The UK Prison Crisis | with Shanice McBean & Janey Starling

0:00Today is a doubleheader and we're going to be talking about intersectional feminism, violence against women and girls and prison reform and maybe even prison abolition. I'm going to be joined by Shanice who is the co-author of Abolition Revolution and the co-founder of Sisters Uncut. I'm also going to be joined by Janey who is the co-director of Level Up. So I guess if we start with, I've just listed some organisations you're involved with but it'd be great to hear what they do in your own words. So should we start with Level Up? So Level Up is a feminist gender justice campaigning organisation and for the last six years we have led a national campaign to end the imprisonment of pregnant women and mothers.

0:37And Sisters Uncut? Yeah, Sisters Uncut is a feminist direct action group that was started in 2014. So it's been going for a really long time and our work initially started on fighting cuts to domestic violence services before really progressing to looking at criminal justice system and domestic violence and state violence. and how that affects women more generally. And so I suppose my open question, which sounds almost absurd, but is the prison system working? We know it's not working, but why is it not working? Very good question. I think we first need to define what working means because I think what prisons represent in the public imagination and what they are in reality are two vastly different things.

1:20So in the public imagination, we've kind of got this political agenda which politicians always want to position themselves as tough on crime and in control of a society that's ordered. But actually what we see inside prisons, particularly women's prisons, I mean, prisons are just warehouses for people who have fallen through all of the holes in our welfare safety net. We know that the majority of women in prison are survivors of domestic abuse, survivors of child sexual abuse, who are struggling with addiction, who's the reason they're in prison in the first place is related to social issues like homelessness, poverty, trauma, substance use that should have been resolved much, much earlier on in life.

2:02And the reason they've ended up in prison is because they haven't had that support. So most people might not know that the majority of women in prison are there for less than six months, sentences of less than six months. And the most common offence is shoplifting. And if that isn't indicative of a society where something is terribly, terribly wrong, then I don't know what is. And I think it's really, really important that we remember where prisons sit, especially now in the context of a real dearth of functioning public services where the state has stripped public services of so much money, particularly addiction support services, particularly domestic abuse refuges.

2:39we've got a housing shortage and what we see prison doing is almost acting as a public service of last resort where people have not had the support they need and you know women who should be in a refuge bed are in a prison cell women who should be in social housing are inside prison and I want to get to Sister Senka in a second but you just sparked off an immediate question which was on day one of my leadership the Labour Party'd love to remind me of this but I talked about the fact that if I was a single mother and I needed baby food or nappies I can understand why people steal like you're literally worried about the survival of your child and you can imagine the media reaction everything from he's justifying shoplifting to people aren't stealing these things they're stealing alcohol or they're stealing like luxury items I mean you've already said that the evidence shows that women are being imprisoned for less than six months or so like the vast majority how do we push back against these reactive narratives?

3:33I think we have to just keep pointing to what prison produces, which is more poverty and more homelessness. Because taking the example of mothers who are stealing to provide for their children, if you send that mother to prison, you're separating from her children who will inevitably end up in the social care system. Or if there is family around, luckily go to family. But the trauma that that causes to that child and to that woman is incalculable. And we know that mothers are separated from their children through the criminal legal system every day, which flies in the face of everything we know about child psychology and actually what it means for a child to develop with a healthy emotional attachment to their parent.

4:12And given that they're being sent for such short sentences, the proportionality is so, so out of whack. I think it's really, really important when we're looking at prison, we're talking about individuals and the actions they've taken, looking at the context of those actions and what it means to be a mother who is stealing and whose fault that really is as a society. Why are people having to steal to provide for their children? Let's ask those questions, zooming out away from the individual and looking at the bigger social structures that are facilitating this. Thank you. And on Citizen Cuts, I think it was founded in 2014 during the height of austerity.

4:49What's kind of the aims of the organisation and what are you about? It's an organisation that's existed for quite a long time now. And so it's gone on quite a vast political journey. I think at the beginning, it really started out as a campaigning group against cuts to domestic violence services, because at that time, our understanding and analysis of gendered violence was that it's an interpersonal issue. But the state can intervene and make women's lives better by opening certain economic doors. So, for example, to housing, the benefit system and funding women's services. I think there were several kind of key political moments that changed that political trajectory.

5:27Not to say we don't think that austerity and cuts and funding services is important. We absolutely do. But that there is another side to the story, which is that the state itself does perpetrate violence against women in various different ways. And I think one of the most harrowing stories that really had an impactful, profound effect on our politics as an organisation was the story of Sarah Reid. Sarah Reid is dead now. She died in 2016, but her life was touched by the state in so many different ways. It started when she gave birth to a child that died in childbirth and she was sent away from the hospital with her baby wrapped in cloth in a taxi to take to the undertaker.

6:12And you can imagine the kind of level of trauma that that caused her. She then was in the news for really horrible reasons because a metropolitan police officer, I think his name was James Kiddy, was caught on CCTV unprovoked, beating her across the head in a shop. She was accused of shoplifting. Don't think she actually did steal anything, but she was accused of it and she was beaten up by a male police officer. The next point in which the state touches her life is she was sectioned under the Mental Health Act. and while she was sectioned was actually sexually assaulted by a man who was detained with her she defended herself and her defending herself physically led to her eventually ending up in Holloway prison and it was in Holloway prison where she wasn't given her medication wasn't given the support that she needed that she ended up being found dead in her cell with ligatures around her neck so this story unfortunately isn't isolated there are thousands of people who have died in custody whether that's police mental health custody prison custody and whether it's men or women the stories are really quite similar but I think for Sisters Uncut what this told us is that yes there is interpersonal violence and yes the state has a role in protecting women but actually we need to expand our analysis because the state also plays a fundamental role in harming women we can look at Yarlswood detention centre for example we can look at the way police treat women it's just vast and it's ugly and it's awful there's a recent trend in women going to prison for violent offenses there's been this spike in the last couple of years and the specific offense they're going to prison for it's actually a short sentence it's of less than a year is for assault on an emergency worker and when you actually look into these prosecutions I mean it's very cleverly cleverly named charge because when you think of that you think someone's attacked a paramedic someone's someone's done something awful actually the majority of these are police officers and And it's women who are in extreme mental distress, who are resisting restraint, who are then prosecuted for it in such a violent way.

8:15It's it's quite shocking, actually. The the most upsetting case of this is the case of Annalise Sanderson. She was an 18 year old girl who was very, very sadly. I mean, she grew up in the care system. She had a history of self-harm and suicide attempts when she was 18. she was at a petrol station trying to drink petrol and pour petrol over herself um very very distressed girl uh police were called paramedic was called she fought back against restraint and she was sentenced to 52 weeks in prison when she got to prison there was no referral made to a psychiatrist she was not given any mental health treatment and after six months she took her own life inside prison it really is you know I remember at the time Deborah Coles the the director of the charity inquest that represents families whose loved ones have been killed in state custody just asked why was she sent to prison why why was she sent to prison in the first place and I think we can ask that question of so many women and it's so evident that she needed mental health support and that's often the case particularly with this assault and emergency worker events which was only introduced recently women who are calling the police in domestic abuse incidents for example there was a really good open democracy investigation into this actually which found that there were so many women who had called the police during a domestic abuse incident the example of a woman called jane is cited whose partner was outside her house making threats against her life she called the police the police turned up um and they said well there's nothing we can do because he's actually outside the limit that you're restraining order covers sorry and I mean anyone working in domestic abuse will know of these cases where the police just basically say call us when you're dead it happens all the time um but what happened was she was so angry at the police and she was the one arrested gosh um I can think of plenty of politicians who listen to this conversation so far and agree that all of this is awful and think the response here is more money for the police or more money for the prison system they'd say this is all terrible but it's a consequence of austerity let's fund more why is that the incorrect position fund more what because it costs 80 000 pounds to send a woman to prison for a year if she's a hmp bronze field which is the private sodexo run prison um she it costs 99 000 pounds that's 100k for a woman to go to prison for a year how many mental health support workers could we be funding with that money how many spaces in refuges could we be funding with that money ultimately um what we need is a redirection of resources away from the criminal legal system into communities which have been so deprived of resources and if we had those resources you know I speak about the the holes in the welfare safety net if we could take some of those resources that are being pumped into prisons which is a total dead end and then use them to kind of stitch up some of those holes in the welfare safety net we would have a completely different society.

11:09Yeah and just to add on to that people often approach the question of policing prisons the criminal justice system from emotion I like to approach it from empiricism. And if you look at the data, policing and prisons works and it doesn't work. So what does it work at? Police and prisons work at clamping down on protesters, of kind of restraining political movements and restraining resistance against the status quo, against capitalism, against the state. The mythology that we are sold is that police are there to keep you safe, prisons keep you safe, you know, punishment stops crime. the reality the data proves that this isn't the case so for example you know if we look at the prison system people go in with vulnerabilities and they come out with those vulnerabilities multiplied times 100 if you go into prison homeless you're going to come out of prison homeless it's going to be even harder for you to get council housing or support for your housing you might lose your council house while you're in prison if you go into prison for a short sentence you're going to lose your job you're going to come out with a record it's going to be harder to get a job because that's going to be disclosable via a DBS.

12:14If people go into prison with a substance use problem, there was a study done by King's College London that showed if you go in with an opiate addiction, when you come out, you're seven times more likely to have an overdose when you come out. So, you know, we're sold this mythology that prisons keep us safe, they work, they stop crime. Empirically, they just don't. What they do is they provide an ideological and emotional self they tell people that you know a harm has been done to you and so if you punish the person that will deal with it and I have this discussion with my friends all the time because there are a lot of people that I would really like to punish sometimes in really horrific physical ways because of how horrible they are and the things that they do to other people but then the political question I have to ask myself is if I want there to be less harm and violence in society what is the route to achieving that and oftentimes our victorian notion of kind of crime and punishment isn't the right way so for example we can look at glasgow they had an attempt at taking a kind of different approach to youth violence and knife crime on the streets which was a public health approach where they would connect people who were at risk of youth violence to housing educational opportunities mental health support domestic violence intervention because we know that there's a really strong link between domestic violence in the home and youth violence on the street and what did they see a statistically significant drop in the levels of youth violence in Glasgow compare and contrast that to the approach that the Metropolitan Police takes in London where they harangue and harass our communities with stop and search you know the smell of cannabis being used to stop and search people does it lead to a statistically significant reduction in crime no it doesn't and we know this because the police and the government did a report called Operation Blunt 2 in 2016, where they drastically increased the levels of stop and search in certain at-risk boroughs in London, like Haringey, Hackney, Lewisham, et cetera, over a three-year period.

14:15In fact, the three years before the 2011 riots, funnily enough. And then they did a report in 2016, and they found the thing that actually led to a reduction in crime was the weather. The warmer it is, the more crime, the colder it is, people stay indoors and not the fact that they increase stop and search a stop and search doesn't work i think as well when it specifically comes to drugs the amount of the billions the billions that are pumped into policing efforts around drugs and yet the uk is the drug death capital of europe we have that title it's so clear yeah that criminalization models don't work not only that but they stigmatize people who really do need help with addiction um and you know pumping money into policing and removing it from rehabs and refuges.

15:03I mean, it's really sad. When you look at the devastation that austerity has caused specifically for addiction services, we lost a third of all residential rehabs between 2012 and 2019. There is now only one, one rehab in the whole of the UK where women can go with their children, which means that in reality women who are struggling with substance use have to make a choice between getting clean and keeping their children no one should have to make that choice so i think you know it's it's very clear and i agree we have to look at the evidence we have to look empirically about where resources are flowing and that that really is the fundamental question because the resources are there the money is there so so what are we doing with it wasting it i always think that care experienced young people as well are part of the canary in the coal mine here where when you look at the empirical evidence too of how disproportionately likely they are to face the criminal justice system or end up in prison people either must think that there's something like fundamental about a care experienced young person that means they're villainous or evil or austerity poverty lack of opportunity means that you're much more likely to end up in the running with the police i know that holland very superficially i know this as an answer has a much better system um one is that true or two are the better examples of where you go a country or a city are doing things in a better way?

16:26I mean, almost everyone apart from the US is doing it better than us, specifically in Europe. I mean, we've got the highest incarceration rate in Western Europe. And I think what's really important is that global economic studies that have made international comparisons have found there's a direct relationship between spending on welfare and rates of incarceration. And it will be nobody's surprise that the more estate spends on welfare the lower the incarceration rate is the less they spend on welfare the higher the incarceration rate is and I think we've got some of the highest child poverty also in Europe and the highest incarceration rate I think whatever the model is that is what we need to be looking at it's making sure that we have a strong social security net because that is what leads to people going into prison in the first place and we've touched slightly already on violence against women and girls it's partly a communications question that um i'll put my hands up as a politician if i was saying this to you before i went on that i when i'm asked about this i give a very direct answer so it's not that i'm shy of it but i rarely bring it up proactively the other reason is that it's so often co-opted by the right whether it's about talking increasingly yeah migrants refugees and the conversation about trans people as well what do we do about that in the way that we communicate violence against women and girls is a matter of resources look if we think about materially what you need to leave an abusive relationship what you actually need is money to survive on a safe place to go to someone who can help you look after your children and ultimately until we have those things women will not be safe i think there are obviously you know you can't abstract it from patriarchy and a male-dominated society but when it comes to policy solutions when it comes to material things that politicians can commit to when we see people saying oh you know for example the reasoning for cutting down on jury trials which is ultimately dismantling some of the guardrails of our democracy it's an extremely concerning move which is you know in tune with this authoritarian state of travel with this particular government um that's being justified because of the crown court backlog specifically Keir Starmer has said, I've made promises to organisations that represent violence against women and girls, that we will cut the Crown Court backlog.

18:44And it's so, so disingenuous and manipulative. We know that only 3 % of reported rapes even lead to a charge. The majority of rapes do not even get to a police cell, let alone a courtroom, let alone a prison. We see this again with the anti-migrant rhetoric, protect our women and girls. It's really, really insidious. What it needs to come back to is asking women what we need to stay safe. and almost every time it's economic independence resources and I mean short of a total cultural overhauled where men stop abusing women full stop what we need in the interim is to make sure that women can be independent and can leave because the majority of women who are in domestic abuse situations don't have the resources to leave.

19:27I think a key one just on the comms question that you mentioned and particularly how violence against women and girls is mobilized and manipulated by the right wing I think we have to just go back to the reality of what is violence against against women and girls so for example there's a lot that's made about stranger danger you know the the lone migrant man on the streets who's just come off a boat and he's he's in our is in our town centers attacking women and actually we know that the vast majority well over 80 percent of violence against women and girls takes place from someone the woman or the girl knows typically someone in their household but can also be a friend a colleague a schoolmate you know a brother a father etc so we know the vast vast majority of for example let's bring race into it of white girls and white women are abused and attacked by white men that is just you know the fact of of violence against women and girls and I think you know the way in which certain groups are manipulating violence against women and girls you know we're looking at the Epstein files now where women and girls have fought working class women and girls we should say have fought for years and years and years against these awful brutal disgusting elites nothing to say why because it's their mates in the files if we look at for example our state institutions we know that you know so many black women when they report domestic violence are themselves arrested because of our brown skin we're we're not deemed to be able to you know have bruises or our bruises aren't seen or were deemed as too aggressive and so I think Rape Crisis did a study that showed that you know when black women report violence they're less likely to be believed all of these things they're silent on because they use violence against women and girls as a tool for their propaganda and we have to call out the hypocrisy at every point.

21:27I was going to talk about contentious subjects but I don't think this is contentious which is about sex work. For people watching or listening to this who maybe are new to this kind of whole area could either of you explain the Nordic model why it's not a good idea and actually what we need to do instead presuming you think it's not a good idea I haven't checked that with you but I'd be surprised if you did support the Nordic model so i think that part of the problem with uh criminalizing sex work at all is it doesn't recognize the reasons and the circumstances for women entering sex work and it doesn't take into consideration um you know that it's work under capitalism so what are the reasons that women get in into sex work sometimes particularly working class women it's because there are lack of economic opportunities elsewhere.

22:11It's because there are sometimes vulnerabilities, for example, substance use, that lead them into sex work. And I think the problem with the Nordic model, which is more or less focused on criminalising men or users, you know, the Johns that access sex work, is it stigmatises it. It says that this is a horrible, dirty thing and we're going to make it really difficult for men and other people to access sex work. The flip side of that is it also criminalises the women doing sex work. It drives them underground. It makes it harder if they need support to get the support that they need. If they don't need support, it stigmatises them.

22:56And I think we have to recognise that sex work, although you might have your own kind of moral or ideological position on it, it is work under capitalism. And the best way you can protect women who do sex work is to give them workers rights, is to protect them as workers, is to not stigmatize them and shove them underground and leave them exposed to, you know, the police raiding brothels and to all sorts of various forms of raids and criminalization. For example, immigration raids is a common one that's used to criminalise sex workers. What women need in those situations are a good paying jobs, you know, support for mothers who need economic support, because oftentimes women are economically excluded by having part time jobs, low and paying jobs and workers rights.

23:43It's, you know, the right to say, no, I don't want to do this and be protected in that to not fear that if you were to report violence against yourself, that you would then be criminalised and sent to prison, which protects perpetrators ultimately. Right. You know, if you're so afraid that you're going to be sent to prison or sent to immigration detention and therefore you don't report violence that that takes place against you. and let's bear in mind you know violence is a very typical part of work you know working under capitalism you know violence happens in all forms of work and we have rights to protect us from that except sex workers can't have rights because they're so heavily stigmatized.

24:25Also in countries where the Nordic model has come into place there has been a huge upsurge in violence against sex workers. Materially that's that's what it produces we know this from other countries so why on earth we would entertain that is just so backwards. Again it's like a it's like a salve. It's this thing that governments do to make itself and make its populations feel better about a topic. Let's criminalise this person or criminalise that person. That's how we're going to respond to knife crime. That's how we're going to respond to sex work. The missing piece of the puzzle is does this actually work at keeping people safe?

24:58Nine times out of ten the answer to that is no but no one really interrogates that because well we chucked them in prison so we've done the job yeah and I think often and it cuts across a number of different fields when it comes to the criminal legal system and I say criminal legal system because it very rarely brings justice is the alternate framing is public health so I think if you have a public health model you're looking at prevention you're looking at groups who will be at risk and what interventions you can do there and you're looking at what happens after the fact what happens where there are harms where people are hurting or suffering but all we have in the criminal legal system is a punishment system which is only really the third part and it's very few people who ever really um i've spoken about the the fact that only three percent of rape reports lead to a charge i mean there's very few consequences for people who do cause serious harm and and what we need across the board is this understanding of public health of what social harm does look like and resolving our social problems through more preventive efforts through more state resources particularly for people who might be more at risk you've already addressed care leavers and then when it comes to the consequences not just looking at punishment because punishment really really is a dead end going back to what we were saying about the majority of women in prison being on short sentences 73 percent of women who have served a short sentence will re-offend within a year why because the conditions that were there that led them going to prison are there when they come out and maybe even worse because they now have a record as well absolutely and if you're a woman who goes into prison and separated from your children that is the most traumatic thing you could ever inflict on anybody particularly women who are perfectly good mothers they're just poor they're struggling with addiction where are the interventions to actually support them to be mothers to support them to stay with their children the state would much rather tear them apart through the prison system and it's completely pointless and it creates generational trauma that that child who's then separated from their mother might be spending time in and out of school as their housing is sorted in and out of temporary accommodation in and out of different family members households the mental health impact of being separated from your primary caregiver then that later on in life might lead to mental health issues substance use and you can see how that cycle continues that cycle created by essentially being working class under capitalism being a working class woman how that creates generational trauma and also the stigma that those children face as well it's just so painful they get bullied at school it's yeah it's it's just so avoidable i think that's the thing it's so so avoidable if we could just think more expansively and creatively and also build the public counter power and the public shift away from attitudes of punishment to actually looking at health for sure um really want to um say that i take your note on criminal legal system and one of my favorite things on this podcast is when i hear things like that and it changes my language ever more so thank you for that um hopefully you won't ever hear me saying criminal justice system because I really take that point it's a really really good point and until someone says it you go of course like you're reaffirming a frame that's actually a false frame it's part of the mythology and ideology of of the criminal justice system you know it sustains itself despite being so ineffective so ineffective on the mythology that surrounds it and actually the language is part of that isn't it yeah for sure I can think of lots of other areas like that too and also totally take your point about the fact that prevention the public health approach this isn't necessarily my question but I can imagine someone watching this and going so are we just getting rid of prisons entirely what happens when someone does commit a crime yes we are I love this question by the way yes we are but it's not an overnight job right it's going to take so much restructuring of the state and of society to get there and I think one of the first critical steps is we stop building more prisons every prison place built is the state's admission of a failure to care for that person and to prevent that harm happening we need to see it in those terms they're not keeping us safe um it's it's state failure we need to stop sending so many people to prison to shrink the size and scope of who is in prisons i mean the work that i've been doing over the last six years to end the imprisonment of pregnant women and mothers in particular has followed that kind of strategy where it's what prison abolitionists called decarceration which is really looking at groups who could be taken out of the system altogether and it's in in those cases where we build the alternatives that can be then used for everybody so for pregnant women and mothers we'll say you know that women can be supported in the community the resources that would have gone to sending her to prison need to be going into a community women's center where she can access everything that she needs support with from housing to mental health support to work to child care and that's what we need to start doing it we need the women's centers there before we can close the prisons because if you look at the case of hmp holloway which was closed in 2016 so 10 years ago now um it was it's the prison that sarah reed died at it was standing for 150 years it was closed not for ideological reasons but the victorian building was just crumbling ministry of justice sold it to a housing developer campaign groups and clean Sisters Uncut at the time for there to be a provision for there to be a women's centre on the site, it's still yet to materialise.

30:39So I think we need to be building the alternatives, resourcing those alternatives and then emptying and closing the prisons. And we've got a housing shortage, prisons take up quite a lot of land, ultimately why are we not using those sites as social housing? Yeah, I was there at those protests with Sisters Uncut and it just amazes me that it's a decade later. We met, but didn't we? Yeah, exactly. I wasn't a politician at the time, but I was there alongside. Wow. Because the case is always, I think it's irrefutable. You look at the evidence and it's pretty clear that it's not working. I guess to push again though, if someone is still committing a violent crime, for instance, we talked about the alternatives.

31:20What are the alternatives? If I may, I think... Sorry, you did just list a lot of alternatives. I'm probably sometimes trying to be the audiences it's a really important question because people do do awful things i love this question and i love talking about this question on this podcast bold politics because i think this question requires bold thinking um and i think there's a crisis of imagination here so let's look at who's in prison and this is for men and women about 50 percent of people in prison are imprisoned for crimes of survival broadly speaking and these are crimes like theft robbery fraud substance use sex work related things these in their entirety can be solved by just changing and fundamentally overhauling the economic system giving people access to good well-paying jobs and workers rights giving people access to support and a safety net when things go wrong mental health support domestic violence preventative intervention not just after the fact but preventing it you know before it gets to that that point is very very much connected to people you know ending up impoverished and and homelessness intervention all of these things would solve that 50 percent we then have another 50 percent approximately which is crimes against the person so this is where it gets you know the tricky what do you do with the rapists and murderers and this is harder but I think is still connected to these broader societal questions so for example if we take crimes against a person like domestic violence like sexual assault we know that these things are very much connected to how people view their role in society how much control they feel they have in their lives and therefore if they feel they you know are lacking in control They attempt to gain that control on the backs of women in terms of violence against women in the home.

33:16We know that sense of self-esteem is wrapped up in things like youth violence and knife crime, self-esteem, place, masculinity. And we know all of these things are impacted by social status, which is also impacted, again, by economics, by how productive you feel and can be in society, but also how connected you are to other people. You know, the loneliness epidemic is naturally going to have a huge impact on mental health, on domestic and sexual violence. You know, when people are so disconnected from each other, from connection, from love, from, you know, just the basic things that we need as human beings in relationship to one another.

33:55It makes the horrible crimes like violence and sexual assault much more likely. So do I think that, you know, changing the economic system is going to solve absolutely everything? No, it's not. But the fundamental thing I will say to our listeners is the current system does not deal with rapists. Thank you both so much. That was an incredibly important conversation. Thank you both so much for the humanity and also the information you brought to it. Thank you for having us.

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