On 9 May the government announced ‘Operation Safeguard’ – an emergency measure, whereby police cells are used to house people there is no room for in prison. This was followed six days later by ‘Operation Early Dawn’, which delays some court hearings in order to avoid creating yet more prisoners in a system already packed out and creaking at the seams.
The prison population of England and Wales currently stands at around 87,500 people. In 2023, the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) predicted this would rise to over 94,000 by 2025 and potentially to 106,000 by 2027. Scotland, which has a separate criminal justice system, currently holds some 8,000 prisoners. Per capita, England/Wales and Scotland already have the highest rates of imprisonment in Western Europe. Although new prisons are being built and capacity is increasing, it cannot keep pace with the incessant demand to punish and incarcerate, and there is no political will from either the government or opposition to fix the crisis of ever-increasing imprisonment, via anything other than yet more building coupled with the most minimal of stop-gap measures.
Prison overcrowding is a consequence of criminal justice policy and not of rising crime rates, and in an increasingly reactionary political climate that policy will seek to legitimise the ever greater imprisonment of the scapegoated poor. Mass imprisonment, under the guise of the ‘war on drugs’ was used by the Clinton government in the US during the 1990s to ‘cleanse’ poor African-American communities of ‘anti-social’ young black men, in particular. Beginning under the John Major Conservative administration, and increasingly under the reign of Tony Blair’s Labour Party, the British government emulated Clinton’s policies, resulting in the British prison population doubling in size.
The use of joint enterprise prosecutions, together with the introduction of the sentence of Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) by the 1997-2010 Labour government, has had a significant effect on the numbers imprisoned. Since 2020 the situation has become yet more dire, due to new legislation such as the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, together with other legal measures, all of which have the effect of both increasing overall sentence lengths and upping the amount of time of those sentences prisoners must serve in custody (from half to two-thirds in most cases). There is more to come in the Criminal Justice Bill 2023, Sentencing Bill 2023 and Victims and Prisoners Bill. Prisons already bursting at the seams face being completely overwhelmed.
Alongside longer sentences, excessive use of pre-trial custody is a critical driver of prison population rates. The cancelling of court trials during the Covid-19 pandemic has created a backlog of some 65,000 cases, and has condemned many prisoners to languish for years on remand in filthy overcrowded conditions.
By October 2023, two-thirds of prisons in England and Wales were officially overcrowded with conditions such as to undermine their ability to meet basic human needs such as health care, food and humane living accommodation. Overcrowding has led to prisoners being held in harrowing conditions, often with two and sometimes three prisoners confined to cells designed for a single person, and kept locked up inside such cells for 23 hours a day. Recent MOJ figures show that 11,018 single-use cells are being shared by two prisoners, while an additional 18 are shared by three people.
Finally confronted by the reality that the mass overcrowding of prisons had overwhelmed their capacity to imprison many more, in October 2023 the government was forced to begin announcing some superficial reforms. These include telling judges that any sentences of less than 12 months for minor offences should be suspended, and releasing some low-risk prisoners a short while prior to their official release date. This period was initially just 18 days but in March 2024 was increased to 35-60 days and in May to 70. The implementation of the scheme is chaotic, with no publically available written information about its operation or eligibility criteria; prisoners who are likely to be considered suitable have to just hope for the best.
The Labour Party’s reaction to even these pathetic attempts to reduce prison numbers was predictable. On the Party’s official Twitter page, a graphic claimed: ‘Under the Tories, rapists and burglars will be spared jail’ and ‘Rishi Sunak has lost control of the prison system. He is letting violent criminals walk free. He is letting Britain down.’ On 15 May Labour leader Keir Starmer ranted in similar vein during Prime Minister’s Question Time in the House of Commons. A Labour government led by Starmer will do nothing to reverse the tide of spiralling imprisonment and will continue to herd mounting numbers of working class people into prison. The relentless imprisonment of more and more people will continue and the conditions in which they are held will become increasingly inhumane and life threatening. Figures published in December 2023 show that incidents of self-harm had increased by a fifth in the preceding year, and by a quarter among those serving IPP sentences. In the same period there were 311 deaths in prison custody (a rate of 3.6 per 1,000 prisoners) – 93 of which were self-inflicted.
Sooner or later, the rage, anger and despair of those imprisoned in such conditions will find expression in collective revolt and although most prisoners are currently in extended lockdown mode, that rage will find ways to transcend the locks and keys and render the prison system inoperable. When that happens it will be our duty to support the struggle of incarcerated people fighting back against brutal repression.
John Bowden
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 300 June/July 2024
