Punishment does not make society safer or reduce crime. You don't have to take our word for it, numerous studies, statistics and real world examples bear this out.
Dear Shabana Mahmood,
We write to you in response to your department's proposed reviews to reform the prison system and in the context of the national conversation sparked by the current capacity crisis in the prison estate.
We are serving prisoners in HMP Send and we wanted to write to you with an inside perspective. We welcome the reviews that are to take place.
The increasingly punitive sentencing and treatment of people in the legal system is causing immeasurable harm to people inside and outside of prison and this must change.
Unshakeable
Firstly, it must be recognised that these reviews have been set up out of necessity in response to the unmanageable overcrowding in the prison estate.
Reaching this crisis of capacity of course compels a response, but we must name the fact that this is not just a crisis of capacity, it is an exposure of the structural violence at the heart of the UK legal system.
Therefore, whilst it is obvious that overcrowding is a big problem, we outrightly reject the proposal that solutions include building more prisons and, “exploring tougher punishments outside of prison”.
The root of this crisis is not the prison estate in isolation, but the unshakeable belief in punishment underpinning our justice system and the structural inequality in the way that punishment is meted out.
Punishment does not make society safer or reduce crime. You don't have to take our word for it, numerous studies, statistics and real world examples bear this out.
Positive
Many people convicted of crimes are already familiar with punishment to the trauma of abuse, poverty and racism. The majority of the time it is these things that have led them to commit crimes or be falsely criminalised, having done nothing wrong.
When we recognise this, the idea that further punishment will keep them out of the legal system in the future exposes itself as ludicrous.
You have expressed admiration of the style of reforms seen in Texas, but why look so far across the ocean to a country that still has the largest prison population in the world?
The obvious short term goal should be to emulate the approach taken by our neighbouring Scandinavian countries who have very low recidivism rates because their justice system focuses on rehabilitation and harm reduction rather than punishment.
We are talking about human beings, not beasts. We have finally learned that kicking a child harder and harder does not result in a positive change of behaviour. So why do we apply the opposite logic to adults in the legal system?
Principles
It is a dogma which defies everything that we know about each other. The key to a safe society is a compassionate and equitable one.
If people were cared for, if communities could sustain themselves, and if government acted in service to the whole of its population, the majority of people who pass through the legal system would never find themselves there in the first place.
Punishment does not make society safer or reduce crime. You don't have to take our word for it, numerous studies, statistics and real world examples bear this out.
We note that your department has stated three core principles that will guide the sentencing review being undertaken by David Gauke - to punish serious offenders, to reduce re offending and to explore tougher punishments outside of prison.
We wish to highlight the incompatibility of these principles. We will never reduce reoffending by relying on punishment inside or outside prison, and a review guided by such a principle will only reproduce violence and harm.
Taking the logic of prison and grafting it onto non custodial sentences will not lead to a safer society because it does not address the roots of the problem.
Safer
Punishing someone assumes that they are the problem. However, crime is the result of systemic oppression of certain sections of society through racialized harassment and economic impoverishment.
The criminalization process comes from the social conditions and profiling a person is subjected to, not some fault in the individual themselves.
This is true whether or not an act of harm has actually taken place. In no small number of cases, prisoners and convicted criminals have done nothing substantive to warrant being in the legal system at all.
They are merely criminalised as scapegoats for the failings of those in power. As the same sentencing review you have said that “this review, along with our prison building programme, will ensure that we never again have more prisoners than prison spaces”.
Surely it is not unreasonable to question whether the aim of such a review should really be about managing prison capacity, or whether it should rather be led by the aim of reducing harm and making society safer for everyone.
Decency
Because if that was the aim, the government would not be building more prisons and you would not be clinging on to the ideology of punishment.
A safer society is not one where more people are under the eye of law enforcement. It is one where fewer people are criminalised. That should be your aim.
We understand that the government faces the constant threat of backlash from the billionaire press. We recognise that they would slander an approach founded on care and rehabilitation and attempt to whip up rage against such an approach.
We want to remind you that you do not have to rise to this threat. The proof will be in the pudding, not what the tabloids say about the pudding.
You have spoken about the way your faith drives you to public service. You have said that the fundamental values of Islam compel you to believe in “decency and fairness “ and “not wanting to live in a society where there is conflict”.
Justice
We urge you to take action in accordance with this, because words alone are nothing without actions to make them a reality.
As it stands, we fear that your government's plans to reform the prison system are merely efforts to make it look like they are tackling the issue without fundamentally changing anything that risks the liberation of poor and racialized people because of a deep seated fear of empowerment of the matter.
If your government continues a mad tightrope dance between its public legitimacy and the capitalist imperative of oppressing certain groups, none of us will benefit from a safer, more connected society.
Instead, people will continue to be ruined, families broken and human lives devalued and thrown away by a legal system wedded to punishment. British public have long been encouraged to thirst for vengeance, but it is high time government told the truth.
Vengeance does not make us safer, punishment does not heal. You have a responsibility to challenge the narrative of reputation and to address the social deprivation and oppression that leads to crime and false criminalisation in the first place. Only then will we see the true meaning of the word justice.
Yours sincerely,
Louise Lancaster, Cressie Gethin, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Anna Holland. The authors are JSO women prisoners at Send HMP.