On 12 July the Labour govern-ment’s newly-appointed Justice Minister, Shabana Mahmood announced plans for a new scheme to slightly reduce prison numbers. In June the Prison Governors’ Association had warned the then Conservative government that within days all prisons would be critically overcrowded and that the entire prison system was standing ‘on a precipice of failure’. NICKI JAMESON and JOHN BOWDEN report.
Mahmood’s plan is that from September, some but not all prisoners serving Standard Determinate Sentences (SDS) will be released after serving 40% rather than 50% of their sentences. An SDS is comprised of a fixed custodial period, with the remainder of the time spent under probation supervision on licence in the community. Prisoners whose custodial term is currently 66% rather than 50%, due to the nature of their offence, will not have any reduction.
This statutory scheme will be more consistently applied than the Conservatives’ Early Custody Licence Scheme, which had been in place since October 2023 and under which some 10,000 prisoners were released between 18 and 70 days prior to the 50% mark. However, it will not do anything other than buy time while Labour sorts out longer term plans for more prison building, to which it is as wedded as was its predecessor. Those released from prison will not escape systemic neglect: a briefing published by the Prison and Probation Ombudsman on 18 July on ‘post-release deaths’ highlighted widespread homelessness, and lack of addiction and mental health services.
Beyond this, and despite Labour leader Keir Starmer et al bemoaning the problems of the system they have inherited, there have been no other announcements from Labour about the prison system. None of the 40 Bills previewed in the King’s Speech at the opening of Parliament on 17 July addressed any of this, although some of the planned measures will clearly create yet more prisoners.
On taking the reins of power, Labour announced a number of surprise Cabinet appointments, including that of James Timpson as Prisons Minister. Until accepting the post and the accompanying lordship, Timpson headed the lucrative family business running high-street outlets providing key-cutting, shoe repairs, printing and other services. Timpsons has a track record of running pre-release schemes in prisons and employing ex-prisoners. His appointment sent a shiver of excitement through prison reformers; however Timpson soon made clear that he was not going to be advocating for reduced prison numbers, and indeed supported building more prisons.
The Blair years revisited
Under the 1997-2010 Labour government, headed for 10 of its 13 years by Tony Blair, now a close associate of Starmer, prison numbers dramatically increased by 66%; New Labour having declared itself to be ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’.
The Blair government’s 2003 Criminal Justice Act brought in both the SDS sentence and the infamous indefinite Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP). IPPs are made up of a minimum custodial period and an indefinite licence period. Unlike the SDS, release after the minimum period is discretionary and subject to approval by the Parole Board. IPPs were abolished by the Con-Dem Coalition government in 2012; however the change was not retrospective, leaving some 2,700 IPP prisoners trapped in prison. The incoming government is silent on their fate.
Another flagship policy of the Blair years was the Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO). ASBOs were used to ban people from areas and compel them not to engage in a wide range of behaviours, some of which were equivalent to criminal offences but for which a far lower standard of proof was applied, while others were not criminal but had been said to be a nuisance in the local area. They were disproportionately used against young black men.
In 2014 the Coalition government replaced ASBOs with Criminal Behaviour Orders, which were used less frequently. Since early 2023, Labour politicians have been bemoaning the effect they claim this has on communities and promising to bring back ASBOs. In October 2023 then Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper told the Labour Party conference of the plan to introduce ‘respect orders’ for low level offenders. This has now been reflected in the King’s Speech, which heralded forthcoming legislation ‘to strengthen community policing, give the police greater powers to deal with anti-social behaviour and strengthen support for victims’. This will be given shape in a Crime and Policing Bill, and a Victims, Courts and
Public Protection Bill.
Breaches of behaviour orders are punishable by imprisonment, which again will contribute to the ever-spiralling prison population. By March 2024, there were approximately 134 prisoners per 100,000 of the population in England and Wales, compared for example to Finland (52), the Netherlands (64), and Slovenia (65).
The party of ‘law and order’
Throughout the election campaign, Starmer adopted an overtly punitive tone on ‘law and order’ and prisons, both to court right wing voters and to pave the way for even greater repression of the ‘anti-social’ and most marginalised of the working class. Starmer, a former director of public prosecutions, has praised Margaret Thatcher for having been ‘right on crime’, even despite her criminalising entire working class mining communities during the 1984 miners’ strike as the ‘enemy within’. The incoming Labour government will continue to operate the anti-protest laws of its Conservative predecessors.
Labour will now push ahead with the Conservative government’s planned prison-building programme, which is designed to create 20,000 new prison places, spending billions on the project, while also enabling private corporations like the Kier Group to profit from the expansion of mass incarceration. Starmer has said that planning applications for new prisons will be taken out of the hands of local authorities and given to ministers to decide, on the grounds that prisons are of ‘national importance’.
Labour is a ruling class party and will continue to operate the machinery of punishment to attack the working class. Prisoners and their supporters can expect only increased repression from the new government and must organise to oppose it.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 301 August/September 2024
