At the end of 2018, I interviewed the prominent QC and defence barrister William Clegg about his recently released memoir. He spent much of the conversation excoriating the state of the British justice system: things, he said, were worse than they ever had been. Courts were closing because of cuts, legal aid had been obliterated, prisons were in crisis, and the Ministry of Justice budget had been slashed by 40% since 2010 – a rate that many in the legal profession have flagged as far deeper than those suffered by other Whitehall departments.
Why had this been allowed – or promoted – by those in power? His answer was clear enough: there are no votes in prisoners.
The upcoming general election feels unusually important. There will be much talk of Brexit policies, remainer alliances, Lib Dem surges, green new deals and spending pledges. Attention-grabbing flagship policies will be debated or torn to ribbons. Occasionally, the national media may even mention Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Those serving prison sentences – approximately 92,400 people – will hardly feature. In fact, they will have no chance to cast a ballot. Under the Representation of the People Act (1983), convicted prisoners are denied a vote in any UK election. The situation is supposed to be different for those on remand, or serving time as “civil prisoners” (such as debtors or those found in contempt of court), but in practice few exercise – or are even aware of – this right. The difficulties of applying for a postal vote in custody often prove off-putting.
The prospect of votes for prisoners remains distant, though it has been an irregular feature of Britain’s discourse since the European court of human rights ruled in 2005 that the ban breached human rights law – a ruling that successive governments have resisted. David Cameron was so disgusted by the idea of being compelled to give prisoners serving sentences shorter than four years the chance to vote that the thought of it made him feel “physically ill”. Granted, some progress has been made in Scotland since then.
The concept of disenfranchisement is nothing new, with its roots in the 19th century, when “civic death” was thought to be a fair and just accompaniment to incarceration – a double punishment that should be a “far cry from what we would expect from a 21st-century justice system and a modernised prison service”, in the words of Juliet Lyon, the former director of the Prison Reform Trust.
It’s probable that in the next few weeks we’ll hear vague talk about rehabilitation, if criminal justice is discussed at all. Boris Johnson has paid lip service to the idea of spending money on making sure prisons “don’t make bad people worse”, while also announcing £100m for “airport-style security for prisons” to supposedly stem the flow of drugs and contraband to inmates. There is also talk from the Tories of 20,000 new police officers (echoing Labour on this issue), £2.5bn to be spent on 10,000 prison spaces by the mid-2020s, the ending of early release for prisoners, as well as this week’s announcement that child murderers should expect life sentences without parole.
In short, the usual litany of Tory “law and order” reforms: red meat for the party’s base. No matter that many of these have already been condemned as fraudulent and unworkable, it’s the tone that apparently counts.
But you don’t have to look far to discover the chasm between this policy rhetoric and the realities of prison life. It recently came to light that there are widespread and serious failures across dozens of prisons in England and Wales regarding dedicated emergency telephone helplines – designed to prevent suicide and self-harm.
According to the Prison Reform Trust, at least 22 prisons had no publicly advertised hotline; in another 22, calls were simply not answered or were transferred to a general switchboard – and the majority that did go through went straight to answerphone. This news came after the MoJ published figures from the year to September 2019 showing a 22% rise in reported cases of self-harm in prisons to 60,594 incidents, with more than 90 self-inflicted deaths in the same period. When a resource as simple and crucial as phone helplines cannot be relied on, it becomes difficult to trust the official noise about rehabilitation and reform.
Most commentary on the current state of the UK’s penal system invariably focuses on the “Victorian squalor” of this or that prison. But each example is simply one part of a rotting system. The incarceration rate in England and Wales is already the highest in western Europe and is set to climb even further by 2023, according to the MoJ’s figures. What does it say about our society that it doesn’t allow those behind bars to have any meaningful say on the issues that will define their future, both inside and outside the prison walls?
• Francisco Garcia is a London-based writer and journalist
