Her Majesty’s Profit
“We are currently seeing the growing exploitation of prisoners’ labour by private companies and by the state… compulsory work is nothing less than slavery.” – Prisoners Mark Barnsley and John Bowden.
Last Friday saw the first action against forced prison labour in Britain, when supporters of wrongfully jailed anarchist Mark Barnsley invaded and shut down Hepworth Building Products in Edlington, South Yorkshire. Hepworth uses prisoners at Wakefield Prison to carry out tedious work packaging their products. In return the prisoners receive a whopping £8 a week, which for a 25 hour week works out at a pocket bulging 32p an hour. Wakefield has no educational programme and the prison labour is compulsory. Mark has refused to do the work and as a result he’s now being held in the notorious isolation block.
About 30 supporters invaded the site – locking the main gates and disrupting the lunchtime shift-change – quickly knocking up some leaflets on Hepworth’s copier to distribute to workers with details of the company’s exploits. The action disrupted the warehouse and offices for about 2 hours. The fire brigade were called to cut through the locks on the gates but turned around and departed to cheers after it was explained to them what the protest was about.
One of those involved told SchNEWS “It was only a small action, but considering it was relatively spontaneous it was a great success. There were no arrests, the workers were mostly pretty supportive (including one who actually knew Mark Barnsley from being involved in anarchist politics back in 1980s!) and seemed to know nothing of their company’s involvement in prison labour.” A delighted Mark Barnsley said “This is brilliant! I really hope actions against companies like this carry on; they are so easy to target on the outside and it is so inspiring to those on the inside. Prisons themselves can stand up to pressure, but the companies that profit from them can’t. This is what I call real solidarity.”
But it’s not just Hepworth who are involved in prison labour. Companies like Virgin, who get prisoners in Lewes to untangle headphones for use in its planes; Joe Bloggs who get Strangeways inmates to stitch its clothes and Age Concern who have their donation bags printed and folded.
(extract from “Schnews n.317-10th August, 2001)
Prisoner Sues for Violence at HMP Long Lartin
In November 2001 at Manchester County Court ex-prisoner Billy Whitfield brought a civil claim for damages against the Prison Service on the grounds that staff ‘supervising’ the HMP Long Lartin segregation unit had repeatedly beaten him up.
On the first morning of the hearing the judge pointed out to the counsel for the Prison Service that ‘procedural irregularities’ in Whitfield’s treatment tended to establish the culpability of prison staff, and maybe it would therefore be advisable to come to a financial settlement and avoid a full and costly court hearing. The Prison Service refused.
Billy’ Whitfield described being attacked by staff on two consecutive days during March 1997. Their wrath was apparently provoked on the first occasion by his request for a medically recommended diet, already prescribed by the prison doctor. He was physically assaulted by about five screws, placed in ‘locks’ and dragged to a sensory deprivation special cell where he was beaten again and left for 24 hours. During that time, he was neither fed nor given water; nor was he checked by medical staff, nor charged with any disciplinary offence. These were the ‘procedural irregularities’ referred to by the judge.
The next day he decided to write to a solicitor about what had happened. He requested the use of a biro from his assailants of the previous day. He was promptly attacked again. Other prisoners objected by hammering on their cell doors; a few refused to slop out or clean their cells in protest, and one complained directly to a member of the Board of Visitors (BOV).
As a result of his treatment, Billy Whitfield was psychologically traumatised and suffered irreparable physical injury. The Prison Service’s attempt to defend the screws’ actions was dismissed by the judge, who then awarded Whitfield 21,000 pouds damages. All of the screws involved continue to work at HMP Long Lartin and none has been disciplined. The Prison Service has now lodged an appeal against the decision.
John Bowden, HMP Bristol
===================
Fightback at Full Sutton
Following prison protests at HMP Full Sutton in late 2001, Fight Racism Fight Imperialism (FRFI) asked prisoners to send us their accounts or comments on what happened.
Matthew Fitches: I was one of the ringleaders ghosted for organising the protest on my wing, E,wing. It was peaceful and intended to stop them from constantly cancelling exercise and gym. Eighty of us refused to bang up; only eight or so dissented. Seeing as Full Sutton is an A-category dispersal prison, we at least expect to have exercise and gym on a regular basis.
No notice was taken of the first protest. A second one occurred a few days later. This time roughly 150 prisoners off E, A and F wings refused to lock up. The result was that about 20 Of us were ghosted out, many to blocks (seg units) around the country. Worse was in store for the ones who went to Long Lartin where ill-treatment occurs on a regular basis. I and another good fella went to Wakefield block for a month and were then ghosted to Parkhurst
John Shelley: The sit-down protests at HMP Full Sutton were a direct result of poor management. Too many changes in too short a space of time, together with an unwillingness to hear the needs of its prisoners are the two main contributing factors which led to a large number of inmates making a stand.
Having arrived at HMP Full Sutton myself in March 2001 it was immediately clear there was a great deal of animosity between management and prisoners. Even then there was a small number of prisoners who spoke out against the rapidly deteriorating conditions. But this was swiftly met with the outspoken inmate being removed from the wing and subsequently transferred out of the prison.
The problems at Full Sutton largely stemmed from the prison being split in two: half the prison being main wing prisoners, whilst the other half is devoted to ‘Vulnerable Prisoners’ (VPs). Main wing prisoners were left with a bad taste in their mouths when early in 2001 the running of the kitchens was for no apparent reason handed-over Wjhe VPs. it didn’t stop there. It then tran–spired that the VPs would enter the visiting room for visits before main wing prisoners, gaining an advantage of around 30 minutes. Main wing prisoners suggested a rota system; management spent months before eventually agreeing, but once again it was to be in the VPs’favour. They would go first onto their visits five days a week, compared to our two – some balance!
More was to come… In May the working week was cut in half, as was the pittance they had the affront to call a wage. Again, this was to give the VPs a chance to work in some of the workshops they had previously been denied. Once more, not satisfied with sharing it evenly, management decided to allocate main wing prisoners the half of the week which just happened to coincide with POA meetings, wing meetings and wing callups, further reducing our earning capacity to less than half what it used to be. To add insult to injury, we were then expected to attend education for the other half of the week, or lose whatever job we had. The problems were never-ending.
The governors’ attitudes were to implement changes as quickly as possible, with little regard as to how they would affect the people involved. The show of solidarity by the main wing prisoners at Full Sutton momentarily took control away from the authorities.
===========================================
Source: Fight Racism Fight Imperialism (FRFI)
http://www.mojuk.org.uk/bulletins/fight.html
What has become of prison revolts in the British prison system? Where now are the open expressions of collective anger and solidarity that fueled the uprisings and jail riots of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s and created the iconic images of Hull 1976 and Strangeways 1990? What happened to the spirit of revolt that used to periodically shake the British long-term prison system and engender a philosophy of prisoner empowerment and solidarity, a philosophy that situated the struggle of prisoners at the very forefront of the universal struggle for human rights and even social revolution?
Has the British prison system now become so responsive to and accommodating of the rights of prisoners that revolt and protest has been rendered unnecessary and redundant? I think not. In fact British jails are now more chronically overcrowded than ever before and inmates virtually warehoused in conditions and under regimes probably worst than they were twenty years ago. The despair and misery created by such conditions is reflected in rates of self-harm and suicide that are inexorably growing, along with the length of sentences now dished out. And like never before the treatment of prisoners is increasingly influenced by a political climate and manipulated public mood supportive of even greater repression and revenge. Yet nowhere, apparently, is there the spirit of solidarity and organised resistance amongst prisoners that was so evident twenty years ago, no-where the readiness to fight back and literally raise the roof in protest. Instead of defiance there seems now only passive acquiescence and an acceptance of conditions and forms of treatment that previously would have mobilized disobedience and revolt.
Silence in the face of intolerable oppression is a disturbing phenomenon; in conditions of extreme cruelty the will to resist is inherently human and wholly characteristic of a healthy and intact human spirit possessing an integrity unique to our species.
Why then has the militancy that seemed to characterize the behavior of long-term prisoners, especially, towards the prison system been replaced by conformity and submission?
Organizationally, the prison system in terms of methods of control, prison architecture and design, etc, has developed significantly since the last major prison uprising at Strangeways in 1990. Before the Strangeways revolt the physical space of most large prisons was more or less controlled by the prisoners themselves and scrutiny and close supervision of that space by the jailers was difficult and haphazard. Apart from punishment/segregation units, most prisoners were housed in large wings where they were allowed to circulate freely and create a certain degree of autonomy of physical space; complete oversight and surveillance was impossible and control often tenuous, and where incidents of protest were sparked off they tended to spread without containment, developing a momentum that reached into most areas of the prison. Large group solidarity was a common feature of life in the long-term prisons and was reflected in the balance of institutional power which dictated that the co-operation and good will of prisoners was a vital and necessary prerequisite of relative control.
Changing the physical architecture of prisons was to become a key component in the state’s strategy of eradicating large scale protest and seizing back control of physical space. The new-generation of prison architecture and the extensive re-design of prison space started in the early 1990s purpose-built small group control into wing lay-outs and won back completely the control of space from prisoners.
In Scotland where bloody revolts had convulsed the prison system during the 1970s and 1980s a massive building programme transformed the old open-plan halls and galleries into new “super wings”, enormous structures where space is divided and sub-divided into small self-contained units holding under 50 prisoners, all closely monitored and observed in small manageable groups. This separation and concentration of prisoners into small groups under almost microscopic surveillance effectively prevents and undermines the potential for large-scale disturbances by quickly identifying and weeding out “ringleaders” and containing and isolating conflict when it occurs. By transforming the physical space and design of jails institutional power has shifted back in favour of guards and removed the spectre of mass prison uprisings.
In and of itself building methods of control into the physical fabric of prisons does not eradicate completely the possibility and existence off rebellion, and when trying to understand the reasons for such a radical downturn in the prison struggle the wider social and cultural context is equally relevant.
The term “millennium prisoner” is now often used as a derogatory label by prisoners themselves for the current generation of prisoners who seem on the whole to have reconciled themselves with the institutional interests of the prison system and possess absolutely no memory of a time when prisoner culture was imbued with a spirit and attitude of resistance. This is not just a generational phenomenon but a social and political one also and reflects a fundamental change in the nature of the wider working class community from which most prisoners are drawn. On the whole the prisoners who revolted and fought the system during the most turbulent decades of prison protest, the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, were products of close knit industrial working class communities with strong traditions of trade union organization and militancy; solidarity and mutual support were the lifeblood of these communities and informed the instincts of even those on the wrong side of the law. The generation of prisoners who riot and fought at Pankhurst in 1969, Hull in 1976 and Strangeways in 1990 were from communities still nourished by class consciousness and a “them and us” attitude, as well as an understanding that sticking together and showing solidarity was the most effective way of securing collective benefits and rights.
During the 1980s and 1990s the Thatcherite onslaught tore the heart and soul out of working class communities and transformed them into wastelands of depression, hopelessness and defeat, and bred a generation of young people saturated with cynicism, alienation and absolutely no memory of a time when principles like solidarity, community and mutual support defined working class identity. Even the more proletariat forms of property-related crime, which in a way represented a sort of elemental form of class warfare, gave way to a more viciously entrepreneurial drug crime based on crude capitalist principles and a contempt for poor communities and those who inhabit them. Drug dealing is a uniquely capitalist from of crime involving massive profit for the few and immense misery for the many, and is informed by a rejection of the sort of values or codes of the old criminal fraternity – never grass, resist authority and never hurt “one’s own”. Modern drug dealers in attitude and mentality are the absolute antithesis of what were working class villains and their way or strategy of doing prison time is also radically different; collusion and co-operation with prison regimes has replaced defiance and resistance, and the fighting spirit that sometimes gave rise to a noble vision of positive change and reform; from the flames of revolts like Strangeways came manifestos of radical reform and an understanding and imperative that prisoners are as deserving of full human rights as any other human being. Today those sort of noble aspirations seem to have given way to a mood of defeat and conformity.
As microcosms of society prisons, in an often brutally exaggerated way, reflect the social condition and reality of life of the poor generally, and also the level of political activity and struggle of that group. When the poor are subdued and disorganized and kept under the heel so are those in prison; the reproduction of a junkie culture amongst prisoners accurately reflects what has taken hold in most poor and working class communities and districts on the outside.
What then are the chances of defiance and militancy re-emerging amongst large groups of prisoners and re-defining their current relationship with prison authority? The inexorable drive towards greater incarceration and the construction of virtual penal cities in the form of massive “Titan jails”, will eventually result in whole chunks of the poor and disadvantaged population being walled into factories of repression; sooner or later that repression, no matter how sophisticated and well-organised, will meet with resistance. There has always been a cyclical quality about protest, revolt and resistance, both in prison or outside in the wider world, and periods of quiescence and absolute social control are always fragile and essentially dependent on people co-operating in their own subjugation as opposed to control being imposed by force and coercion alone. As the South African Black Consciousness activist Steve Biko once said, “The greatest weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the minds of the oppressed themselves”. Those who administer the prison system equate a good prison with a well-controlled prison; the prime function of prison is to imprison efficiently and maintain absolute control over the imprisoned. Issues of human rights and respecting the inherent human dignity of the prisoner do not register in the mentality of the penal operator and ground has never been conceded on these issues unless prisoners themselves have forced them onto the agenda. There is a direct relationship between the limited liberalization of prison regimes in the British long-term jails during the 1970s and 1980s and the protests and demonstrations of that period that forced the system to concede ground. No significant reform of the prison system has ever been achieved by anyone other than prisoners themselves, usually as a result of collective direct action, and the progressive erosion of those reforms over the last 20 years is as a direct result and consequence of the change in prisoner culture and the diminution of collective struggle amongst prisoners. Unless the spirit of struggle is re-discovered, therefore, nothing will prevent a nightmarish vision of the prison world coming to pass; the mass imprisonment of social problem and poor people in huge privately-controlled jails where human rights are abandoned completely in the interests of profit and the total and absolute control over the imprisoned. It’s maybe in all our interests ultimately that we see the return of a militant and unmanageable prison population.
John Bowden
6729
HM Prison Glenochil
King O’Muir Road
Tullibody
Clackmannanshire
FK10 3AD
John Bowden
Solidarity Without Prejudice (2009)
Should a decision to politically support and build campaigns on behalf of particular prisoners who are engaged in a struggle against the prison system be wholly contingent upon the type of offence that preceded their imprisonment? Are some prisoners, no matter how politicised they’ve become whilst in prison and committed to the struggle, unworthy and undeserving of support because of lifestyles, forms of behaviour and criminal activity engaged in prior to arrest and imprisonment?
When it comes to supporting the struggle of “social” prisoners or those imprisoned for offences other than the overtly political (although it could be argued that in a capitalist system where the overwhelming majority of those sent to jail are inevitably from the poorest and most disadvantaged sections of society, all prisoners are in some way political) is it okay to support those who are originally convicted of, say, crimes against property but definitely not those jailed for crimes like murder, extortion and even rape? Are some prisoners on account of the crimes that put them in prison so irredeemably beyond the pale that absolutely nothing they subsequently do or become can ever qualify them as worthy of political support and solidarity? On this issue should we bury our differences with the police, judiciary and capitalist media and concur with their endlessly propagated view that some individuals convicted and sent to jail for seriously violent behaviour and the most “wicked acts” should be forever demonised, despised and permanently excluded from the human race?
Most prisoners in fact first enter jail for offences and forms of behaviour almost wholly associated with a life time experience of poverty, disadvantage and abuse, and are for the most part products and casualties of a grossly unequal and class ridden society. Obviously some people find their way into jail because of behaviour that was criminally entrepreneurial (the “career criminal”) and violently predatory, but these are a small minority of the overall prisoner population, and in the case of the “career criminal”, especially, the least likely to jeopardize early release by becoming politically active in prison or being associated with politically radical groups on the outside. The fact is that the prisoners more likely to become involved in confrontation and conflict with the prison system are those initially imprisoned for chaotically violent and rage-fuelled offences.
The revolutionary black American prisoner George Jackson once wrote in a letter to a friend – “I was captured and brought to prison when I was 18 years old because I couldn’t adjust. The record that the state has compiled on my activities reads like a record of ten men. It labels me brigand, thief, burglar, hobo, drug addict, gunman, and murderer.” Jackson of course was transformed by his experience of imprisonment into a politically conscious prisoner leader and dedicated member of the Black Panther Party before being murdered by guards at San Quentin prison in 1971.
Amongst prisoners themselves the diversity of offences that initially landed them together in jail is quickly subsumed in a common experience of repression and collective adversity, and apart from the traditional hatred of serious sex offenders, prisoners are completely non-judgemental of one another’s crimes and bond quickly in a common struggle for survival. Brotherhood and sisterhood amongst prisoners that organise and fight back is a real imperative and heart felt dynamic. Possibly in the enclosed world of prison populated by what ordinary society considers outlaws and law breakers and guarded over by individuals often prepared to brutalise, maim and occasionally murder in the interests of absolute control, “normal” values of behaviour and morality become inverted and corrupted; or maybe in conditions of extreme repression, struggle and survival, what originally put a person in jail matters nothing compared to the infinitely more important need to stick together and collectively resist a system that treats them all as something not fully human and undeserving of basic human rights.
Inevitably, there is conflict and division amongst prisoners that is often fostered by the guards for the purpose of exerting greater control, and some prisoners enter into a complicity with their jailers which creates a diffused suspicion hindering trust and solidarity, but during moments of collective and open rebellion the most natural and powerful tendency amongst prisoners is to band together and develop a new relationship, whoever and whatever they may have been during their moments of freedom.
Political activists on the outside who feel dubious about showing support for prisoners because of their original crime should maybe consider this: when prisoners revolt and fight back they are subjected to the cruelest and most vicious repression because isolated and stigmatised by the state and deionised by the media, conditioned and manipulated “public opinion” largely endorses the behaviour of the prison system when it brutalises prisoners back into line. Refusing to recognize and support the struggle of prisoners purely because of their pre-prison lives is tantamount to taking the side of the system against them and suggesting they get all they deserve; it also suggests ingrained middle class prejudice and fear of working class folk devils and tacit recognition of the legitimacy of the prison system.
That some prisoners, no matter how brutalised and brutalising they might have been before their imprisonment are radically changed as people by the experience of prison and sometimes embrace revolutionary politics to their very core is undoubtedly true. Yet to deny such prisoners any recognition and support when they politically fight back is also to deny the possibility of profound change in such people as a result of struggle. In fact, prison can and often is a crucible for radical change and a deep politicisation of some prisoners, and as in all areas and places of extreme oppression and resistance prisons by their very nature do produce revolutionaries and individuals who single-mindedly fight back. In the U.S. radical black groups, like the Black Panthers and Symbionese Liberation Army, were actively and theoretically guided by prisoners and ex-prisoners; George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, H. Rap Brown, Malcolm X etc., were all radicalised in prison following conviction for crimes such as robbery, rape, drug dealing, pimping and serious violence.
It is easy for those who have never experienced extreme poverty and discrimination, never experienced imprisonment and the inhuman brutalisation that takes place there, to be moral purists about the behaviour of people that have – it’s a middle class inclination and attitude based on ignorance, arrogance and a distaste of the poor, and it pervades the characters of some individuals who claim to retain not a trace of their middle class conditioning, like some “anarchists”.
Obviously prison isn’t full of nice people and there are individuals on both sides of the divide in jail, both guards and prisoners, who are so seriously de-humanised by the system. It’s difficult to imagine them living safely amongst ordinary people in the community; although whether prison as an institution, the chief cause of their de-humanisation, should exist to constrain them is another issue. The issue here is that by its very context and the nature of the environment struggles that take place in prison will be represented, instigated and organised by people originally sent to jail for often the most destructive and violent forms of behaviour, that’s what initially put them there and it’s what the state uses to justify its brutalisation of them for ever afterwards. The organisers and leaders of most major uprisings in the U.K. during the 1960s, 70s and 80s were all people that the state and media described as “psychopaths”, “terrorists”, “gangsters” and “murders”, individuals that some strictly principled anarchists would no doubt deem unworthy of any expression of support and solidarity.
In prison, as in all places where repression is extremely sharp edged and survival hard, struggle is not an abstract concept or idea, it is a basic necessity of existence and an all important imperative of surviving with dignity and integrity, and it informs one’s instincts about, above and beyond everything else, who the true enemy is.
Real prisoner support, if it means anything, is about expressing the same instinct and supporting all those on the inside who are fighting the common enemy.
John Bowden Prison No. 6729, HM Prison Glenochil, King OMuir Road, Tullibody, Scotland FK10 3AD
John Bowden
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/01/417462.html
John Bowden’s pamphlet ‘Tear Down The Walls!
http://leedsabc.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Tear-Down-The-Walls-2010.pdf
Prisons: Factories Of Hate (may 2012)
Right-wing Tory Justice Minister Chris Grayling’s declaration in late April that prisoners would now be made to “earn” basic privileges by “working harder” probably wasn’t just the usual “popularist” promise to stick the boot into one of the most powerless and demoralised social groups. During times of economic austerity and potential social unrest scapegoating marginalised and outcast groups like prisoners, is always useful as a means of deflecting and re-focusing public anger away from the true culprits of the country’s economic ruination, in this case Grayling’s pals in the city of London. Behind the rhetoric and the guise of “getting tough” on prisoners is the actual purpose of the prison
industrial complex: to turn prisons into privatised forced-labour factories.
Prisoners are, it seems, to become like third-world workers, a source of extremely cheap and compliant labour for multi-national corporations, a practice which of course draws its inspiration from the U.S. Where one of the largest prisoner populations in the world have increasingly replaced outside unionised labour as a source of profit. Under the U.N. Charter of Human Rights forced labour is of course unlawful, but prisoners don’t seem to count, and during times of economic crisis and a burgeoning prison population there is a cold rational in the capitalist intention to focus its rapacity on those behind bars.
It also harks back to the original purpose of the Victorian-inspired model of what was then a modern prison system: to instil conformity and the work ethic in the rebellious poor. After decades of the control and containment model
prisons are to be returned to their original function as places where the errant poor are taught their true place as producers of profit for the rich.
Of course the tabloids who cheer Grayling’s “get tough” treatment of prisoners and whip-up mob support for him omit to mention or question why prisoners are being forced to do work that its unemployed readers could be invited to do
on a legally-enforced minimum wage? And whilst large corporations and companies constantly “rationalise” their operations by shedding labour and creating unemployment, some of these same companies are using prison cheap labour to top-up profits, all with the willing assistance of Grayling and his rich and powerful colleagues in the Tory government.
Not only is prison slave-labour an absolute negation of the basic human rights of prisoners, which Grayling has now prevented any legal challenge to from within jails by stopping legal aid for prisoner litigation cases, but also the removal of a means of employment for many of those outside prison who are influenced by the lies and witch-hunting of the tabloids and an increasingly right-wing political establishment.
Grayling should also ponder this: forcing a slave-labour regime as a condition for basic privileges on prisoners serving increasingly longer sentences might just be a catalyst for some extremely expensive prison repairs further down the line.
John Bowden
6729
HMP Shotts
May 2012
http://bristolabc.wordpress.com/2013/05/16/prisons-factories-of-hate/#more-3021
In The Belly of The Beast (John Bowden)
Fyoder Dostoevsky, the Russian novelist and sometimes political dissident, once wisely observed that a good barometer of the level and quality of a society’s civilisation is the way it treats it’s prisoners, the
most dis-empowered of all social groups.
There has of course always existed a sort of socially organic and dynamic
relationship between prison society and the wider ordinary society beyond it’s walls, and the treatment of prisoners is usually an accurate reflection of the relationship of power that prevails between the state and ordinary working class people in the broader society. It is how political power is shaped and negotiated between the state and the poorer social groups on the outside that essentially determines the treatment of prisoners on the inside.
Prisons are concentrated microcosms of the wider society, reflecting it’s
social and political climate and the balance of social forces that characterise it’s political culture. The more authoritarian and politically oppressive the society, the more brutal it’s treatment of prisoners is. The treatment and sometimes the very lives of prisoners is therefore critically dependent on the balance and alignment of power in society generally. For example, changes in state penal policy always tends to reflect shifts and changes in that relationship of power between the poor and powerless and the elites who constitute a ruling class, and it is always the more marginalised and demonised groups such as prisoners who feel and experience the repression more nakedly when society begins to shift even further to the right.
During the 1960s, 1970s and part of the early 1980s structures of
established power in society were seriously challenged and the atmosphere and movement of radical social change became manifested
within the prison system itself in prisoner protests, strikes and uprisings, and an organised movement of prisoner resistance that was recognised and supported on the outside by political activists, radical criminologists and prison abolitionists. The struggle of long-term prisoners was recognised by such groups as a legitimate political struggle against an institution originally and purposely created to punish the rebellious poor and as an integral part of an entire state apparatus of repressive social control, along with the police and judiciary. Just as the heightened social struggle of groups like the organised working class in the broader society caused a shift and change in the balance of power, within the long-term
prison system itself prisoners used the weapon of solidarity and self-organised to collectively empower themselves as a group. This climate of increased struggle and freedom that permeated society generally at that time found expression within long-term prisons and even found limited reflection in the thinking of those administering them with the adoption on policy of the one relatively liberal recommendation of the 1968 Mountbatten report concerning prison security: whilst Maximum-Security jails should make physical security as impregnable as possible the regimes operating in such institutions should also be made as relaxed as possible.
But just as changes in the balance of power can be to the advantage of
progressive forces in society so it can shift the other way, and that is what happened in Britain during the 1980s and 1990s with the defeat of the organised working class movement and the apparently finale triumph of Neo-Liberal Capitalism (deregulation, free trade, unfettered profits and minimal state benefits – in short, capitalism at it’s most savage) and a Thatcherite ideology of greed is good and “there is no such thing as society”. This found expression in the treatment of prisoners with the seizing back of the long-term prison regimes and their re-moulding into instruments of “Dynamic Security” and naked repression. The control and absolute disempowerment of long-term prisoners was conflated with the
necessity of physical security now. And of course the economic principles of Neo-Liberal Capitalism also found expression in the prison system with “Market Reforms” and the flogging off of increasingly greater parts of it to multi-national private prison entrepreneurs. Prisoners would now be bought and sold as commodities and also as a source of forced cheap labour. They would also be taught and conditioned to know their true place in a massively unequal society, and prisons would revert to their original purpose of re-moulding working class “offenders” into obedient slaves of capital and those who own it. Towards this end the huge proliferation and empowerment of behavioural psychologists in the prison system over the last decade is a symptom; the breaking and re-creating of
prisoners psychologically in the image of a defeated and compliant working class on the outside has become once again the purpose and
function of prisons. Rebellion and defiance in prisoners is now labelled “psychopathic” and “social risk-factors”, which depending on how they are “addressed” will determine the length of time one spends behind bars, especially for the growing number of “recidivist offenders” serving indeterminate sentences for “public protection”.
As what were once tight-knit working class communities on the outside
fractured and were destroyed following the last high point of organised working class struggle during the 1984 miners strike, so the solidarity and unity of long-term prisoners was broken and withered away. The flooding of heroin and crack cocaine into now marginalised and poor communities created an almost alternative economy and was reflected in the changing nature of the prison population. What had been a generation of prisoners from strong working class communities imbued with a culture of solidarity, mutual support and a readiness to confront and challenge official authority, was increasingly replaced by prisoners with no memory of a time before the victory of Thatcherism and the dog eat dog culture it bred and encouraged. The increasing prevalence of drug-orientated crime
found expression in the “Millennium convict”, lacking in principle and with an acquiescent, submissive attitude towards their captors and a focused determination to do whatever it takes to achieve an early release from prison.
The uprising at Strangeways prison in 1990 was the last significant expression of collective defiance and protest in a British jail and is unlikely ever to be repeated in such a form.
The current Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, with his Tory “Attack Dog” reputation and contempt for the human rights of prisoners, blended of course with his determination to sell-off virtually the whole of the criminal justice system to multi-national capitalism, is a perfect representation of the social and political climate outside prison. Deep economic crisis generates social fear and insecurity, and the scapegoating of marginalised and demonised groups who are used as a focus for public anger. Folk devils and moral panics are stock in trade for the tabloids, Tory politicians and far right groups when social climate is at its most receptive for easy, powerless targets. Grayling is pandering to what he imagines is the masses appetite for revenge, as long as its not focused on those actually responsible for the economic and social destruction of
people’s lives.
If, as Dostoevsky believed, the treatment of prisoners is an indicator of
a society’s level of civilisation then we seem to be entering another Dark Age, and of course history provides us with some chilling examples of what can happen when an apparently modern and developed society enters such a phase.
John
Bowden, March 2013
HMP
Shots
http://bristolabc.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/in-the-belly-of-the-beast-john-bowden/
Interview With Militant Prisoner John Bowden
http://bristolabc.wordpress.com/2012/12/05/interview-with-militant-prisoner-john-bowden/
John Bowden Writes From HMP Shotts
http://bristolabc.wordpress.com/2012/06/13/john-bowden-writes-from-hmp-shotts/
‘Criminalising Children In The Care System’ by John Bowden (UK)
Criminal Justice Services continue to cover up lies about John Bowden
Is the Parole Board deciding on the continued detention of life sentence prisoner?
Update From John Bowden About Lies Written In A Report By Prison Hired Social Worker – April 2012
Indefinite Internment Without Trial – John Bowden – March 2012
Another Attempt To Sabotage John Bowden’s Parole By Prison Hired Social Worker
John Bowden in Solitary Confinement in HMP Shotts
http://bristolabc.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/john-bowden-in-solitary-confinement-in-hmp-shotts/