Prisons - review (1)
01 January 1991
Prisons - review
artdoc October=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'.
Statewatch no 4 September/October 1991