of isolating thousands of prisoners away from their families and communities is nonsense. From a rehabilitation perspective, it is completely counterproductive, it is unpopular wherever it is proposed, and it turns the entire system into nothing more than a series of battery farms, with tens of thousands of lives lost.

The Tories, despite their best efforts, have shown that mega-prisons and longer sentences are exactly what we said they would be: not only inhumane, but also completely impractical. We know of approaches to tackling prison sentences and better ideas for bringing people back from the darkest period of their lives and reducing the dangers to the public. permanentnot only for the duration of a four-way route. The establishment is running out of “better” ideas, and even people like the Financial Timesare, in a certain desperation, increasingly open to alternatives.

There is room for campaigns and positive pressure.

~ Rob Ray