“...[Thatcher’s reactionary prison reform] took place against a background of a prison system in crisis. From the perspective of both the Labour government and their Conservative opponents, the institution was abjectly failing to deter the criminal, reform the offender and protect and defend the wider society from their forbidding ravages. Central to the sense of crisis was the apparent unwillingness of a group of state servants – prison officers – to act reasonably and responsibly with respect to managing offenders, ensuring order and maintaining security. From the mid-1970s, prison officers began a series of campaigns that undermined the basis of hierarchical authority which a militarized service such as the prison system relied on to function efficiently and effectively. The militancy of prison staff was one element in a series of interlocking crises that gripped the system during this period (Fitzgerald and Sim, 1982). The crisis generated by this militancy was so severe that, in November 1978, prison governors forebodingly warned that there could ‘be a serious loss of control’, which might have to be ‘quelled by armed interventions with the probability of both staff and prisoners being killed’ (1982: 3).
The crisis also cut across several other dimensions over and above the militancy of the prison officers which, taken together, undermined the legitimacy of the institution in the eyes of politicians, public and prisoners themselves (1982: 23–24). Appalling conditions and severe overcrowding in local prisons were the most obvious manifestations of the deeply embedded problems confronting the institution. Additionally, the challenges to penal ‘truth’ mounted by radical prisoners’ rights organizations to the hegemony of official accounts of life inside (Fitzgerald, 1977; Ryan 1978) – what Foucault termed ‘the insurrection of subjugated knowledges’ (Foucault, 2004: 7) – were crucial in highlighting the fact that for all the ‘state talk’ (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985) (and indeed much of criminology’s ‘talk’) about rehabilitation, reform and progress since the end of the nineteenth century, prison life for many of the confined remained bleak, brutal and bewildering.
The state’s attempt to maintain the fragile order of the prison brought these issues into sharp focus as a number of strategies and policies were pursued which, paradoxically, often generated further, negative, unintended consequences for the system. These strategies included: the introduction, in secret, of psychologically withering Control Units, which were used against those labelled as recalcitrant; the militarization of the state’s response to disorder through training every prison officer in techniques of riot control, which was allied with the use of special squads such as the Minimum Use of Force Tactical Intervention Squad (MUFTI); the use of segregation within, and the ‘ghosting’ of prisoners between, different institutions; the mobilization of brutal violence against demonstrating prisoners at Hull in 1976 (especially towards Irish and black prisoners) and at Wormwood Scrubs in 1979 (the inquiry into which was described as ‘Whitelaw’s Whitewash’ by the radical prisoners’ rights group, PROP (Coggan, 1982: 3); and the use of drugs to control those labelled as ‘difficult’ (Warren, 1982) or against those deemed ‘unable to cope’, especially women (Sim, 1990). These strategies provided a clear, unambiguous indication that the state’s unnerving capacity for drastic interventions into the lives of the confined had not been eliminated in the ideological drive to construct the prison as a place of munificent and benevolent reform.
The Labour government’s response to the crisis was predictable: the establishment of an inquiry under Mr Justice May. May’s findings and recommendations were also predictable given the baleful and nefarious control exerted by the Home Office over the terms of reference and the final report. They were built on a poorly conceived managerial explanation for the crisis while propounding an equally naive managerial solution to the same crisis (Fitzgerald and Sim, 1980). Crucially, the inquiry failed to confront one of the key issues and dimensions underpinning the crisis, namely the discretionary and non-accountable use of prison officer power, a failure which was to reverberate through the coming decades. As was noted at the time:
The May Report was an opportunity not simply to review but to change fundamentally the 100-year-old recipe of more prisons and more prisoners. In the event, it passed up that opportunity, preferring, like so many Inquiries before it, to represent the recipe for prison crisis as a recipe for prison salvation. It simply won’t work (1980: 84).
The crisis in the prisons, particularly the ‘crisis of legitimacy’ (Fitzgerald and Sim, 1982: 23), symbolized the broader social crisis of legitimacy and hegemony in the wider society (Hall et al., 1978). Again, as was noted at the time,
the crisis of the British prison system thus reflects not simply a concern about the state of the prisons, but a more widespread belief that the prisons of the State are not making a contribution to the maintenance of social order (Fitzgerald and Sim, 1982: 23–24).
The Labour government’s tired, and indeed shambolic, response to the prison crisis, appeared to perfectly symbolize the fact that ministers had little to offer by way of political solutions, either to this crisis or to the crisis gripping the wider society. With Labour defeated at the General Election in May 1979, and the government of Margaret Thatcher in power, the apocalyptic concerns articulated by Joseph over the previous five years, while not achieving complete hegemony (as no ideas ever do), nonetheless began to work their way into her government’s programme for law and order. Ominously, for a range of already economically and politically powerless groups, it was a programme increasingly based on the principles of the free market and the strong state (Gamble, 1988).”
- Joe Sim, Punishment and Prisons: Power and the Carceral State. London: SAGE, 2009. pp. 23-25.
