Below is a speech delivered by Nicki Jameson at a virtual rally, ‘Free Mumia & all political prisoners’, held on 10 December 2022 organised by Free Mumia UK in support of the political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.
I’m going to talk about the British prison system and resistance to it.
As nearly all other speakers here are in the US, it is interesting to note that the New York Times is currently featuring the iniquities of the British prison system. As an earlier speaker pointed out, this is a feature of the liberal media. Just as the Amnesty report on Mumia was given more coverage out of the US, this appears to be the case here.
Britain does not imprison as many people as the US. No country in the world does. But Britain does lock up more people than anywhere else in Western Europe and has more life sentence prisoners than France, Germany, Turkey and Russia combined. And of the prison population, over a quarter are from a racialised group.
Joint enterprise
The recent NYT articles have highlighted ‘joint enterprise’ (JE), the legal precept whereby if someone is killed, many more than the individual killer can be imprisoned, not just as accessories, but for murder itself. For those in this meeting it will be unsurprising to find that the main targets of this dragnet are young black men.
I want to salute the campaign group JENGbA (which stands for Joint Enterprise, not guilty by association). JENGbA is a grassroots coalition, mainly made up of working class families who have been directly impacted by JE imprisonment. It has been active since 2010, fighting to expose this law. My organisation, FRFI, has always supported JENGbA – hence the banners on show in the NYT.
Imprisonment for Public Protection
Like JE one of the most punitive features of an overall punitive system is the IPP sentence. IPP stands for Imprisonment for Public Protection. This is an indeterminate sentence, with a usually short minimum custodial period, followed by an indefinite ‘post-tariff’ period, when only the Parole Board can direct that the prisoner is released.
As John Bowden, a long term prisoner activist, writes in the latest issue of FRFI:
‘The Parole Board conflates deteriorating mental health with increased risk to society, and IPP prisoners are therefore denied release because of mental health problems directly caused by their indefinite detention.’
The IPP was the brainchild of the last Labour government and was introduced in 2003, becoming law in 2005. In 2012 the Con-LibDem Coalition government abolished it, so courts can’t give these sentences any more. However, this wasn’t retrospective and there are still some 3,000 people stuck in prison on these sentences. Others are out but face the prospect of recall at any time for petty infractions of their parole licences.
In September this year the House of Commons Justice Committee published a report into IPP sentences, in which it concluded that all those still subject to IPP should be sent back to court to be resentenced to a determinate sentence with a definite release date. The government has no obligation to accept this recommendation and has so far ignored it.
Solitary confinement/segregation
The last feature of the system I want to highlight is the use of segregation and solitary confinement. Officially solitary confinement does not exist in the British prison system, since it was abolished many years ago as a Victorian style punishment, along with bread and water diets and corporal punishment, which persisted until the late 1960s.
But it is there nonetheless, with prisoners spending long periods in segregation units as an unofficial punishment. And in addition there are special units, with a range of names, but most notably at the moment the Close Supervision Centres, to which prisoners who are deemed to be particularly disruptive or dangerous can be confined for years on end.
Prison resistance
None of these stark forms of oppression is easy to fight from within prison. The very construction of a system that will use any resistance put up against it as an excuse to incarcerate you in a CSC and ensure you do not get parole, is a powerful tool to ensure compliance.
And yet, prisoners do fight back. Some by physical protest. Others, following Mumia’s example, by the power of the pen. Kevan Thakrar, for example, who has been incarcerated in the CSC system since 2010, is a powerful voice, who writes and campaigns extensively against the brutality and oppression of the carceral system. He is currently in Belmarsh prison, where Julian Assange is also detained and awaiting extradition to the US for blowing the whistle on US and British war crimes. Kevan has a wide-ranging group of supporters who regularly protest outside the prison, the Home Office and other places associated with the perpetuation of the CSC system.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! which is the newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Group (as it also tells you in yesterday’s NYT!) has been supporting prisoners in struggle since it began publication in 1979, and so has the organisation since its founding in 1974.
This began not because of an immediate identification with all those behind bars, but because in the 1970s and 80s we supported the Irish national liberation struggle against British imperialist occupation.
There were many Irish freedom fighters imprisoned by the British government, and our comrades wrote to them, and supported the protests they were staging inside the prisons by organising solidarity marches and events outside.
It was the Irish prisoners of war who alerted us to the struggles of other ‘ordinary’ prisoners, the daily fight against brutality, neglect and racism.
Since then we have highlighted what is happening in prison in every issue of our paper. We detail the policy developments and report on resistance. We give a platform to prisoners and their supporters, and we send copies free of charge to prisoners nationally and internationally, including to Mumia and other political prisoners in the US, such as the Cuban Five, now released and home in Cuba, but who corresponded with us for many years. Fernando Gonzalez, one of the Five, who met brigadistas from our group in Cuba in 2015, told them – perhaps slightly tongue-in-cheek – that getting FRFI delivered regularly was the only thing he missed about prison!
Obviously this is not all plain sailing and a lot of time goes into endlessly arguing with prison authorities about censorship of the newspaper.
Prison conditions are becoming harsher. Prison staff were delighted with Covid-19 conditions as they hardly had to let anyone out of their cells at all, and there is a big resistance among them to relaxing this now. At the same time, the prison population is set to increase yet further, with harsher sentencing and parole regimes kicking in. The government has a big prison building programme – although there is resistance to this, some from the unlikely quarter of people in rural areas who don’t want a massive gaol by their village.
Despite all this, protest from those inside is at a low. Desperate individual protests take place all the time, but concerted uprisings are currently a rarity.
In 1990 a massive wave of protests swept across the whole prison system, led not by political prisoners, but by those serving shortish sentences for crimes of poverty – and who were sick of the daily brutality. It is chronicled in the book we produced Strangeways 1990: a serious disturbance.
This happened simultaneously to the wave of protests on the streets against the Thatcher government’s poll tax and other punitive measures. Such times currently look far off, but that level of fightback cannot fail to come again. When it does, we at FRFI and doubtless everyone in this meeting today, in whichever corner of the world, will be there to show their solidarity with the people fighting for their humanity from behind the prison bars.
