1356 words: 8-minute read
Prisons are in the news.
More precisely prison sentences are in the news, owing to a perceived disparity between the sentences given to environmental protestors of various stripes and those handed down to participants in the recent race riots across the UK, sparked by the fatal stabbing of three young girls at a dance class in Southport UK on 29th July.
As for the environmental activists, in October 2022 two Stop Oil activists shut down the QE2 Bridge by occupying it, suspended in hammocks. They were sentenced to three years and two years seven months in prison respectively - shocking enough at the time. Then earlier in July this year five Stop Oil protestors were given sentences of four and five years for co-ordinating direct action on the M25, the ring-road that orbits London. These were by some distance the longest sentences handed down for non-violent protest in recent times. More and more activists are awaiting sentencing and there is every likelihood that these long - and unusual - sentences will be repeated in the weeks and months to come.
The race riots began on 30th July in Southport and spread to various towns and cities across England and Northern Ireland. By the 9th August around 600 people had been arrested, with more than 446 charged by 20th August. All this in a context in which the prison estate (as it is quaintly called) is bursting at the seams, where suicides and cases of extreme violence rose by 25% in the year 2022-23 and self-harm in women’s prisons is at an all-time high.
The recently elected Labour government said that 500 extra prison places would be made available to cope with the anticipated influx of rioters found guilty of a range of offences.
As of the 20th August over 150 rioters have been sentenced, with most of them going to jail. The average sentence is two years - roughly half as long as those meted out to Stop Oil and other climate change protestors.
This disparity between the jail time given to environmental protestors and to rioters has led to irate charges of double standards from those supporting the protestors. ‘When civil disobedience is punished more severely than racist rioting, something has gone badly wrong’, wrote George Monbiot. ‘Spot on’, said Caroline Lucas. Peter Tatchell tweeted, ‘Violent racist rioters who tried to burn refugees alive get shorter jail sentences (2-3 years) than peaceful @JustStop_Oil protesters (4-5 years). That’s the real 'two-tier injustice' in UK today. SHAME!’ Private Eye and Rory Stewart weighed in in the same vein.
Sometimes supporters of the climate change protestors refer to specific sentences and argue that they are ‘disproportionate, unjust and a waste of resources’, as recently-elected Green MP Carla Denyer has done in the case of her constituent Gaie Delap, a 77-year-old woman sentenced to 20 months in jail for a Stop Oil action.
What's missing in this carceral tit-for-tat is any discussion as to how long the jail terms should be for either group, and absolutely nothing about whether they are appropriate at all. It’s not clear what the left wants: the same high tariffs for the rioters as for the environmental protestors, or a reduction for the latter so as to bring them in line with the former? In the absence of clarification the overwhelming impression is that they’d like to see the rioters receiving the same 4-5 year sentences as the climate change protestors.
And they are increasingly getting their wish: David Wilkinson, John Honey and Stephen Love were jailed for six years, four years and 40 months respectively for their part in the riots in Hull.
(To be fair there is the odd isolated voice on the left singing a different tune: ‘Gonna be that guy because no one else on the left will do it: We SHOULDN'T be jailing nasty racist far right morons for shitty Tweets, even serious incitement. We SHOULD be prosecuting them, fining them, giving them big community sentences, but prison is fucking madness’).
‘The justice system claims to be blind’, writes Monbiot, but there’s a case to be made that in its call for penitentiary revenge it’s the left that’s blind to the deficiencies - not to say depravities - of the prison system to which it wants to commit rioters.
Leaving aside the question of intent - there is evidence that some people just got ‘caught up’ in the riots - organisations such as the Howard League have been saying for years that ‘Prison won’t work unless we, as a society, are prepared to have a serious conversation about punishment and what it is meant to achieve’. There’s no sign of this conversation from either the right or the left in the current race-to-the-bottom for jail time equivalence.
Here are some facts, all drawn from the Prison Reform Trust’s latest (February 2024) report:
This is the system into which Judge Hehir has cast Just Stop Oil protestors - and into which supporters of the Just Stop Oil protestors would like to send participants in the recent riots.
To what end? If the aim is to reduce reoffending, forget prison. As the Prison Reform Trust says, ‘current evidence does not suggest that increasing the length of immediate prison sentences is an effective way to reduce reoffending’. After a prison sentence (even a suspended one) insurance, credit, a job and - most importantly - housing are very hard to get and sometimes refused outright. Ex-prisoners are condemned to a life defined by obstacles and by stigma - pretty much inescapably so in the internet-connected global village we inhabit. The stocks are always out on Google's global village green.
The consequences of a prison sentence lead to marginalisation: precisely the condition likely to drive the rioters into the arms of the very political forces the left (including environmental protestors and their supporters) oppose.
The question as to which side is the victim of ‘two-tier policing’ has dominated debate. More vital still to those of us on the left, but definitely much less recognised, is our two-tier response to these events. At the same time as Carla Denyer rightly condemned the sentence handed down to 77-year-old Gaie Delap for her Stop Oil action, she could have censured the conviction of the 13-year-old girl (awaiting sentence in September) for violent disorder following unrest outside a hotel housing asylum seekers during the riots. That girl’s life chances have been irrevocably damaged by her conviction - just like those of the young Stop Oil activists so absurdly incarcerated or on remand waiting to be sentenced.
Let’s leave the last word to someone who know what she’s talking about, sociologist Jenny Thatcher, raised in poverty and who spent her childhood visiting her father in Pentonville prison: ‘I don’t think making “an example” out of children by sending them to prison for stealing a Greggs sausage roll will do anything to tackle racism & division in British society’.
Amen to that.
Prisons are in the news.
More precisely prison sentences are in the news, owing to a perceived disparity between the sentences given to environmental protestors of various stripes and those handed down to participants in the recent race riots across the UK, sparked by the fatal stabbing of three young girls at a dance class in Southport UK on 29th July.
As for the environmental activists, in October 2022 two Stop Oil activists shut down the QE2 Bridge by occupying it, suspended in hammocks. They were sentenced to three years and two years seven months in prison respectively - shocking enough at the time. Then earlier in July this year five Stop Oil protestors were given sentences of four and five years for co-ordinating direct action on the M25, the ring-road that orbits London. These were by some distance the longest sentences handed down for non-violent protest in recent times. More and more activists are awaiting sentencing and there is every likelihood that these long - and unusual - sentences will be repeated in the weeks and months to come.
The race riots began on 30th July in Southport and spread to various towns and cities across England and Northern Ireland. By the 9th August around 600 people had been arrested, with more than 446 charged by 20th August. All this in a context in which the prison estate (as it is quaintly called) is bursting at the seams, where suicides and cases of extreme violence rose by 25% in the year 2022-23 and self-harm in women’s prisons is at an all-time high.
The recently elected Labour government said that 500 extra prison places would be made available to cope with the anticipated influx of rioters found guilty of a range of offences.
As of the 20th August over 150 rioters have been sentenced, with most of them going to jail. The average sentence is two years - roughly half as long as those meted out to Stop Oil and other climate change protestors.
This disparity between the jail time given to environmental protestors and to rioters has led to irate charges of double standards from those supporting the protestors. ‘When civil disobedience is punished more severely than racist rioting, something has gone badly wrong’, wrote George Monbiot. ‘Spot on’, said Caroline Lucas. Peter Tatchell tweeted, ‘Violent racist rioters who tried to burn refugees alive get shorter jail sentences (2-3 years) than peaceful @JustStop_Oil protesters (4-5 years). That’s the real 'two-tier injustice' in UK today. SHAME!’ Private Eye and Rory Stewart weighed in in the same vein.
Sometimes supporters of the climate change protestors refer to specific sentences and argue that they are ‘disproportionate, unjust and a waste of resources’, as recently-elected Green MP Carla Denyer has done in the case of her constituent Gaie Delap, a 77-year-old woman sentenced to 20 months in jail for a Stop Oil action.
What's missing in this carceral tit-for-tat is any discussion as to how long the jail terms should be for either group, and absolutely nothing about whether they are appropriate at all. It’s not clear what the left wants: the same high tariffs for the rioters as for the environmental protestors, or a reduction for the latter so as to bring them in line with the former? In the absence of clarification the overwhelming impression is that they’d like to see the rioters receiving the same 4-5 year sentences as the climate change protestors.
And they are increasingly getting their wish: David Wilkinson, John Honey and Stephen Love were jailed for six years, four years and 40 months respectively for their part in the riots in Hull.
(To be fair there is the odd isolated voice on the left singing a different tune: ‘Gonna be that guy because no one else on the left will do it: We SHOULDN'T be jailing nasty racist far right morons for shitty Tweets, even serious incitement. We SHOULD be prosecuting them, fining them, giving them big community sentences, but prison is fucking madness’).
‘The justice system claims to be blind’, writes Monbiot, but there’s a case to be made that in its call for penitentiary revenge it’s the left that’s blind to the deficiencies - not to say depravities - of the prison system to which it wants to commit rioters.
Leaving aside the question of intent - there is evidence that some people just got ‘caught up’ in the riots - organisations such as the Howard League have been saying for years that ‘Prison won’t work unless we, as a society, are prepared to have a serious conversation about punishment and what it is meant to achieve’. There’s no sign of this conversation from either the right or the left in the current race-to-the-bottom for jail time equivalence.
Here are some facts, all drawn from the Prison Reform Trust’s latest (February 2024) report:
- England/Wales and Scotland have the highest imprisonment rates in Western Europe
- The prison population has risen by 93% in the last 30 years—it is predicted to rise by around 17,000 people by 2026
- Almost all offences now receive a much longer custodial sentence than they used to
- Self-inflicted deaths are nearly four times more likely in men in prison than men in the general population
- Self-harm by women in prison hit a record high of 20,248 incidents last year
- The prison system as a whole has been overcrowded in every year since 1994
- In 2022–23, basic screening suggested that nearly a third of arriving prisoners (31%) had a neurodivergent need
- Prison is rarely a necessary, appropriate or proportionate response to women who offend … [but] … on 30 September 2023 there were 3,570 women in prison in England and Wales — a 12% increase on last year
- More than 17,500 children were estimated to be separated from their mother by imprisonment in 2020
- An estimated 320,000 children had a parent in prison in 2020
- More than a third of women (36%) and two in five (42%) men reported being in their cell for more than 22 hours a day during the week
This is the system into which Judge Hehir has cast Just Stop Oil protestors - and into which supporters of the Just Stop Oil protestors would like to send participants in the recent riots.
To what end? If the aim is to reduce reoffending, forget prison. As the Prison Reform Trust says, ‘current evidence does not suggest that increasing the length of immediate prison sentences is an effective way to reduce reoffending’. After a prison sentence (even a suspended one) insurance, credit, a job and - most importantly - housing are very hard to get and sometimes refused outright. Ex-prisoners are condemned to a life defined by obstacles and by stigma - pretty much inescapably so in the internet-connected global village we inhabit. The stocks are always out on Google's global village green.
The consequences of a prison sentence lead to marginalisation: precisely the condition likely to drive the rioters into the arms of the very political forces the left (including environmental protestors and their supporters) oppose.
The question as to which side is the victim of ‘two-tier policing’ has dominated debate. More vital still to those of us on the left, but definitely much less recognised, is our two-tier response to these events. At the same time as Carla Denyer rightly condemned the sentence handed down to 77-year-old Gaie Delap for her Stop Oil action, she could have censured the conviction of the 13-year-old girl (awaiting sentence in September) for violent disorder following unrest outside a hotel housing asylum seekers during the riots. That girl’s life chances have been irrevocably damaged by her conviction - just like those of the young Stop Oil activists so absurdly incarcerated or on remand waiting to be sentenced.
Let’s leave the last word to someone who know what she’s talking about, sociologist Jenny Thatcher, raised in poverty and who spent her childhood visiting her father in Pentonville prison: ‘I don’t think making “an example” out of children by sending them to prison for stealing a Greggs sausage roll will do anything to tackle racism & division in British society’.
Amen to that.
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