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Prisons - review

01 September 1991

When you aint got nothing, you got nothing to lose - the Peterhead Rebellion the state and the case for prison abolition, Joe Sim, Institute of Crime Justice and Welfare Studies, Liverpool Polytechnic, Liverpool L3 2ET pp44. Paper presented at the British Criminology Conference July 1991.

The paper looks at why the state has problems restoring order and achieving hegemony in the prison system. The reasons include the emergence of radical prisoners' rights organisations; the critique of the radical critical criminologists who counterposed the individualistic explanation of prison conflict with an understanding of the wider structural processes; the continuing conflicts between management and prisoner officers and between the prisoners and the prison managers. At the centre of the paper is a critique of "Opportunity and Responsibility" published by the Scottish Office in 1990 after a sustained period of conflict in Scottish prisons. One of the many areas ignored in the prison debate is that of accountability where a "highly discretionary operational culture" allows prison staff "a tight degree of control over the confined which is often unregulated and unaccountable."

The paper ends by arguing the case for abolitionism: "Like dinosaurs, prisons in their present form should become part of an era of human history that is worth studying but to which we would not want to return."