Imagine a judge making these sentencing remarks to a man found guilty of rape: “This is one of the most vicious crimes I have come across. I am therefore adding an extra sanction to your sentence. You will be sent to a prison ward where you yourself are very likely to be raped.”
Or imagine a judge saying this, to a female murderer, found guilty of killing babies and now pregnant herself: “Because of the seriousness of your actions, an additional punishment will be added to your life sentence. You will be left to give birth in a cell alone, in conditions where your own child will be more likely to die. No officer will respond to your pleas for help.”
Or, say, this, to a people trafficker: “You have preyed on vulnerable people, and kept them in cruel conditions. And because of this, you will be sent to a prison ward infested with rats, where you will be locked up for 22 hours a day, sharing a cell designed for one person.”
Does this sound like the bleakest of dystopias?
Well, that dystopia is here. We already award these extra sanctions to those sent to prison – just in a rather less organised manner. It may be unspoken in sentencing remarks, but the judiciary and the public know these things happen behind bars. And frequently, too.
Prison rape, for example, is rife and rising. An Observer investigation this year found that about 1,000 rapes have taken place in prisons since 2010 – rates have shot up since 2016. And that’s just the reported incidents. According to the Howard League for Penal Reform, research into these sorts of abuses is scant – in closed systems holding both vulnerable and dangerous people, rape is likely to be even more prevalent. The studies that exist have uncovered “pervasive routine physical victimisation” of prisoners – by fellow inmates and sometimes by staff.
Self-harm is also shockingly common – 16,543 incidents were recorded in men’s prisons in the first quarter of this year, a rate that is 11 times higher in women’s prisons and which has doubled in the past 10 years. A recent inquest into the death of a newborn baby in Bronzefield jail in Surrey found that her mother – on remand after pleading guilty to robbery – had repeatedly called for help as she was giving birth, but had been ignored. Blood spattered the cell and the child could not be revived.
In Wandsworth, where a terror suspect recently reportedly escaped, inmates were found to be held in squalid conditions, sharing cells built for one and denied showers for days at a time – a result of too few officers and too little space. A court in Germany decided not to extradite a criminal to the UK recently because of the conditions he would face. Strange, though, given the horror of what happens in our prisons, that it rarely seems to constitute an emergency in itself. Jail overcrowding hit political agendas last week – but only because we have reached the point where we have run out of space entirely, meaning some criminals will be spared prison temporarily while solutions are found. The justice secretary, Alex Chalk, has announced the government is considering renting jail space in Estonia. Labour has vowed to build more prisons (but has not mentioned recruiting more staff).
In other words, overcrowding becomes an urgent problem only when it threatens the safety of the public – not the safety of inmates. Both main parties fear being seen as “too soft” on prisoners, and this concern may well be justified. YouGov surveys find a roughly consistent 50% of respondents think living conditions in jail are too easy – only 7% believe they are too harsh.
Are we unaware of the horrible things that happen to prisoners, or is it that we simply don’t care? It is not as if these problems go unreported, or that they do not show up in popular culture. For decades, in fact, prison rape has been a punchline in movies and TV shows – particularly in American culture, which spills into ours. So prevalent and accepted are these jokes in Hollywood that they appear even in films aimed at children. In Puss in Boots, for example, Humpty Dumpty expresses fear about “what they do to eggs in San Ricardo’s prison”.
Do we on some level believe this kind of violence is an acceptable punishment for anyone sent to prison? Perhaps we feel that when it comes to breaking the law, no deterrent is too steep. Or perhaps we think that if rape and assault have to happen somewhere, better that they happen in prison, against a more deserving population. In the hierarchy of social problems, the experiences of wrongdoers may come fairly low on the list.
But even if this is your belief, there is a practical reason to care about the treatment of prisoners: it is tied closely to public safety. Brutalised prisoners kept in their cells for most of the day are much harder to rehabilitate. There is wide international consensus that punitive approaches have worse outcomes – criminals reoffend and end up back in the justice system, at the taxpayer’s expense. When you send someone to a dystopian horror house, you don’t expect an upstanding citizen to come out the other side.
In fact, it is the impulse to punish wrongdoers with ever-tougher sanctions that has led to jails overfilling in the first place – and has meant that convicted criminals are (temporarily) on the loose. Since the Conservatives have been in power, more people have been in jail for longer, at the expense of community sentences. But someone needs to be brave enough to point out that treating prisoners like humans – with proportional punishments – helps everyone. Justice, after all, does matter. Perhaps Keir Starmer, with his background as a prosecutor, is the man to do it.
• Martha Gill is an Observer columnist
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