In 2002, legal action by then prisoner John Hirst forced the Prison Service to accept that Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights (freedom of association) meant prisoners had the right to form ‘representative associations’. The Association of Prisoners (AOP) had been set up shortly before this but did not become active; however, in April 2009, Ben Gunn announced that he was the AOP’s new General Secretary. In the last issue of FRFI Ben set out his vision of how the AOP could further the struggles of prisoners. We invited other prisoners to respond. The contribution below is from long-term prison resister, John Bowden.
If the history of the struggle for prisoners’ rights shows anything, it is that the dynamism and strength of that struggle has always been primarily expressed by prisoners themselves. Certain individuals and groups of a reformist nature based outside prison that have claimed to speak on behalf of prisoners and represent their interests have always tended to pursue an agenda based either on self-aggrandisement or an eventual collaboration with the institutional interests of the prison system. John Hirst’s AOP, devoid as it really is of any organic connection with prisoners in struggle, yet seeking as it does to assume a position of leadership over them, will either wither on the vine of his own personal ambition or, worse, be embraced by the prison system as a useful safety valve and means of legitimising its own authority.
Ben Gunn’s article (which in my opinion was given undue prominence and priority over the news of Comrade Ronnie Easterbrook’s tragic death) revealed both the ideological weakness of the AOP and its total naivety about the true nature of state power as enforced against prisoners. Ben writes: ‘The essence of prison is power. And at the heart of the AOP’s agenda is a rebalancing of that power and a calling to account of those who use it to misuse prisoners.’ So how is this to be done? Well, in the opinion of the AOP, not by old strategies of resistance and solidarity, not by uprisings and direct confrontation (or ‘reform riots’ as Ben calls them) which are apparently obsolete because of the prison system’s greater effectiveness in containing and neutralising such forms of protest. According to Ben, the ‘landscape’ of power in prisons has now fundamentally changed and thuggish prison officers have been replaced by a sophisticated mechanism of offending behaviour programmes, sentence planning boards and behaviour modification privilege schemes, all of which render old forms of resistance worthless.
Instead, power should now be negotiated through ‘representative associations’ and a sort of democratic process, underpinned by the legal right to organise, which prison bosses will have no choice but to co-operate with, or ‘grin and bear it’, as Ben claims. This is of course a nonsensical analysis of how power operates and reveals complete ignorance and inexperience of how the prison system responds to prisoners challenging its control over them.
Certainly, the European Convention on Human Rights might allow prisoners an abstract right to set up ‘representative associations’ but only within the established parameters of ‘good order and discipline’, as defined by the prison authorities. Real power, who wields it and over whom it is exercised is decided not by abstract rights or peaceful negotiation, but by the very nature of the prison system. In the final analysis, prisons represent a form of absolute state power that, along with the police, judiciary and army, has a single primary function and role outside of democratic control and influence – to maintain and enforce the capitalist status quo by whatever means necessary.
If the landscape of power in prison has changed, it is not to one where plain brutality has been replaced with a manageable strategy more responsive to formalised prisoner representation, but rather to one where absolute control and containment are imposed with even greater psychological and physical violence. And, contrary to Ben’s claim that the old strategies of prisoner solidarity and resistance are no longer relevant to deciding and furthering prisoners’ rights, it is in reality the virtual disappearance of such forms of struggle that has allowed prison administrations to enforce regimes even less tolerant of these rights.
Ben says that the broad aims of the AOP do not necessarily differ from those of established prison reform organisations, which suggests there is nothing fundamentally different about its analysis of prisons and the limitations of prisoner empowerment from that of middle class groups like the Howard League or Prison Reform Trust. Indeed, the main campaigning ambition of the AOP seems to consist of winning voting rights for prisoners and propagating the fallacious belief that the capitalist political system, currently shifting dangerously to the hard right, will somehow be responsive to votes from a savagely scapegoated minority whose very existence has been used to popularise right wing politics and the power of the state. If the AOP is seriously suggesting, especially in the current social and political climate, that the struggle of prisoners will ever be represented by corrupt bourgeois politicians, then it is going absolutely nowhere.
John Bowden, HMP Glenochil
FRFI 210 August / September 2009
