FRFI 142 April/May 1998
In opposition, today’s Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw excelled himself in attacking his Conservative opponent, the rabidly reactionary Michael Howard, not from a left-wing or even liberal perspective but from the right. According to Straw, the pro-hanging Howard wasn’t too vicious: he was too lax, too soft on crime. In response to Howard and Prime Minister John Major’s rallying cry ‘Prison Works’, Straw and Blair never said, ‘No, it doesn’t’. Instead they proclaimed, ‘Yes, prison works and we will make it work better’. NICKI JAMESON takes a look at the state of the British prison system after nearly a year under Labour.
Even the prison reformers who blindly, almost religiously, hoped and wished for New Labour to implement a more liberal agenda have had to admit that Labour prison policy is virtually identical to that of the Tories. (Dr David Wilson, Labour Party member, a prison governor who resigned to work for the Prison Reform Trust, speaking at the preview of a Channel 4 documentary he fronted shortly after the election: ‘I want to believe. I really, really want to believe…’) No repressive measures have been repealed nor progressive ones implemented. The prison population has continued to rise. Expensive methods of security and punishment are still in place while funding for prison education has not been restored. Tory cuts to the education budget resulted in a 71% reduction in the number of hours prisoners were able to spend on education. Labour also continued a High Court appeal by the previous government against prisoners’ right to receive visits from journalists. In essence, Jack Straw’s ‘different tone’, which the likes of the Prison Reform Trust latched on to so keenly after the election (see Prison Report Summer 1997) amounts merely to the fact that unlike Howard, who took every opportunity to make a virtue out of rising prison numbers and boast about increasing ‘austerity’ for prisoners, Straw is somewhat more tight-lipped and defensive on the subject.
Rising numbers
When Labour won the election last May, there were 60,000 men and women in gaol in England and Wales. These included nearly 1,000 15 and 16 year-olds and 500 asylum-seekers. Shortly before the election, Straw and Howard had done a number of parliamentary deals whereby Conservative Bills were passed without opposition. One of these allowed the US prison ship Resolution, berthed in Portland Harbour, to become a functioning British prison: the HMP Weare. The ship cost £4-5 million and was designed to help ease overcrowding by providing 400 new prison places. Ironically, a year later it has never yet been full to capacity.
In the first three months of Labour’s office, the prison population rose by 178 per week and by August 1997 stood at 62,177. The Penal Affairs Consortium wrote: ‘To cope with such an increase without worsening overcrowding, would require the opening of a new prison the size of Dartmoor every month’. The government was forced to allocate an extra £43 million to the prison building programme.
By October there were 63,000 prisoners, 11,000 of whom were being held two to a cell built for one. The relatively small female prison population had increased by 19% since the previous year and more than doubled in five years from 1,353 to 2,783. There were 11,000 people aged under 21 in prison and 12,000 prisoners on remand. Fewer than half of men and fewer than a third of women who are remanded in custody awaiting trial are subsequently sentenced to terms of imprisonment. In November the government announced plans to electronically tag and release 3,000 prisoners nearing the end of their sentences.
By March 1998 the prison population of England and Wales had reached 65,000. There is no indication that numbers will fall, nor even that the increases will become less dramatic. On the contrary, every projection of future numbers is superseded by an increased figure. The current estimate is that by 2005 there will be 82,000 prisoners. Jack Straw continues to insist that ‘prison is a “demand-led” service’ and it is not the business of politicians to interfere with judges’ decisions. However he does exactly that by bringing in most of the Conservatives’ minimum sentencing legislation and exercising his power to determine the length of a life sentence and prevent some prisoners from ever having any realistic chance of release. While this approach continues, the British prison population will continue to outstrip that of almost all European countries and may well begin approaching the obscene proportions of imprisonment in the US.
Continuing Conservative repression
During the last few years of Conservative government, a whole range of repressive measures were introduced into prisons. Some appear under the guise of security, such as the more frequent and intrusive searching of both prisoners and visitors, the use of special Dedicated Search Teams and Volumetric Control: the restriction of prisoners’ property to what will fit in two small boxes. Others are designed specifically to divide and rule the prison population. Among the most pervasive in their effect and the most hated by prisoners are the Incentives and Earned Privileges Scheme and the Mandatory Drug Testing programme. Labour has embraced both.
Under the Incentives and Earned Privileges Scheme all prisoners are defined as Basic, Standard and Enhanced, according to a ‘performance assessment’. Basic regime entitles them to basically nothing and the other categories progressively award more ‘privileges’. These consist of visits, association and the right to spend your own money: £2.50 per week on Basic, £10 on Standard, £15 on Enhanced. The system is unfair in itself, particularly to prisoners without regular visitors or friends to send them money, but is also implemented in a completely uneven and arbitrary way, depending on which gaol a prisoner is in and the whims of individual officers.
Mandatory Drug Testing was introduced in 1996 at a cost of millions. Some 70,000 ‘random’ drug tests are now carried out annually. Prisoners who test positive are then punished. Punishment is virtually the same for cannabis as for heroin. The system is blamed for actually creating heroin users as heroin stays in the body for days, whereas cannabis is detectable for several weeks. For prisoners who are heroin users, no treatment is provided. There is no methadone programme or any other form of detoxification. Punishment takes the form of loss of remission and closed visits, with a glass screen between the prisoner and the visitor. This punishes the prisoner’s family and friends as well, even when there is no suggestion that drugs were obtained on visits. It does not punish drug pushers, only users. The pushers test negative and carry on their trade. It is a system which is entirely punitive and a complete waste of time and money.
Special Units – what’s in a name?
Just as Harold Wilson’s 1974 government continued with the previous Conservative administration’s plans for a special behaviour modification unit at Wakefield prison to brutalise ‘subversive’ prisoners, so Tony Blair’s government has continued with the setting up of ‘Close Supervision Units’ at Woodhill, Hull and Durham prisons. Despite some public rhetoric about ‘ground-breaking group therapy’, these units operate on a crude carrot and stick basis and are designed to destroy their inhabitants. The Woodhill units opened in February and as we go to press the old Hull Special Unit is being refurbished in order to reopen as an ‘Activity Intervention Unit’.
Most of the Irish prisoners of war housed in the prison system’s other type of unit – the Special Secure Units – have been repatriated, along with the majority of other POWs. However, contrary to public perception, Labour has not closed the SSUs: the one at Whitemoor is still in operation, although it holds very few prisoners. The Belmarsh SSU has simply been renamed the High Security Unit and continues to subject remand prisoners to a punitive, closed regime.
The repatriation process begun by John Major’s government has speeded up under Labour. However, prominent among those POWs whom Labour still refuses to repatriate, or even set a release date for, are the four men arrested at Balcombe Street in 1974 who have been in English gaols ever since.
Privatisation and the POA
While in nine-tenths of the pre-election ‘law and order debate’ there was no distinction between Labour and Tory, one crucial area of penal policy where the parties did take different positions was over privatisation. Writing in the POA’s magazine, Gatelodge: Jack Straw said ‘I should like to … stress my fundamental objection to prisons run by the private sector. This is surely one area where there can be no free market. We cannot break contracts which already exist, but we shall certainly make no new ones and, within the existing budget, shall take back into public service privatised prisons as soon as contractually possible.’
On coming to power, Labour did a U-turn and by October 1997 Straw had given the go-ahead to the building of four new private prisons, in addition to the four already in operation and three then under construction. These latest four included the Cookham Wood secure ‘children’s prison’ for 12-14 year-olds, which is due to open this Spring and will be run by Group 4.
It is no coincidence that the anti-privatisation stance was designed to curry favour with the POA. Similarly, Labour had hinted that it would reverse the Conservatives’ removal of the prison officers’ right to strike. Of course, it has done no such thing.
In FRFI’s 1997 Election Special we wrote: ‘In many respects, Labour and the Tories mirror one another on law and order … There has been, however, a class difference which surfaced in times of crisis. Labour, having its origins in the labour aristocracy, has tended to support the Prison Officers’ Association’s reactionary but anti-government line of “need for more staff”/“blame cuts”/“oppose privatisation”, allowing it to attack Conservative policy without defending prisoners. In government, Labour will be forced to ditch this alliance for financial reasons and will continue Tory attacks on prison officers’ privileged status.’
Locking up the working class
The past 20 years have seen a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. The differential between the richest and poorest sections of society is greater now than in Victorian England. At the same time, successive governments have been hell-bent on dismantling the small protection against poverty afforded by the Welfare State. They preach ‘individual responsibility’ and ‘prudence’. Every single survey carried out into the make-up of the prison population reveals that prisoners are overwhelmingly poor and that the vast majority of crime is directly or indirectly motivated by poverty. Labour, like the Conservatives before them does nothing to address the root cause of the problem: social inequality. Tony Blair’s famous utterance: ‘Tough on crime; tough on the causes of crime’ is complete nonsense, with so-called anti-poverty measures and ‘social exclusion’ units at best window-dressing and at worst part of the policing methods. There are more and more people in prison; the conditions they face there are worsening; their chances of ‘rehabilitation’ lessening. The Labour government is as vicious as its predecessor and is creating a monster which it will not always be able to control. At her most arrogant Margaret Thatcher was caught off guard by the anti-Poll Tax riots and the Strangeways protest. So, watch out Tony Blair – the people who today are being driven into poverty and into gaol will not be submissive forever.
