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The UK made international news this week: “UK prisons overcrowded after racist riots”.
Our protruding prisons are, it appears, a brand-new problem as Labour’s “riot clampdown leaves justice system on the brink” (according to GB News).
Mere weeks after reporting Labour’s “shameless scaremongering” about prison overcrowding, The Mail warns Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s “tough crackdown” has left jails “clogged up” by sentenced rioters.
“This is not news”, said Lady Unchained, poet and ex-prisoner, on Media Storm. “If you know nothing about the criminal justice system, you’re like ‘Oh my God, we’re in crisis!’ We who once lived in it understand that it’s been like this for a very long time.”
The news loves things to be new. Right-wing papers also like it to be Labour’s fault. But prisons are overcrowded not because of recent sentences, but because the UK is both Western Europe’s “highest incarcerator” and one of the worst at funding them. The latter can be blamed on Conservative austerity, but the former is cross-party, with pre-election Labour pledging yet more prison places in exchange for power.
To be clear, the male prison estate has been operating at “higher than 99%” occupancy since January 2023.
This is why David Navarro, Media Storm’s second guest this week, had to learn the tricks-of-the-trade to getting a rare single cell during his decade locked up in overcrowded British prisons. Spoiler: it doesn’t play to a rehabilitative environment. “You have to be a ‘high-risk prisoner, a risk to your cellmate, so a lot of prisoners manufacture things to become ‘high-risk’”.
Navarro and Lady Unchained represent the voices missing in a conversation which has, grat