On 9 March Stuart Horner was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment as a punishment for the rooftop protest he staged in 2015 in protest at conditions in Strangeways prison, Manchester. Stuart is already serving a life sentence to which the new sentence will run concurrently, but the length of the term was clearly intended to send out a signal to any other prisoners who decide to take action to highlight degrading prison conditions.
The prison system which Stuart described to the jury in his trial is in some ways very different to the one in place at the time of the more famous Strangeways protest, but in others is almost identical. The prevalence of synthetic drugs and the violence surrounding them did not exist in 1990, but the description read to the court of physical conditions in Strangeways could have been taken verbatim from accounts written back then: ‘We are just fed up with the way we are treated, isolated in our cells sometimes 24 hours a day. It’s escalating into a major situation… You’re sat in a cell, two people in a one man cell, with a bucket… because the toilets are all broken, having to eat in that cell…you can’t live like that, it’s disgusting.’
