The In's and Out's of Prison

We haven't said much about prisons for some time, but I do recall the MoJ has an alarming track record of highlighting any new additions to the estate as being job creation schemes. Clearly this tendency hasn't been lost on the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies who have been casting their expert eye over where prisons have been built over recent time, and it's of more than academic interest to me as it pretty much charts my own probation journey.  

Coal today, gone tomorrow: How jobs were replaced with prison places

Foreword

In early March 2020, we held an event on the spatial history of British prisons. The event explored how decisions about the siting and development of new prisons were connected to underlying social, economic and political changes over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. 

We planned to publish the main insights that emerged from that event shortly afterwards. Then the COVID-19 crisis intervened, disrupting the best-laid plans, and casting a long shadow over the lives of far too many. Nearly one year on from that event, I am delighted that we are now able to publish this important briefing. 

It is commonplace that prisons are created and maintained to hold those sentenced by the courts, and those remanded while awaiting trial. The geographical location of any given prison, whether it is newly-built, or adapted from existing buildings, is something far less frequently reflected upon. These are the questions explored by Phil Mike Jones, Emily Gray and Stephen Farrall in this briefing. 

Taking in a sweep of time from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day, the authors identify some striking patterns. In the years following the Second World War, for instance, a number of prisons were opened on former military bases and in former country houses. Such redevelopments are rare today. 

Since the 1960s, a number of prisons have been built on former industrial sites, with most of them located in the former industrial heartlands of England and Scotland. In particular, the authors find a strong concentration of new prison capacity in former coal-mining areas, associated with the traumatic economic restructuring and deindustrialisation of the 1980s. 

“Regions where industrial employment was concentrated may expect to see economic restructuring”, the authors write, “but if economic recovery is weak, the prison complex may come to replace the industrial complex”. 

The claim that new prisons offer an economic bonanza to hard-pressed areas is a dubious claim at best. What this briefing points to is the interreleationship between governmental economic policies, and the decision to site prisons in the industrial wastelands left in their wake. 

Richard Garside Director

Introduction 

The reverberations of industrial closures and high levels of unemployment in the UK after 1979 have been charted by numerous scholars. Shipyards, steel and coal-mining industries and parts of the British automotive industry were heavily affected by deindustrialisation (measured as the relative decline of manufacturing or the decline of manufacturing employment). 

While this development began in many advanced economies during the 1960s, it accelerated rapidly in the UK following the pursuit of monetarist economic policies instigated by Margaret Thatcher’s administrations. These conditions hit the UK manufacturing sector particularly hard in the 1980s. High interest rates and an over-valued currency rendered UK manufacturing exports uncompetitive domestically and internationally. By 1995 nearly 90 per cent of the coal-mining workforce had been lost, and the impact of this unprecedented destruction of jobs was geographically concentrated. 

In areas of the English midlands, south Wales and central Scotland, mining had been the dominant source of employment for men for generations, so the consequences for these communities were especially pronounced. Indeed, Britain’s miners launched one of the longest and fiercest industrial disputes in modern times in the UK. At its peak, 142,000 miners went on strike over pit closures and pay and a violent conflict, dubbed the ‘Battle of Orgreave’ when a mass picket was charged by police, remains a controversial event some 35 years later. 

Deindustrialisation continued throughout the 1980s as the British economy shifted from manufacturing to services. Notably, such was the impact of this economic transformation that Beatty et al., (2007) found evidence that by 2004 (more than 20 years after the miners’ strike) former coal– mining areas had still not fully recovered. Substantial job losses in ‘heavy’ industries were not matched with new jobs, and many former miners registered as ‘inactive’ or ‘permanently sick’ (rather than unemployed), suggesting that official estimates of unemployment may have been significantly underestimated.

In this paper we explore what happened to those regions with regards to the location of prisons in the years since the 1980s. We look specifically at the places in those areas that were once economically dependent on coal-mining, assessing the extent to which prisons were located in them relative to non-coal-mining areas. We do this by examining the prison building programme that took place in England, Scotland, and Wales during the 1980s and in the period since. 

From the 1990s there was a substantial expansion of the prison population and the criminal justice system. Between June 1993 and June 2012 the prison population in England and Wales increased by 41,800 prisoners to over 86,000 as a result of new sentences and recalls to prison. During the Thatcher and Major administrations (1979-1997) 26 new prisons were built. Others were extended to manage the mounting pressure on inmate places as crime and punitive attitudes increased, resulting in a ‘tougher’ criminal justice system and ultimately more inmates. 

Older prisons also underwent refurbishment to improve conditions and security following disturbances, of which there were 46 in 1986, as well as a 25-day riot in HMP Strangeways in 1990. The privatisation of prisons also introduced an ‘enterprise culture’ into public services in the early-1990s. HMP Wolds was the first contracted-out prison in the UK, run by Group 4, in 1992. We assess if it is possible to detect a patterning in the location in time and space of new British prisons. Did they appear evenly spread across British counties, or did the building of such establishments mirror other trends that were taking place historically? 

We consider this hypothesis in two steps. First, we examine the number and former uses of the sites where prisons were built 1901-2017, categorising key developments. Second, we compare the number of prisons in former coalmining areas to non-mining areas (controlling for population change).

--oo00oo-- 

The Centre for Social Justice have been pondering what's going on inside our jails, or rather what isn't and just published a report strongly arguing for getting prisoners online:-

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY IN PRISONS 

Unlocking relationships, learning and skills in UK prisons

Summary:

The conditions imposed on prisoners as a result of the lockdown has exposed a pre-existing problem. Prisons in England and Wales are rooted in a pre-digital age. If this is allowed to continue, our prisons will serve not as places of reform, but as drivers of exclusion, systematically denying the prison population access to education and training, and leaving them unable to work. This report argues the time has come to modernise our system – and to redress the exclusion of prisoners from the world outside the prison walls – by installing controlled broadband facilities throughout the prison estate.

Executive summary 

Over the past ten years, UK society has become increasingly digitised. More and more, a significant proportion of our daily activities – including our personal relationships and our professional lives – are conducted online. This societal change has been accelerated rapidly due to the impact of Covid-19. 

And yet our prisons are almost entirely offline. The majority of prisons in England and Wales do not have the cabling or hardware to support broadband, with just 18 out of 117 prisons possessing in-cell cabling. Remarkably, even prison staff do not have access to the internet, such as video conferencing services. Some lower-risk prisoners in lower category prisoners may have highly restricted access via an internal system, principally for minimalist email services, but this is the exception, not the rule. Many older prisoners serving longer sentences have never held a digital device. 

The cost to the UK of prisoner reoffending is £18.1 billion per year. Employment prospects for released offenders are extremely bleak: 68 per cent were unemployed in the four weeks before custody (81 per cent for men), 47 per cent have no qualifications, and only 4 per cent of women and 11 per cent of men are in work six weeks after their release. Prisoners are often among the most digitally excluded in our society, yet nearly all jobs – from supermarket assistants to construction workers – require digital literacy of at least a basic level. 

Ever more educational courses are only available online, reducing prisoners’ opportunities to learn. The Prisoners’ Education Trust (PET) has argued that digital “remains the essential ingredient that would revolutionise prison education. Without this, the digital divide will become a chasm, as prisoner learners miss out on developing digital literacy skills.” 

Because of the lockdown, almost all prisoners in England and Wales have been confined to their cells for up to 23.5 hours per day. A prisoner who successfully sustains a family relationship is 39 per cent less likely to reoffend than one who does not, yet prisoners have been barred from seeing their relatives, with family visits completely forbidden. Video calling has been installed across the prison estate, but prisoners are entitled to just one 30-minute call per month. As such, many family relationships have completely broken down. 

One prisoner’s partner said: “My three-year-old grandson hasn’t seen his dad for 11 weeks and yesterday he said, ‘Daddy has gone now’. The impact on the children (and the parents) is heart-breaking.”

One prisoner said: “If I don’t see my family I will lose them, if I lose them what have I got left?”

 

43 per cent of prisoners have a diagnosed mental illness, and one fifth of male prisoners have attempted suicide. Yet prisoners remain isolated from family, deprived of opportunities to learn or reform, without the psychological support they need, and confined to their cells in circumstances that produce enormous mental strain. 

While there is a perception that the British public are not supportive of giving digital access to prisoners, Dr. Victoria Knight has shown they are broadly supportive provided proper security can be guaranteed and that there are verifiable outcomes in terms of recidivism. Such security can be delivered, and the evidence for reducing the rate of reoffending is there. 

The conditions imposed on prisoners as a result of the lockdown has exposed a pre-existing problem. Prisons in England and Wales are rooted in a pre-digital age. If this is allowed to continue, our prisons will serve not as places of reform, but as drivers of exclusion, systematically denying the prison population access to education and training, and leaving them unable to work. This report argues the time has come to modernise our system – and to redress the exclusion of prisoners from the world outside the prison walls – by installing controlled broadband facilities throughout the prison estate.

Introduction 

We can’t go on with prisons in a pre-internet dark age: inefficient, wasteful and leaving prisoners woefully unprepared for the real world they will face on release. I have not met one prison professional who does not think drastic change is needed.

Nick Hardwick – former Chief Inspector of Prisons 

In this report the CSJ argues that the installation of broadband technology with limited, secure access to the internet for prisoners is both overdue and necessary, and that this pressing need is intensified by the specific pressures of the lockdown prison environment. As the use of digital platforms for personal communication, sustaining relationships, professional communication and education and learning becomes the norm, it is vital that prisoners are not deprived of the digital skills and facilities that will allow them to engage in meaningful, positive activity during their sentences. Moreover, it is essential that they are not left in a digitally illiterate and/or excluded state upon their release, or they will stand very little chance of navigating the world around them. 

With the government announcing in the 2020 Spending Review the implementation of a £5 billion UK Gigabit Broadband programme with the aim of levelling up connectivity, and a government drive to provide access to remote rural areas, the anomaly of the digital “black holes” that are the nation’s prisons seems ever harder to sustain. 

In particular, this paper will argue that online digital technology should be implemented for the purposes of: 

• Improving and sustaining relationships with family 
• Improving educational and employment opportunities 
• Delivery of emotional and psychological support to address mental health, wellbeing and addiction support 
• Improvements to prisoner and staff wellbeing and relationships by means of improvements in prisoner behaviour