SALIENT’s Richard Kirkham visited The Snaith School in the East Riding of Yorkshire on the 9th December 2024, where he spoke to Year 9 students as part of their studies exploring ‘Life on the Edge’ and wider issues associated with crime and punishment.
Richard’s session, which was organised by the English Department at Snaith, explored ‘Prisons, Prisoners, Protest and our Human Rights’ – with a focus on the challenges faced by the Prison and Probation Services, most notably, the significant rise in the UK’s prison population during the past 5 years.
The students were challenged to think about the reasons for imprisonment and the wider issues in society that influence the likelihood of an individual entering custody such as poor housing, unemployment, exclusion from education, care experience and access to physical and mental health services. We also discussed organised crime and the damage to communities caused by so-called ‘county lines’ – this is a subject of a 3-part documentary currently featuring on BBC Radio 4 [1].
The importance of independent monitoring and inspection of our prisons, young offender institutions and immigration detention facilities was also explored during the session; a simple provocation – ‘why should we uphold human rights in prison?’ was discussed in the context of British Values and the Rule of Law. This was a particularly timely discussion given the events that were being played out in Damascus at the time.
The public is familiar with the pressures facing the UK’s prison system. The Government’s recent decision to allow some prisoners to serve 40% of their sentence in prison rather than 50%, with the remainder of their sentences being served in the community under the supervision of probation, is designed to ease pressure on the demand for places across the prison estate. It has proved controversial and may yet prove to be a ‘stop-gap’ rather than a solution to a resilience problem that is intractable.
The Government has committed to building more new prison places, but has tempered this with a need to recognise that increased capacity alone will not solve the problem. In evidence to the Justice Select Committee on the following day, the Secretary of State remarked:
“We simply cannot build our way out of this problem, so in order to make sure there’s always a prison place for the people that need to be locked up and that we never run out of prison places again, we do have to have an independent review of sentencing.”
The Snaith students offered some interesting views on the problems of creating additional capacity in our prison estate, with some suggesting that it might lead to more people being imprisoned. The Norwegian model of a ‘waiting-list’ (to enter into custody after sentencing) was suggested by some students as a potential way forward.
The session concluded with a discussion on protest in prisons – including the 1990 Strangeways Prison Riot and the Suffragettes in Holloway Prison (1909). These events (and similar protests at prisons such as Barlinnie in Glasgow [2]) were framed as a complex paradox; these events featured criminal acts yet the outcome was to create the necessary conditions for transformation change and reform. The protests at Strangeways led to Lord Justice Woolf’s inquiry and subsequently, his report ‘Prison Disturbances April 1990: Report of An Inquiry’ (1991), which is widely viewed as one of the most ground-breaking and transformational reports in recent prison history.
As for the Suffragettes…..well, we all know how that ended. Universal Suffrage!
Ones to listen/watch
[1] ‘County Lines’ https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0025d4q
[2] ‘Inside Barlinnie’ https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m0023r11/inside-barlinnie
SALIENT is the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) funded ‘Building a secure and resilient world: research and co-ordination hub’. We are a collaboration of the universities of Manchester, Bath, Exeter, and Sussex. Our work focuses on national security and resilience through a human-centred systems approach.
The Snaith School is a coeducational secondary school with academy status, located in Snaith in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. The school was founded in 1899. thesnaithschool.org.uk/
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