‘Prison doesn’t work – and it doesn’t work for those jailed for the riots’ – Byline Times

The United Kingdom was international news this week: “British prisons overcrowded after racist riots”.

Our excellent prisons are, it seems, a brand new problem as Labour’s “riot control” pushes the justice system to the brink of collapse (according to GB News).

Just weeks after Labour’s ‘shameless scaremongering’ over prison overcrowding was reported, The post Prime Minister Keir Starmer warns that the “tough approach” to prisons has left them “full” of convicted rioters.

“This is not news,” said Lady Unchained, poet and ex-convict, on Media storm“If you don’t know anything about the criminal justice system, you think, ‘Oh my God, we’re in a crisis!’ Those of us who have lived in it understand that this has been the case for a long time.”

The news loves to be new. Right-wing papers also love it when it’s Labour’s fault. But prisons are overcrowded, not because of recent convictions, but because the UK is both the “highest prisoner” in Western Europe and one of the worst at funding them. The latter can be attributed to Tory cuts, but the former is cross-party, with Labour promising even more prison places in exchange for power before the election.

To put it plainly, the occupancy rate of male prisons has been “over 99%” since January 2023.

This is why David Navarro, Media storm‘s second guest this week, had to learn the ropes to get a rare single-celled creature during his decade locked up in overcrowded British prisons. Spoiler: it doesn’t play to a rehabilitative environment. “You have to be a ‘high-risk’ prisoner, a risk to your cellmate, so a lot of prisoners fabricate things to be ‘high-risk’.”

Navarro and Lady Unchained represent the voices missing from a conversation that has thankfully emerged in the mainstream media in response to the “current” crisis: a nuanced discussion about what prison is actually for.

Hearing prison guards on the national news pleading for “a targeted regime” is a welcome change from the standard tabloid response to prison reform (outrage over the humane treatment of people). But Media storm‘s focus on conversations with ex-convicts adds something new to the conversation.

Both black, both well-acquainted with the racial biases of the justice system that served them, both somewhat surprised that it gave white rioters a dose of the same medicine – neither Navarro nor Lady Unchained condones it.

“I don’t think it will work because (the rioters) need real support,” Lady Unchained said. “They need to be given a real education about the other people around them, the history of the United Kingdom and why many of us are here.”

Navarro goes further, bridging the racial divide to rioters, many of whom he thinks understand the situation. “This whole riot thing, even the whole ‘jails are full’ thing and all that, is a distraction from the bigger issue, which is that poverty goes hand in hand with crime. Instead of addressing that, certain news outlets are pushing this[tough-on-crime]narrative” — the same outlets, he points out, that “regularly use racial hatred” and incited the riots in the first place.

There was another major news story this week that drew attention to the UK criminal justice system: data showed that one child was frisked every 14 hours over the past five years.

Navarro’s own constant pat-downs as a child contributed to a dataset in which black children were four times more likely to experience them. He’s not sure a child should have to go through this: “At the end of the day, you have to be naked as a child.” In none of these procedures was he accompanied by the mandatory “trusted adult,” a parent or guardian. In none of them was a weapon or a drug found on him.

That’s not to say he didn’t have bad intentions. Police justifications revolve around a duty of care to protect the children they seek and those around them from imminent danger — from gangs, for example, who are increasingly using children’s bodies to transport or store illegal drugs.

Does it feel like it’s being done to protect you? “No!” Navarro laughed at our question. “How does giving them a criminal record help? You’re essentially setting them up to fail” – not just with the criminal record, but perhaps more alarmingly, he points out, by giving them thousands of pounds in drug debts to gangs who then have leverage to force them into permanent slavery. The aim, Navarro reiterates, is not to keep you from crime, it’s to catch you.

Is this sad truth any less true for child rioters now serving years in prison? The evidence does not support a punishment-first approach to the crimes of children raised in poverty with inadequate government support—it does not change depending on the child’s political background. In the rush by progressives to condemn racist riots, many who know this deep down have remained silent. But those who have lived through the system, our guests this week, do not.

Like the media, Labour is selective in its reporting. In July, Starmer was applauded by progressives for his bold appointment of Prisons Minister James Timpson – not an MP, but a shoemaker’s CEO and chairman of the Prison Reform Trust, a man known for hiring hundreds of ex-offenders and braving the wrath of the tabloids by saying: “Only a third of prisoners should actually be in prison”. Where was this mantra when Starmer declared that rioters should face “the full force of the law”?

“Prison makes people bad,” said one ex-convict who had a “revolving door” Media storm. It took David Breakspear nine sentences to break a cycle in which networks behind bars, combined with the impact of prison on his employability, increasingly dragged him into serious criminal involvement. “It’s criminogenic!”

Is Labour’s short-term memory a political bias that does far-right criminals no favours? More likely, it is a knee-jerk reaction: stop the disorder now at all costs, and make another government pay three times over in the long run. No one in the criminal justice system shares their illusion that implementing criminal justice reform requires anything less than controversial consistency: so far, we have not seen it.

Three years ago when we first launched Media storm“Burnt-out” prison officer John Sampson told us: “Prisons are so overcrowded” and “tough-on-crime policies are failing miserably.”

Today we repeat the question he put to the government yesterday to our new government: “Are we just going to dig further into the pit of our own despair, or are we going to climb out of the pit and actually build something new?

The latest episode of Media Storm, ‘Prisons: Overcrowding, Operation Early Dawn, and child strip-searchers’ is out now.