Responsibility for the prisons of England and Wales now lies with Theresa May’s newly appointed Justice Minister and Attorney General, Liz Truss. Despite having written in 2011 that prisons should be ‘tough, unpleasant and uncomfortable’, Truss has insisted that she will continue the widely publicised ‘prison reform’ programme commenced by her predecessor Michael Gove. Nicki Jameson reports.
While Gove was busy with Brexit and power-grabbing, his ‘reform’ plans, announced in the Queen’s Speech on 18 May, were put on the back burner. The promised Prison Reform Bill does not yet exist, although the first six ‘reform prisons’ have been named and are beginning to operate.
Gove himself took over as Justice Secretary from the even more unpopular Chris Grayling, whose contribution to the prison system included cutting ‘privileges’, reducing release on temporary licence, banning the sending in of clothes and books and reducing the amount of money spent on food. Following Grayling made the right-wing Gove – who unbanned the sending of books and began to talk about restoring more access to temporary release, at least at some prisons – look like a liberal, and his subsequent talk about ‘prison reform’ fooled quite a few people. However, in reality, Gove’s ‘reforms’ are simply the introduction into the prison system of similar mechanisms to those he brought into schools when he was Education Minister; governors of the selected prisons are given greater autonomy over the running of their institutions. This can have some positive consequences and no doubt the first round of ‘reform prisons’ will do some flagship work to prove the point; however the same ‘free hand’ that can bring in more release on temporary licence and more rehabilitative programmes is equally free to spend less money on food or education, arbitrarily increase punitive security measures and bring in yet more private contractors to exploit prisoners’ labour.
Meanwhile, British prisons are already ‘tough, unpleasant and uncomfortable’, not to mention dangerous and violent. Figures released by the Ministry of Justice at the end of April revealed a massive increase in violence in the previous 12 months, which in some cases was close to double the rates from 2010 before the Coalition government came to power. Between 2010 and 2015, the number of recorded sexual assaults more than doubled, from 137 incidents per year to 300, and the number of deaths in prisons rose from 198 to 257 per year. During 2015 there were over 20,000 assaults in prisons, an increase of 27% over the previous year; serious assaults have risen by 31%, up to nearly 3,000.
There were 100 self-inflicted deaths between April 2015 and March 2016, a 27% increase on the previous year. Self-harm and suicide attempts have also risen at an alarming rate, with over 32,000 recorded self-harm incidents in 2015, an increase of 25% on the previous year. The number of recorded attempted hangings rose from 580 in 2010 to 2,023 in 2015, attempted overdoses from 1,414 to 2,523, and incidents of prisoners cutting themselves from 15,159 to 21,282.
On 19 July, the Inspectorate of Prisons published its annual report. The job of the Inspectorate is to ensure impartial scrutiny of the prison machinery; however the Chief Inspector is directly appointed by the Justice Secretary and those who are too critical usually fail to be reappointed. This was the fate of Nick Hardwick, who was Chief Inspector from 2010 until earlier this year. Gove replaced Hardwick with former Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Peter Clarke, the man who fed false information to Parliament in support of Tony Blair’s failed attempt to give police the power to hold terrorism suspects for 90 days without charge.
However, even Clarke cannot cover up the appalling brutality and degradation that is the daily reality of British prisons. Commenting on the overuse of segregation units to warehouse people with mental health problems and the prevalence of so-called ‘new psycho-active substances’ such as Spice within the prison system, he stated: ‘No-one could sensibly argue that a segregation unit is a therapeutic environment or a suitable place to hold people with mental health issues. These three issues of violence, drugs and mental health will, on many occasions, find themselves intertwined. They are, in turn, compounded by the perennial problems of overcrowding, poor physical environments in ageing prisons and inadequate staffing.’
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 252 August/September 2016
