‘So far we have successfully avoided loss of life during serious
disturbances but if the present trend continues there will be a
serious loss of control… In such circumstances there is a
probability of both staff and prisoners being killed.’ This
dramatic warning, given by the prison governors to the Labour Home
Secretary, Mr Merlyn Rees, stimulated the setting up of the May
Committee in 1978. That Committee then reported and revealed how
dangerously explosive the prison system had become. The time was
exactly right therefore for a book like Prison Crisis, originally
published in 1980, to draw together all of the issues to provide an
agenda for public and politicians to use this best chance in one
hundred years for a major reform of the prison system. One issue
above all symbolises those which affect the prison system and the
prison service, and of course the prisoners themselves; for it
exposes why the system is dangerously close to breakdown:- ‘The
extent of prison overcrowding is a national disgrace. In 1978, for
the first time, as many as 16,000 inmates in some of the most
primitive of Britain’s prisons were forced to live two or three
to a cell which the Victorians had built to hold one. They have not
even washbasins in their cells, let alone lavatories… Sometime
prisoners are locked in together for twenty-three hours out of
twenty-four, sleeping, smoking eating, urinating and defecating
without privacy in sickening sight, smell and sound of each
other.’ The author, who had been Home Affairs Correspondent of
The Times for ten years, raises, as Sir Robert Marks puts it in his
Foreword, ‘all sorts of issues which could and should be of great
interest to a caring public’ and which now demand decision and
action: how best to hold the top-security prisoners, including
terrorists, how prisons are often forced, with psychiatric cases,
to do the job of hospitals; ‘the academies of crime’, detention
centres and borstals; the rise in female, and particularly juvenile
crime; violence in prisons and riot control; the prisoners’
rights movement; discontent among prison officers not just over pay
but over the status of their job and the importance of their role
in re-educating prisoners; the governors’ position of
responsibility without power; the low political priority given by
Government. Finally, in a chapter aptly called ‘Rescuing the
Prisons’, Peter Evans conducts a wide-ranging, well informed and
radical debate on what, at different levels, needed to be done to
make a system rooted in the nineteenth century fit for the
twenty-first century and still retain the sense that prisons are
above all a moral issue.
General
Imprint: |
Taylor & Francis
|
Country of origin: |
United Kingdom |
Series: |
Routledge Library Editions: Prison and Prisoners |
Release date: |
October 2023 |
First published: |
1980 |
Authors: |
Peter Evans
|
Dimensions: |
216 x 138mm (L x W) |
Pages: |
180 |
ISBN-13: |
978-1-03-256395-4 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
1-03-256395-8 |
Barcode: |
9781032563954 |
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