With a budget of over £4 billion, prison building is currently the government’s second-largest expenditure program

~ Kevan Thakrar ~

As prisons all over the country are crumbling, the government is implementing a mass building exercise to expand the total population held captive by the state by a further 20,000 humans

When rates of imprisonment in Britain are already the highest in western Europe, this drive for the ability to contain so many more souls exemplifies the fear of the rulers that the citizens could rise-up, rather than suffer further under this failed capitalist system.

For someone who has been held captive through imprisonment in England since 2007, the deterioration of the environment I am forced to live within has gone beyond inhumane. Conditions have fallen to standards last seen 30 years ago, before major uprisings by prisoners (referred to as riots by the authorities and their mouth-pieces) forced improvements. The most commonly known of these uprisings took place at Strangeways Prison, lasting 25 days and costing the British state £53 million and 147 prison officers injured, with at least 47 incarcerated humans being injured and one killed.

All over the country, these tensions are once again boiling over, but the media refuses to acknowledge the reality of the resistance occurring, instead preferring to ignore the brutal retaliation by state employees against prisoners who are unwilling to endure any more. Suicides occur almost daily, but the dehumanisation and othering of prisonershas been so effective that nobody cares. The apathy of the public is exactly what enables this, but as concepts such as Joint Enterprise continue to bring even greater numbers into the sphere of the injustice system, it is no longer possible to remain ignorant to the realities of what public funds are being spent on.

As natural resources are depleted and the need for the workers to extract them is exhausted, the elite must find a purpose for us which enables control to be sustained. With the knowledge that their warmongering invasions across the Middle-East have destabilised the region, as well as their interferences in so-called third world countries, not to mention the impending doom of climate change causing millions to seek refuge in this island, what better way to benefit from our existence than to exploit us like a lump of coal in their factories of despair.

Chances for any real improvement to the rat and cockroach infested prison system have been totally diminished by the allocation of much needed funding to ever more new prisons. Even relatively new prisons are in disrepair, such as those which only opened in the 1990s including HMP Whitemoor which is suffering from a rodent infestation, or HMP Woodhill which has severe subsidence causing a building to be uninhabitable in case it collapses. The failure of these projects is further evidence of the futility of attempting to build out of the overcrowding problem.

Furthermore, the expansion of the prison industrial complex does not end once the building is completed, as there is a perpetual cost of operating these human warehouses and maintaining the processes which turn people into commodities. This includes the police who arrest us, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) who advance the case against us on behalf of the state, the judges who enable the parameters of the criminal trial to function in accordance with the biased laws passed by government as well as passing sentence against us, the probation service which determines restrictions to be applied upon us once released, the parole board who decide using their crystal ball when we are safe to release, and of course, the prison profiteers: the security companies (G4S, Serco, etc) who transport us from court cells to prison cells, the maintenance companies (like failed Carillion) who take millions in return for continuing to allow the vermin infestations and buildings to crumble, and the catering companies who dream-up the recipes for the slop we are served. Even the defence solicitors and barristers provide a veneer of legitimacy to this state system designed to oppress and control the masses all benefit from this invidious economic model.

Statistics show that it is increasingly difficult to attain parole for the thousands of us inflicted with so-called indeterminate sentences, such as the abolished 2-strike-life or IPP, or the severely overused Life Sentence. Britain imposes more of life sentences than anywhere else in western Europe. The probation rate of recalling convicts to prison have spiralled out-of-control, especially for minor and often insignificant so-called breaches of licence conditions (such as being a few minutes late to an appointment), resulting in thousands of people filling prison cells despite being deemed to present no risk to the public—at a cost of over £50,000 each per year to the taxpayer. Even the remand population of  people who are supposedly innocent until ‘proven’ guilty has sky-rocketed, with some 15,000 humans imprisoned awaiting a trial that may never even come. Some 150 of these humans have been remanded in excess of 5-years. When only 6% of prisoners have been convicted of violence, who is really being protected by this mass imprisonment and what is the real ideology behind this prison building agenda?

The structure of these new mega prisons prohibits humane treatment by design, and mistreatment does not produce rehabilitation. As put astutely by Kate Eves, Chair of the public inquiry into abuses at a UK migrant removal centre, “Places of detention are the hidden spaces in our society. There is no higher role for the state than as a guardian of those who are detained and in its care”. She rejected the narrative that abuses exposed, which in many cases amount to torture, were primarily the result of the behaviour of a small minority of staff. Rather, these abuses are the result of a culture which prevails among those empowered by the state. Yet in spite of this, little objection can be seen to the expenses incurred in this expansion project, which could be better spent on building new schools or hospitals.

As more and more laws preventing public opposition come into force, the prison that is life under capitalism makes itself more apparent. The message between the lines is: Be exploited and remain silent, or face increased restrictions on your liberties. Silence did not prevent this slide into fascism, or the clawing-away of human rights which were designed to be the rights of all. The CCTV cameras and tracking of all electronic devices were supposed to be ‘safety measures’, now they make possible the enforcement of the expansive and oppressive state agenda. Hoping this will get any better under Labour is a myth—after all,Kier Starmer received his knighthood for his role as the director of the CPS where he facilitated increased levels of imprisonment.

Knowing what is to come, what do you do next…

Kevan Thakrar is one of the 50 UK prisoners under ongoing solitary confinement under the Close Supervision Centre (CSC) system. He can be written to at: Kevan Thakrar A4907AE, HMP Whitemoor, Longhill Road, March PE15 0PR —- or via emailaprisoner.com