England and Wales Prison Rates Hit Record High

The August far-right riots in Britain and the subsequent arrests and prosecutions of the rioters have exposed a long-standing crisis in the British justice and prison system, which has been described by government officials as “on the verge of collapse” (1).

The prison population in England and Wales has reached a record high, according to data released by the Ministry of Justice on August 26. The data recorded 88,250 people in prison, which equates to around 150 prisoners per 100,000 population (2).

Shortly after the new Labour government to enter In July, it announced that the prison system could be overcrowded within weeks and that an “early release program” was needed to prevent a “total breakdown of law and order,” according to Justice Minister Shabana Mahmood. Many single-person cells were already holding two prisoners, and a body representing prison governors warned that offenders would soon have to be held in police cells, potentially disrupting the entire justice system (1).

The far-right riots and the ongoing prosecution of many rioters meant that an emergency early release plan, originally worked on by outgoing Conservative ministers, was launched earlier than expected, on 10 September (3).

The release scheme means that some offenders who have spent 40% of their sentence in prison will be eligible for release, down from 50%. This excludes sentences being served for serious violent offences of 4 years or more. Around 5,500 offenders will be released between September and October (1) (3).

Two other contingency plans have also come into effect: one allows police forces in northern England and most of the Midlands to postpone the appearance of some newly charged suspects until a cell has been assigned for them, and a high court has ordered 150 police courts to postpone the sentencing of some bailed offenders if they are likely to be jailed (2)(3).

These and previous plans have been criticized for failing to protect public safety and reduce the likelihood of recidivism. These fears were almost immediately confirmed by the case of an inmate accused of sexually assaulting a woman on the day of his release (4) and by reports of delays in fitting electronic tags to released prisoners (5).

The state is the product of society at a certain stage of development, when society was divided into classes with irreconcilable antagonistic economic interests, the exploiters and the exploited. In order to keep the exploited under control, the ruling class needed a special public power that was no longer geared to the interests of the majority of the population, but to the interests of the exploiting minority. This public power consists of both special groups of armed people (the police, the army, and the secret services) and special institutions such as prisons. The state provided the control necessary to allow production to grow despite these contradictions; in other words, it played a historically necessary role.

The capitalist system is unable to adequately address the root causes that drive people to petty crime out of necessity: growing economic inequality, unemployment, lack of access to basic services, and increasing poverty. The capitalist state cannot tolerate ordinary people stealing from their exploiters to make ends meet, because this means losing profits, and it must oppress them.

These conditions exacerbate the psychological maladies that drive people to commit all kinds of violent crimes against innocent people. The capitalist state needs to maintain an illusion of safety for its own exploited workers, so it also needs to “suppress” this kind of crime. In Britain, fewer than 3 in 100 rapes recorded by the police in the same year resulted in the perpetrator being prosecuted (6).

When political dissidents act effectively against the interests of the ruling class, thus exposing its hypocrisy and its own crimes and threatening its class rule, the state must also be able to repress these people.

Of course, the worst criminals are often those who serve the state, the capitalist ruling class. Those who escape punishment for long periods (or even indefinitely) and commit some of the most violent crimes, such as the infamous Jeffrey Epstein (6). While the social murder they are committing on British workers remains completely unnoticed and unpunished.

If maintaining prisons is vital to maintaining working class rule, why do they continue to decay under capitalism?

Britain’s decaying prison system reflects the general decline of capitalism in its imperialist phase. The ruling class is no longer able to maintain even the essential infrastructure needed to manage the contradictions it creates.

In the imperialist (monopoly) phase of capitalist development, the entire world is divided into a handful of dominant capitalist centers, between which there is fierce competition for profits, markets, resources, and labor. As profits begin to dry up, the capitalist class must cannibalize everything it can to maintain itself, even vital components of its own class rule, i.e. prisons, social services, and infrastructure. Ironically, these profits come precisely from extracting surplus value from the working class, i.e. the value produced by workers above their wages, and so this exploited class must be kept alive and reproduced in order to keep capital itself alive. Capital is simply crystallized dead labor and cannot reproduce itself without a source of living labor.

Government officials repeatedly contradict their own stated desires to build more prisons (3), because they need to make a profit above all else. Ultimately, it is capital that controls them.

Under a socialist system, the class nature of the state changes and it is used in the interests of the workers in their struggle against capital. This means that the law and prisons will be used for the benefit of ordinary people. The very problems that petty crime causes will quickly disappear, as production is organized for the needs of the many, not the profits of the few. The working class will be properly protected from violent crime (which will gradually decrease), and the only political dissidents who will be suppressed will be those who try to make the working class an object of exploitation and social murder again.

To establish a socialist workers’ state, a powerful workers’ movement is needed with its own independent class party, armed with a scientific theory that fully represents its objective interests: Marxism-Leninism.

There is currently no such party in the UK. We are in the process of training future leaders and forming such a party. Join us

Sources:

(1) Reuters — “England and Wales’ overflowing prisons are housing record numbers” — September 6, 2024.

(2) BBC News — “Prison population hits record in England and Wales” — August 30, 2024.

(3) BBC News — “How many prisoners are released early and who are they?” — September 18, 2024.

(4) BBC News — “Government defends early release scheme after released prisoner accused of sexual abuse” — September 15, 2024.

(5) BBC News — “Some offenders were released early without being electronically tagged” — September 19, 2024.

(6) Rape Crisis — “Sexual Violence Statistics” — July 2024.

(7) BBC News — “Fifth and Final Set of Epstein Documents Released” — January 10, 2024.