Why we should abolish imprisonment for children and young people (original) (raw)
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Justice, Power and Resistance , 2018
This activist contribution draws upon the issues emphasised by abolitionist activists in their struggles throughout 2017 (and before) to challenge government plans to build at least six new mega prisons in England and Wales by 2020. This activist contribution focuses specifically on the arguments utilised by campaigners in one of the proposed sites for a new mega prison: Bickershaw, in the borough of Wigan, Greater Manchester.
Crossey, P. (2011) Interview: Rod Morgan, Prison Service Journal, 193, 37-42
Special Edition: Where does the prison system go from here? This special edition of Prison Service Journal has been commissioned in order to explore the question: where does the prison system go from here? This question has been posed as the prison system is at the start of a period of potential change. There are at least three elements to this change. The first is that the global economic crisis that started in 2007 has led to the necessity to look afresh at how public services are delivered. The Spending Review was announced in October 2010 in order to provide a national plan for tackling the deficit in public finances. This is to be achieved predominantly by reducing public spending rather than by raising additional revenue. For the Ministry of Justice this will mean a 23 per cent reduction in funding over a four year period. Meeting this challenge will mean asking questions about the use of imprisonment. Can it continue to be used at the same rate and expanded at the same pace as over the last 15 years? Can it continue to be delivered in the same way? Will prison services have to be scaled back? Will they have to be delivered by different providers? These are all questions that have confronted governments around the world over the last three and a half years and will continue to challenge them. For many, this has led to a shift in their thinking about how many people should be in prison as well as what services they receive whilst they are incarcerated.
What is to be done? Thinking about abolitionist alternatives
The prison is unequalled in pain. Uniquely designed and operationalised through deliberate pain infliction it performs a key function in the maintenance of blatantly unequal societies through the control of poor, marginalised and disproportionately BME male lawbreakers (for overview of contemporary debates and discussion in penal theory see Scott, 2013b). But diagnosis and critique of the pains and harms of penal incarceration is not enough. It is also essential that consideration is given to feasible, policy relevant and progressive interventions that can challenge gross economic and social inequalities and mitigate the humanitarian crises confronting contemporary penal practices, without abandoning the broader obligation to promote radically alternative responses to troublesome human conduct and the logic of capitalist accumulation. This necessitates recognition and engagement with the problems and possibilities of our historical moment alongside a disruption of the ideological limitations placed upon what are considered appropriate and feasible means of social and penal transformation. Such engagement must be rooted in a normative framework – what I have described elsewhere as the ‘abolitionist compass’ (Scott, 2013a) - that can assist our navigation away from deeply entrenched social inequalities and the problems associated with the criminal process.