Britain has the most draconian prison system in western Europe. Recent deaths in police custody have increased public consciousness of state violence and its relationship to institutional racism and sexism. And yet we are still often oblivious to the inherently harmful and too often fatal consequences of imprisonment that affect our most vulnerable people beyond the scrutiny of the general public.
Last year, 371 people in England and Wales died in prison behind closed doors – the highest death toll since records began. Yet, despite this, there has been near silence on the issue. On the few occasions when prison deaths have garnered attention on a national scale, they have often been dismissed and even rationalised on account of the status of those who die as prisoners – as if they deserved what was coming to them.
People in prison are some of the most marginalised in society, with experiences of institutional care, homelessness, educational disadvantage, addiction, mental and physical ill health, and abuse, underpinned by poverty and inequality. Many have been failed by other statutory agencies before entering the criminal justice system.
What is clear is that deaths in police custody and in prison are two sides of the same coin. Both occur at the hands of the same criminal justice system that disproportionately polices, prosecutes and imprisons the most disadvantaged and vulnerable people, and are most sharply felt across the intersections of race, gender, disability and class.
Across successive governments, prison expansion has become a de facto policy. In 2021, the government outlined plans for the biggest prison-building programme in England and Wales in more than 100 years. It would raise the prison population to close to 100,000 by 2026.
This latest project fits neatly into a broader historic move towards punitivism. In the last 30 years alone, the prison population in England and Wales has ballooned by 70%, with Britain having the highest imprisonment rate in western Europe.
Official statistics provide useful quantitative analysis of deaths in prison, but they can obscure the human stories behind them.
Tommy Nicol was a 37-year-old mixed-race Middle Eastern man who was being held under an indeterminate imprisonment for public protection sentence. He took his own life in 2015, six years after he was jailed on a minimum four-year tariff.
Sarah Reed was a 32-year-old mixed-race Black woman who was remanded to prison for the sole purpose of obtaining psychiatric reports. Her mental health worsened severely in prison and she was treated as a discipline problem.
Mohammed Afzal was a 22-year-old man of Pakistani background who lost almost a third of his body weight during his 48 days in prison.
Garry Beadle was a 36-year-old white man on remand with a history of mental ill health and was briefly homeless. He told an officer he was a suicide risk, but the officer did not fully record this. He died after only six days in prison.
Thokozani Shiri was a 21-year-old Black man with HIV/Aids. Prison healthcare failed to provide him with life-saving antiretroviral medication during two periods of imprisonment. He told a prison officer: “I can’t breathe … I need to go to hospital,” but an ambulance was not called until five days later. While he was in an induced coma, prison staff restrained him with handcuffs.
An 18-year-old mother gave birth on her own in prison without medical assistance. Her child, Baby A, died, with a pathologist unable to determine if they were born alive or stillborn.
These tragedies reflect recurring issues arising from deaths in prison. Prisons, by their very nature, are dehumanising places that create and intensify vulnerability to violence and premature death.
The poor standard of mental and physical healthcare, ignored risk warnings, a failure to implement suicide prevention plans, the overuse of segregation, and slow emergency responses – as well as indefensible levels of neglect and despair – are problems that cut across all deaths in prison.
Our latest report reiterates that the deaths of racialised people in prison are among some of the most violent, contentious and neglectful of all prison deaths, with racial stereotyping and the hostile environment surfacing as specific issues. The death of Baby A and condition of countless women in prison demonstrate the broader systemic neglect of women’s health.
A constant stream of prison inspectorate reports, inquiries and inquest findings have produced rigorous, evidence-based recommendations to protect the health and safety of prisoners. However, these have been systematically ignored.
Families engage in post-death processes with the aim of ending preventable and premature deaths and seeing meaningful change.
And yet we see similar deaths repeated with depressing regularity, often in the same prison. This raises questions about the lamentable complacency around accountability at all levels of the Prison Service and government.
Prison is an expensive intervention that does not work, as demonstrated by high re-conviction rates. It fails prisoners, victims and communities. Instead of protecting the public from harm, it in fact perpetuates the cycle of harms and deaths. The morally indefensible tide of prison deaths, and the contentious nature of so many of them, reveals the intrinsic problems of the system.
To prevent future deaths, we must immediately halt prison-building, dramatically reduce the prison population and redirect resources from the criminal justice system to welfare, housing, education and health and social care. Through holistic investment in communities, we could address the root causes of crime and violence.
To build the public pressure required to do this, we need the public to stand with us in shining a light behind the closed doors of prisons, and speaking out about the deaths of people in their care. Say their names, and stand with their families for justice and change.
Deborah Coles is the executive director of Inquest, an independent charity working with families bereaved by state-related deaths; Jessica Pandian is a policy and research officer
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