Degrading Sites of Punishment and Pain: The Case for Abolishing Prisons

Prisons have been in crisis in England and Wales for 200 years. The state has responded with piecemeal, ‘pragmatic’ reforms which have done little to defuse the crisis. Instead, there has been a recurring, debilitating cycle of crisis/reform/crisis/reform. This has led to the perennial claim by politicians, the media and state agents that the system is ‘broken.’ This begs the question when was it ever fixed? The answer is never.

The state’s ‘truth’ about prisons is based on a number of myths and misrepresentations: they reduce and prevent crime; they are filled with dangerous individuals; they are holiday camps; they keep communities safe; they protect people in prison and fulfil their duty of care towards them; prison staff are always in imminent danger; state violence against those inside is rare; underfunding has caused the current crisis; building more and ‘better’ prisons will solve the crisis; privatization will defuse the crisis; rehabilitation is central to prison regimes; and prisons are democratically accountable for the actions of their staff. These claims are not true. Nonetheless, they have become deeply embedded in political and popular consciousness justifying and defending the institution’s existence and expansion.

Success and failure

The last two centuries have been dominated by the prison’s consistent failure to achieve its official goals, including rehabilitation. In practice, prisons do not rehabilitate, they ‘dehabilitate.’ Many of those inside experience a sense of ‘aching desolation’ generated by physically corrosive and psychologically withering regimes built on punishment, pain, degradation and systemic indifference which induce terror and trauma. The number of self-inflicted and ‘natural’ deaths, and the appalling rates of self-harm, especially amongst women prisoners, testify to the devastating impact of the regimes on people in prison and their families. The compassionless environment often breaks the already broken.

However, prisons have been successful in other ways. They control, discipline, isolate and punish those often vulnerable people existing on the margins of a society deeply divided along the fault lines of social class, gender, ‘race,’ sexuality and ability/disability, The vast majority of those relentlessly criminalized and repeatedly ‘churned’ through prisons, and the wider criminal injustice system each year in increasingly racialized numbers, are the poor, the unemployed and never employed, the homeless, the sexually abused and those with drug, alcohol and mental health issues. Simultaneously, prisons distract attention from the often much more destructive and devastating social harms   generated by those in positions of power. And they reinforce a hypocritical, binary divide which socially constructs people in prison as the only law breakers in the wider society while those on the outside are regarded, and regard themselves, as the respectable majority who never deviate from the law. This is how prisons actually function.

For abolition

Prison abolitionists are offensively labelled as being pro-crime and anti-victim. In fact, it is state agents, politicians and the media who are pro-crime given their complicit neglect in responding to crimes committed by the powerful. And as for being anti-victim, this claim is also deeply offensive given the contemptuous dismissal of male, racist and homophobic violence and the institutionalized denial of the traumatising impact of this violence on victims and survivors.

This is reinforced by the cheap, misinformed claim that abolitionists want to free every person inside irrespective of what they have done or how dangerous they might be.

Feminist abolitionists have responded to this criticism. They recognise that imprisonment is necessary for some men who have inflicted often horrendous violence on women and girls. However, arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning the few men convicted of sexual violence happens “only after harm or violence has occurred. Incarceration does not prevent these acts from happening.”

Furthermore, a criminal justice response does not address why this violence occurs. It ignores the devastating impact of hegemonic masculinity on the everyday lives of women and girls. Additionally, violent men are detained in hyper masculine institutions which are more likely to reinforce than challenge the exercise of patriarchal power and misogyny which gives meaning to their violent actions.

Abolitionists also challenge conventional definitions of dangerousness. Who defines dangerous acts and dangerous individuals? For example, there are literally hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths each year caused by pollution, poverty, lack of health and safety at work, cuts to welfare benefits and pandemics like COVID-19 to name a few.  These deaths – social murders – dwarf the number of people murdered each year. Why are those who are responsible for these preventable deaths not regarded as dangerous and not held accountable for them?

Abolitionist policies

Abolitionists maintain that prisons are a malignant force and a moral disgrace. If they are the solution to crime and social harm then the wrong questions are being asked. They argue for radically different policies.

These policies are contemptuously dismissed by state agents, media commentators and politicians who have no answer to the crisis except to build more prisons. This strategy has conspicuously failed in the past as the Conservative government found in 1983 when it launched the biggest prison building programme of the twentieth century. Despite this failure, the Labour government is engaging in the biggest building programme since the Victorian era which will cost between £9.4 and £10.1 billion.

Pursuing an abolitionist program as a moral and political strategy would radically transform prisons, reduce victimization and recidivism, ensure security and social protection and establish social justice for all rather than, as at present, criminal injustice for the few. It would include: stopping building prisons; closing existing institutions; redirecting funding from prisons towards radical alternatives to custody; financing third sector organizations who support people inside and outside of prisons and other groups such as Rape Crisis and miscarriages of justice organizations; radically expanding the decimated legal aid system; replacing the authoritarian, highly discretionary, non-accountable staff culture; humanizing people in prison; abolishing the lacerating social divisions which distort, diminish and destroy lives and the potential for human and humane growth;  and building a society based on collective, social need rather than individual, anti-social greed.

Abolitionists have also supported policies which have worked such as the internationally acclaimed Barlinnie Special Unit (which has been closed) and Grendon Underwood, which was opened in 1962 but whose empathic philosophy has not been extended to the wider system. The point is that the lazy stereotypes mobilised against abolitionists that they have no policies for responding to conventional crime is both wrong and offensive.

In fact, it is the state which has questions to answer. Why have the philosophy and practices of these institutions never been extended? What is the answer? Because they illustrate that, given the right environment, the pejoratively labelled prison ‘animals’ can change. However, because they challenge the punitive, regressive mentality which dominates what passes for political debate about prisons, politicians have ignored them and are happy to scrape the bottom of the law-and-order barrel if they believe there are votes in it for them or their party. It is contrary to the overwhelming evidence that punishing and degrading people in prison has not, does not and will not work in fulfilling the prison’s official goals.

If abolitionism sounds extreme then Malcolm X had the perfect response: “I am an extremist, extremely against wrong.” Prisons, and those who support them, are, indeed, extremely wrong.