Responding to Ken Clarke’s rehabilitation revolution

The following article of the Weekly Worker touches the position of SPEW and therefore I'm opening a discussion about it:

Responding to Ken Clarke’s rehabilitation revolution

Reform should not come at the expense of inmates or prison workers, argues Eddie Ford



“Prison works!” Or at least that is what they used to tell us - like a mantra, from Michael Howard’s notorious 1993 speech at the Tory Party conference right up to the present day. Guided by this cruel and irrational ethos, which saw the authoritarian New Labour government dishing out more and tougher custodial sentences, prison numbers have risen relentlessly, to where they have now reached bursting point - or the official “useable operational capacity” of 87,859. So, according to the latest ministry of justice figures released on July 2, the prison population stood at 85,074 - with 2,433 others under various ‘home detention curfew supervision’ orders[1] and the home office predicting that the prison population will rise to at least 94,000 before the next general election if present trends continue. Even worse, we have had to endure a succession of politicians almost boasting about these appalling statistics - as if they were a sign of success, not grotesque failure.

But not any more, it seems. Hence Kenneth Clarke, the coalition government’s secretary of state for justice and longstanding president of the Tory Reform Group, last week launched a scathing assault on the “prison works” orthodoxy of his predecessors. Attacking the “failed” penal system, and stating what has always been obvious for those whose brains have not been zombified by the tabloid press, Clarke warned that simply “banging up more and more people for longer” actually makes the problem worse, not better - so that in our “worst prisons” such a regime just “produces tougher criminals”. Furthermore, he said, “many a man has gone into prison without a drug problem” and then “come out drug-dependent” - how can this be described as “protecting the public against crime”?

Indeed, Clarke questioned the entire punitive notion that building “ever more prisons for ever more offenders” was somehow beneficial to the public - and observed that the UK’s prison population was now among the highest in Europe. For Clarke, incarcerating such numbers of people “without actively seeking to change them” is the sort of thing “you would expect of Victorian England”. He went on to describe the current prison population as an “astonishing number” which he would have dismissed as an “impossible and ridiculous prediction” if it had been put to him as a forecast in 1992. Of course, Clarke pointed out that as a result more and more offenders are being “warehoused” in “outdated facilities”, and at vast public expense - leading to the crazy situation where it costs more to keep someone in prison - £38,000 per year per prisoner - than it does to “send a boy to Eton”.

Yet for all this money spent - some £4 billion a year to maintain the prison system - “no proper thought” is ever given as to what would actually be the “most effective way” to deal with prisoners. He went on to note that the reoffending rates among those given short sentences has reached 60% and is rising. This is hardly surprising, given the fact that it is “virtually impossible” to do “anything productive” with such offenders - many of whom, as Clarke pointed out, end up losing their jobs, their homes and their families during their short but personally destructive time inside. Rather, governmental policies have been driven far more by opportunist political expediencies than by logic or rationality - with Clarke accusing his predecessors, David Blunkett and John Reid, of administrating the prison system with “a cheque book in one hand and the Daily Mail in the other”.

In which case, stated Clarke, confronted by a system self-evidently not fit for purpose, we urgently need instead a “rehabilitation revolution”, one that involves “more intelligent sentencing”. As opposed to the current dysfunctional set-up, he called for prisons to become “places of education” and “hard work”. Really throwing the cat amongst the pigeons, Clarke pledged to cut back on the “absurd expansionism” of the previous government - ie, the coalition would lock up fewer people - and put his weight behind “radical” Tory plans to substantially increase participation by the voluntary and private sectors both inside and outside prison, which would involve “payment by results”. According to Clarke, under such schemes private companies would have “clear financial incentives” to prevent prisoners from reoffending and hence “success” would be measured - and rewarded - by “whether or not they are reconvicted within the first few years of leaving prison.”

Living as we are in the new age of austerity - of cuts, cuts, cuts - chucking billions down the black hole of prisons now looks like a monstrously inefficient use of money, which indeed it is by any objective or moral yardstick. In his 1991 white paper, the former Tory home secretary, Douglas Hurd - another ‘one nation’ social liberal like Clarke - described prison as an “expensive way of making bad people worse”, and that in the days when the prison population stood at ‘only’ 42,000. But, of course, for communists the overwhelming majority of prisoners are not “bad people” at all: they are much more the victims of a dog-eats-dog capitalist society. Thus, for example. two out of five prisoners lack basic literacy skills - around half of all prisoners have a reading age less than an 11-year-old - and four in five do not have basic numeracy. One in 10 male prisoners and one in three female prisoners are being treated for psychiatric disorders. The number of women in prison has risen disproportionately - from 1,800 in 1994 to 4,500 in 2004. Some 40% of women going to prison have previously attempted suicide. Almost 13% are inside for various drug-related offences. And on it goes, a catalogue of despair.

Therefore communists could not agree more that we need a “rehabilitation revolution” - that is, we should stop the obscene waste of human and financial resources that the UK prison system represents: a disgraceful monument to an almost medieval desire to inflict vindictive punishment upon the ‘wretched of the earth’. Needless to say, it follows from this that communists could not disagree more with the disgruntled philosophising of The Daily Telegraph, which feels obliged to remind Clarke that the “principal function of prison is to punish” - not to “treat or educate” the prisoners, “however benign the outcome might be”.[2] No, for that very small minority of people who require some sort of custodial sentence, and have to be imprisoned, then that should only be viewed as a temporary situation pending their rehabilitation back into society - and when in prison they should be treated as human beings.

However, though quite predictably, this has not been the sort of progressive, humane response to Clarke’s speech we have heard from prominent Labour Party figures - quite the opposite, in fact. Indeed, if anything, they have been competing as to who can come out with the most reactionary, illiberal sentiments possible - with the reward for the most venal remarks to date possibly going to Jack Straw, a former home secretary, of course. Writing in the Daily Mail - where else? - Straw castigates the “liberal approach” adopted by Clarke and successive pre-1997 governments when it comes to ‘crime and punishment’. Hence he comments on the “hand-wringing” approach to crime which “had risen during every administration”, whether Labour and Conservative, right from the end of World War II. Straw pours scorn on those who took refuge, as he sees it, in “‘respectable’ research evidence which confirmed the hand-wringing”.

But luckily, Straw informs his Mail readers, “there were some of us” - Michael Howard included, of course - “who did not share the hand-wringing approach”, before going on to boast about the number of people banged up by the Labour administration - “nearly an all-time high”. In fact the “increased number of offenders sentenced to prison” was a “key factor in reducing crime”. Straw asks: “Does anyone seriously believe that crime would have come down and stayed down without these extra prison places?” Straw very much regrets that David Cameron has allowed the government’s penal policy to be “dictated not by his own common sense”, but by Clarke “in alliance with 57 Liberal Democrat MPs” - who are “using the need to cut the deficit to pursue what they have always wanted”: a “more weak penal policy”.[3]

With this vile Daily Mail article, Straw - and all those in the Labour Party who think like him - have positioned themselves on this matter to the right of the coalition government, which is quite a remarkable achievement, considering that the present administration is possibly the most reactionary government in Britain since the 1930s - certainly as far as its strategic assault on our class is concerned.

Then we have the reaction of the prison officers’ union, the POA - until earlier this year its general secretary was Brian Caton, a member of the Socialist Party in England and Wales. According to a July 1 press statement, the POA was “furious” about Clarke’s intention to extend the role of the private sector “at the expense of prison officers’ jobs” - with Steve Gillan, the new general secretary, making clear his view that the justice secretary wants to “sell prison officer jobs to the lowest bidder in the private sector”. So far, so good, But Gillan goes on to say that Clarke’s “statements about rehabilitation revolution are even ridiculed from within his own party”. They are “half-baked”, not to mention “dangerous”. He warns that the POA “have the appropriate mandates from our members to take strike action to protect our jobs when necessary” and concludes: “We will not stand by and watch the public endangered. Nor will we stand by and watch our jobs sold”.[4]

So what attitude should communists take towards the POA’s “furious” opposition to Clarke’s “rehabilitation revolution” and to prison officers in general? Well, there is much that is supportable in their statement. Yes, Clarke’s plans are obviously “half-baked”, seeing that the coalition’s austerity drive demands a 25% cut - except in health and international aid - for all government departments, which must therefore include cuts to the various probationary and rehabilitative services. That will actually lead to more recidivism and very likely to more people receiving a custodial sentence of some description. Equally as obvious, communists are opposed to PFI involvement in the running of prisons, as it will inevitably lead to penny-pinching and a further deterioration of the already appalling conditions that prisoners have to put up with. More to the point, privatisation is a weapon used against workers and their unions and must be opposed for that reason. Nor, unsurprisingly, do communists support measures that will see prison officers, as workers, thrown onto the dole.

However, having said that, it is important to read between the lines of the POA statement. In what way are Clarke’s plans “dangerous” and how will they see “the public endangered”? Because more bad people will be free to roam the streets if prison numbers are reduced? Does Gillan mock Clarke’s “rehabilitation revolution” because he prefers prison? There is more than a hint of blind sectionalism: it could easily be interpreted as saying: ‘We are for more prison places because that means more prison jobs.’

Which leads me to my second point. We cannot simply treat the POA like any other trade union - purely as ‘workers in uniform’ just like any other section of the working class - and thus accord the POA the status of a ‘normal’ trade union, no different from the National Union of Mineworkers or the National Union of Teachers. This, of course, is the economist and rightist position of SPEW and the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain, which in the eventuality of any POA strike action will automatically - and routinely - support it as they would any other strike action by any other union.

The plain fact of the matter is that POA members are responsible for the daily, direct, physical oppression of the most downtrodden section of the working class - a section which has increased in numbers with each month and year that has gone by. So, yes, to that extent prison officers are oppressors in uniform. But this in no way means that communists regard POA members merely as representatives or agents of the oppressive state machinery, obliging us to shrilly denounce any display of solidarity or political sympathy with striking rank and file POA members as virtually an act of class treachery. This would be plain stupid, even if it is the stance taken by leftist moralists like the International Bolshevik Tendency or the Revolutionary Communist Group.

In other words, the POA has a dual nature - workers’ in uniform and agents of state oppression. Consequently, we in the CPGB have always opposed any demands or actions of the POA that could only come at the expense of prisoners, like even longer lock-up times or sadistic refinements to the means of oppression - bigger and harder batons/shields, use of water cannons or tear-gas, etc. But at the same time we critically support those demands - just as we would with rank and file police officers and members of the armed forces - that act to cohere intra-solidarity against the senior officers/management and thus help to undermine and eventually split the state machine.

Therefore communists should favour strike action by militant prison warders to the extent that they are defending their pay, jobs and hours and not the right to be better armed oppressors. Furthermore, if the UK prison population was to be drastically reduced - something which should be welcomed - thus reducing the need for large numbers of prison officers, then there should be retraining and voluntary transfer to other spheres of work.
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Notes

1. www.hmprisonservice.gov.uk/resourcecentre/publicationsdocuments/index.asp?cat=85
2. The Daily Telegraph July 7.
3. Daily Mail June 30.
4. www.poauk.org.uk/index.php?press-releases&newsdetail=20100701-10_poa-threaten-strike-action

Especially the following bit spells out my thoughts on the subject:

In other words, the POA has a dual nature - workers’ in uniform and agents of state oppression. Consequently, we in the CPGB have always opposed any demands or actions of the POA that could only come at the expense of prisoners, like even longer lock-up times or sadistic refinements to the means of oppression - bigger and harder batons/shields, use of water cannons or tear-gas, etc. But at the same time we critically support those demands - just as we would with rank and file police officers and members of the armed forces - that act to cohere intra-solidarity against the senior officers/management and thus help to undermine and eventually split the state machine.

The bit I boldened is the important bit for me. As communists we should work to split the statemachinery and cultivate a sense of working class awareness, the fact that rank and file prison officers have more in common with the prisoners they are guarding than with the senior officers they're reporting to. This position is however not something I read in The Socialist, so is the Weekly Worker correct to criticize SPEW for what they call a "rightist economist" position? How do you feel we should interact with "workers in uniform"?

There can be no interaction with "workers in uniform" if the said "workers in uniform" continue to abuse their power and mistreat proletarian prisoners despite their "official political" claims to be socialists.

Which is why I insist that socialism is explicitly moral/ethical, and the personal and political aspects cannot be separated distinctively. I refuse to have any co-operation with any "workers in uniform" who "politically" support socialism but "personally" continue to abuse proletarian prisoners etc. These people can go and fuck themselves.

However, in general principle I do not rule out politically co-operating with "workers in uniform", as long as they reject the prisoner-abusing behaviours of the capitalist establishment and personally see themselves as being much closer to the proletarian prisoners than to the bourgeois state.

And here is a reply by the current POA General Secretary, Steve Gillan, We don’t make the laws. We do a job.

We don’t make the laws. We do a job

Steve Gillan, new general secretary of the prison officers’ union, the POA, wrote to the CPGB in response to Eddie Ford’s article last week. Mark Fischer spoke to him



Could you tell us something about your political and trade union background?

I joined the prison service some 20 years ago. I was actually looking for a secure job. My employment was erratic prior to this, I had a young family and felt I needed something secure. Something that provided a long-term future for them. I also wanted to work in the public sector - it was a way to give something back to society.

So I started in HMP Chelmsford and I very quickly became a branch official. I suppose coming from a town like Greenock in Scotland meant that my roots were steeped in trade unionism. My grandfather, my uncles and my father himself all worked in the shipyards. There was a very strong union backdrop to my upbringing - the Clydeside and its history. I believe every worker has a basic right to join a union and to be treated with respect as a worker. Trade unions are about winning and keeping that respect for workers.

As I say, I was a branch official early on in Chelmsford and I soon became assistant secretary at national level for the POA. Then I was national vice-chairman for four or five years, afterwards the finance office of the union for a similar period and finally general secretary.

As to my political background, I’ve voted Labour all my life. That was the tradition in Scotland; it was what I was brought up with. I’m a Labour Party member - but I’m not now, nor have I ever been, New Labour. I’m old Labour, if such a thing exists. New Labour has done nothing good for working men and women in Britain. I have to say, I actually struggled this time round to vote for Labour. I was deeply dissatisfied with the Blair-Brown mantra, the way they dealt with the Iraq war, or why young men and women are being sent to die in Afghanistan - a war probably to do with money and oil rather than any notion of ‘democracy’.

But, when it came to it, my roots wouldn’t allow me to vote anything other than Labour, although there isn’t a fag paper between the policies of New Labour and the Tories, when all said and done. They share the love affair with the private sector, with the private finance initiative to fund schools, hospitals and prisons.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? People don’t generally want to talk about prisons in the same breath as our education system, the national health service, housing and so on. But why not? After all, it’s the taxpayer that funds it. So a hospital, or a school or a prison should be equally important to the taxpayer because they are paying for it - they should have as much interest in the penal system as they have in the education system. They should want to know what’s going on, there should be scrutiny and transparency.

For instance, I think the general public should be concerned and want to know why we are holding 86,000 prisoners in this country - something I think is obviously wrong.

Here you might see a parallel between what I’m saying and what Ken Clarke has said. But that’s not accurate. What Clarke was effectively saying was that the onus must be shifting away from the state to the private sector. I still agree with what Jack Straw said prior to 1997, before Labour coming to power - back then, he, Prescott and Blair all said that privatisation of prisons was morally repugnant. Yet New Labour in government opened more private prisons than the Tories.

Now, listening to my views, some people might think this odd. Here I am talking about old Labour, I head a trade union that has taken militant strike action over the past few years, in defiance of court injunctions. Yet the POA is composed of people that some might simply describe as officers of the state. Well, I think every worker has a fundamental right to join a trade union simply by dint of being a worker. So I believe that a policeperson has the right to join a trade union. A British soldier - should they have that right? Of course they should. Trade unions are basic organisations for the defence of workers’ right. Perhaps if people in the army and police were in proper trade unions - let’s leave aside the Police Federation for the time being - then things would be very different for them.

Trade unions in the army would not only fight for better conditions for the rank and file soldiers: they would be able to question, as a collective organisation of soldiers, why we are actually at war in Afghanistan in the first place, for example.

You’ve obviously touched on something important here; something that causes some controversy on the left. Let me put it bluntly. Bus drivers wear uniforms and go off to work every day to earn their wages. Prison officers also wear uniforms and go in to graft for their daily bread. You ain’t exactly bus drivers, though, are you …?

No, absolutely correct! We’re not the same in that sense. But I wrote to you because of this section in the Eddie Ford article in last week’s Weekly Worker, which I take objection to. Let me quote it:

“We cannot simply treat the POA like any other trade union - purely as ‘workers in uniform’ just like any other section of the working class - and thus accord the POA the status of a ‘normal’ trade union, no different from the National Union of Mineworkers or the National Union of Teachers. This, of course, is the economist and rightist position of SPEW and the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain, which in the eventuality of any POA strike action will automatically - and routinely - support it, as they would any other strike action by any other union.

“The plain fact of the matter is that POA members are responsible for the daily, direct, physical oppression of the most downtrodden section of the working class - a section which has increased in numbers with each month and year that has gone by.”

From my point of view that is simplistic and I don’t view our role as such. Look, we as prison officers try our best, under the most difficult of circumstances, to rehabilitate prisoners. Personally, I’m proud of the things I have done in that context. The problems you were referring to are very much of the past when there were too many bad apples. Of course, we still have those - but that’s no different from any other occupation, like teachers, doctors or even MPs. But I see our job as helping to rehabilitate the people we look after, not ‘physically oppress’ them. These people are locked up by the courts - we don’t arbitrarily pick them up off the streets. Society decides that they will be imprisoned; society has its rules. We have no control over that.

What this trade union is saying is that there needs to be a root and branch examination of the whole criminal justice system. Those members of our society who end up in prison represent a failure of our society as a whole, not simply the people who might turn the key at night.

Alcohol abuse, drug abuse, mental health problems, plus poverty and social alienation. Until we start to address these sorts of problems in a fundamental way, we are not going to be looking seriously at the causes of crime.

It’s easy for Ken Clarke to come along and talk about a “rehabilitation revolution” - at the same time they’re cutting the budgets for probation and other related services. It’s fantasy, pure fantasy. If they really wanted that ‘revolution’, then they would be seriously addressing the social causes of crime.

OK, so you often deal with the products of our ‘broken society’, but not only them …

Oddly enough, I’ve just come back from the Durham miners’ gala - Durham prison actually had a lot of miners locked up in the strike …

Exactly my point. We’re talking about a situation looming in this country where there will be a rise in working people’s struggles. You talk about the anti-trade union laws and the repressive legislation against working class organisation. Yet you could be in the position in the not too distant future of turning the key on activists and militants who have fallen foul of those laws. Again, this does say something about the ‘duality’ of prison officers - workers and trade unionists, but …

I can see that. There will be those in the movement that look at us with suspicion, that are unsure about our reliability as comrades, if you like. I would simply say, it’s not us that make the rules. We don’t make the laws. We do a job. First,

Take the PCS. They have members in the dole offices, in the tax offices, in the immigration services, etc. That doesn’t stop them being ’t make them enemies.

True, when we turn up at some trade union forums and conferences, we get a degree of hostility. I can understand that. (And by the way, sometimes we get hostility because we’ve been too militant. For the last two years, we’ve called for a general strike against anti-union laws - that’s earned us some dirty looks as well!). But we actually need some fighting unity in our ranks,

No-one ever reports the good things prison officers do - and we used to have more time to do these sorts of things when the prison population was just 40-odd thousand. This was one true thing Ken Clarke did point to. No-one ever talks about the prison officer who sits in a kid’s cell and talks him out of self-harm or suicide. I can bring to mind thousands of cases when an officer has stayed after work to undertake that sort of care of prisoners. You get an instinct for it. It’s part of the job that is not recognised by the wider

We are not rightwing skinhead boot boys, covered in tattoos, people who ’s a parody of the truth.

A part of rehabilitation has to be a huge expansion of prisoners’ rights, surely? It’s not simply a question of a Mr Barrowclough on your wing as opposed to a Mr Mackay, if we can put it in Porridge terms. We are trying to integrate people back into a society they feel part of and have a stake in. What’s the attitude of the POA to prisoners’ rights - work at trade union rates, the right to vote, etc?

The political climate at the moment makes it hard to come out with a positive agenda like this. Of course, it is appalling when someone says we should bang people up and throw away the key. If you take away hope from people, the prisons become hellholes for prisoners and officers alike.

Should prisoners get the vote? I don’t think that’s really for me to pass a comment on. Parliament says no. The majority of the public would say no, I guess. Until that changes, we just implement the rules. Although organising ballot boxes in prisons would be a bit of nightmare!

There is a tendency to see prison as something alien. It’s not. It’s like the way the rightwing media brand prisons as ‘breeding grounds for terrorists’ as far as Muslims are concerned. No, prisons don’t make young men and women from a Muslim background turn to terrorism - society does that. Prison simply reflects the wider reality.

You’ve been at pains to emphasise the trade union credentials of the POA, which is fair enough. But, given the sections of society you deal with, the job you do, a narrow approach to what constitutes a ‘trade union issue’ for the POA - just pay, conditions, etc - can lead you in quite reactionary directions.

That’s precisely why our union calls for a thorough overhaul of the way our society deals with drugs, for example.

As a prison officer I was appalled when they effectively legalised cannabis. I have seen the effects on people’s lives and families that addiction to this ‘soft’ drug has had. The same with alcohol. But then there’s the problem of prohibition - do that and you simply hand a huge, lucrative industry over to gangsters. So, until we start addressing these questions rationally, we will have the ongoing problems of society reflected in the criminal justice system.

I think you’re right - the POA should have a leading voice in the overhaul of the system, as it’s our members who are working at the ‘coalface’. Take the irrationality of the fact that we are stopping building schools, but there are more PFI prisons in the pipeline. Educate our kids better, give them some hope and a future, then perhaps we wouldn’t need as many prisons.

It’s time for a rethink, we say.

While the demands of prison officers aren't related to my "tough on crime" discussion, perhaps you could post at least the first article, which touches upon the punishment-vs-rehabilitation debate.

personally, i think there is a big debate to be had re prison officers, and there's not really a wrong or right answer to it as i can see both sides. i think as far as the POA are concerned we should give them critical support because attacks to their conditions hurt everyone including (espeically) the prisoners, and if prisons get privatised to the extent they are in the US then they will become even more of a hell hole than they are already

and its very difficult in the case of where to draw the line etc - teachers, job centre staff, etc, all have a role of social control to some extent, but few would argue that those unions shouldnt be supported
i do see where the critics are coming from tho, so its a really difficult one

I would also say that for years they have been trying to stop the prison officers' right to strike etc. If this happened, don't you think that the situation for prisoners might get even worse?