One of the more vexed questions in anarchist theory is “what do we do with all the criminals?” It’s had many different answers on offer over the years, from Kropotkin’s views on the roots of anti-social acts and possibilities for community rehabilitation, to modern ideas for non-”carceral” (locking people up) approaches to harm. 

In fact across anarchist thought you’ll have as many takes on the subject as there are anarchists, based on the wide variety of experiences people have had. Few of us would say for a moment that we have The Solution, partly because there is no singular fix for a vastly complex social problem that often has few routes to truth, let alone justice and healing. And partly because we live within an economic construct that discourages collectivity, both in our everyday lives and in our approach to the fallouts from harm.

This complicated relationship with concepts of misbehaviour, safety, rehabilitation and restitution runs through the thinking we employ on many topics, not least our relationship with the activities of the State. Famously, anarchists tend towards an abolitionist take on State incarceration (again reaching back to the striking criticisms of Kropotkin, Berkman and many others) which clashes continually with the dogmas of the right, centre and indeed left of traditional politics. It puts us in the way of “lock-em-up-longer” media posturing.

All of which comes to the fore as we stare into yet another round of the prison “overcrowding crisis” that has characterised the last two decades at least. Splashed across the newspapers both before and directly after the election, it’s been (as the Telegraph notes) “solved” at least three times in recent memory by the announcement of megaprison projects to provide more places for Britain’s burgeoning jail population, while remaining stubbornly problematic.

The Telegraph’s criticism, of course, is that these previous announcements weren’t actually followed by much in the way of government action. Somehow HMPs Pentonville and Brixton, slated long since to be flogged off for redevelopment, are still there, while planning for new giant coops for cons has foundered in the face of community hostility. For right-wing pundits, Labour’s challenge is simply to maintain the production line to cope with a projected prison population of 114,800 by 2028 (up from 87,400 as of last month).

So why are these numbers rising (up from 75,000 in 2004)? Is it just population increases? Well no; in fact crime rates have fallen dramatically over the last 30 years, roughly in line with the rest of the Western world, while our incarceration rate, according to the Prison Reform Trust, is now at 0.141% of the UK population, compared to 0.106% in France and just 0.067% in Germany. The actual culprit appears to be longer sentencing, a direct result of all our years of cartoonish tabloid attitudes directing real policy. All those lock-em-up-longer headlines spurred government action, and now we have a huge population in these “universities of crime” which no-one in the government seems to have many ideas about.

Release valves

In the medium term, despite their incredibly poor record when it comes to making recommendations, the right-wing press will likely win out again with a bit of help from the civil service. There’s nothing like the dual pressure of frothing punishment enthusiasts and inertia of public institutions to keep a bad plan alive. Sans other factors, we can thus probably expect renewed megaprison projects to be reluctantly announced in due course by prisons minister James Timpson, drawing on his Prison Reform Trust credentials for extra There Is No Alternative points. 

So far so uninventive, with prisons campaigners (sometimes themselves former high-ups, like Nick Hardwick) left shouting into the void, vainly waving their thick sheaves of research at polite, disinterested bureaucrats. What we’re unlikely to see on current trends is any backtracking over sentencing guidelines, let alone, as Hardwick suggests, a serious readjustment to prioritise alternatives. To return to Telegraph columnist Philip Johnston, he candidly notes of community sentencing programmes: “These may sound good and enlightened, but they are expensive.” And if there’s one group no government will shell out extra for, no matter the practical public good of doing so, it’s prisoners.

In the short term, meanwhile, we’re on crisis measures to alleviate overcrowding pressures, particularly in the wake of the recent far-right riots. Which in an interesting twist are clashing with Keir Starmer’s own natural tendency to throw away the keys, as well as offering firepower to the right’s favoured “Labour soft on crime” narratives. 

The announcements over early-release schemes have started a predictable mini moral panic (despite following on directly from the Tories doing the same thing last December), but most serious observers have characterised it as a simple necessity rather than a choice. Overcrowding is now a serious problem across nearly a third of the estate and since the 1990 Strangeways riot officials have been very, very wary of simply squeezing extra people into each cell. Emergency powers to use police holding cells have already been tapped. 

If they’re going to throw in political prisoners like peace and climate campaigners, along with thugs from the Farage Fan Club, they need to make some room. And to do that, existing cons have to sling their hook. Given the lengthening of sentences which took place in recent years, all this practically amounts to, in many cases, is a restoration of previous norms.

In some ways this is all mildly ironic. Back when XR were still gunning to be arrested en masse, hoping to overwhelm the prison system, the government was smart enough not to let them. Instead it strung out sentencing, handed out big fines and made the trial itself the ordeal. Now however, at its weakest moment, it’s actually sending non-violent activists down as a result of the zero-tolerance policies of Starmer’s predecessors, and has found itself playing exactly into the strategy that XR once failed to make work. 

Opportunities for us

In terms of campaigning, what this situation offers us is a weakness to push at both in the short and medium terms. In the first case, we can make the very obvious point that if Starmer wants to avoid overcrowding he could start by reversing the drive to hand multi-year sentences to non-violent activists which was, in the first place, an obscene clunking boot to bring down on civil liberties in response to relatively mild levels of disruption. 

And in the medium term, it has been clear for decades now that the unpleasant reactionary dream of isolating thousands of prisoners far away from their families and communities is cack-headed. Utterly counterproductive from the standpoint of rehabilitation, it’s unpopular wherever it’s proposed and continues railroading the entire system as little more than a succession of battery cages, throwing away tens of thousands of lives. 

The Tories, despite their best efforts, have shown megaprisons and longer sentencing is exactly what we said, not just inhumane but completely impractical. We know anti-carceral approaches and better ideas for how to bring people back from the darkest part of their lives, to reduce the dangers posed to the public permanently, not just for the duration a four stretch, can work. The Establishment is all out of “better” ideas, and even the likes of the Financial Times, in some desperation, are increasingly open to alternatives.

There’s room for campaigning and positive pressure.

~ Rob Ray