‘Prison Doesn’t Work – it Won’t for Those Jailed for the Riots Either’

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, gratefully, emerged in the mainstream media in reaction to the ‘current’ crisis – a nuanced discussion about what prison is actually for.

Hearing prison officers begging for “a purposeful regime” on national news is a welcome break from the default tabloid response to prison reform (outrage over treating humans humanely). But Media Storm’s focus on speaking to ex-prisoners delivers something new to the conversation.

Both black, both overfamiliar with the racial bias of the justice system that served them, both somewhat surprised it served white rioters a dose of the same medicine – neither Navarro nor Lady Unchained approve.

“I don’t think it will work because [the rioters] need to get actual support,” said Lady Unchained. “They need to get real education about the other people that are around them, the history of the UK, and why a lot of us are here.”

Navarro goes further, reaching across the race gap to rioters whose plight – at its core – he feels many prisoners understand. “This whole riots thing – even the whole ‘prisons being full’ and that – it’s a distraction from the bigger issue, which is that poverty comes with crime. Instead of addressing that, certain news outlets are pushing this [tough-on-crime] narrative” – the same outlets, he points out, that “regularly race-bait” and helped stir up the riots in the first place.

There was another major headline this week that sharpened the spotlight on the UK’s criminal justice system: data revealing one child had been strip-searched every 14 hours over the past five years.

Navarro’s own continuous childhood strip-searches contributed to a dataset in which black children were four times as likely to experience this. He’s not sure that any child should have to: “At the end of the day, you have to get naked as a child”. At none of these procedures was he accompanied by the mandatory ‘trusted adult’, a parent or guardian. At none, was any weapon or drug found on him. 

Which is not to say he wasn’t up to no good. Police justifications revolve around a duty of care to protect the children they are searching, and those around them, from imminent danger – for example from gangs, who are increasingly using children’s bodies to transport or store illegal drugs.

Does it feel like it’s being done to protect you? “No!” Navarro laughed at our question. “How is giving them a criminal record helping them? You’re basically setting them up to fail” – not just with the record, but perhaps even more alarmingly, he points out, by landing them thousands of pounds in drug-debt to gangs who then have leverage to force them into permanent bondage. The goal, Navarro reiterates, is not to catch you from falling into crime, it’s to catch you out. 

So is this sad truth any less true for child rioters now facing years in custody? The evidence does not applaud a penalty-first approach to the crimes of children who have grown up in poverty with inadequate state support – this doesn’t change according to the child’s political tribe. In progressives’ rush to condemn racist riots, many who know this deep down have stayed silent. But those who’ve been through the system, our guests this week, do not.

Like the media, Labour has been selective in its messaging. In July, Starmer reaped applause from progressives for his bold appointment of prisons minister James Timpson – not an MP, but a shoe repair CEO and Prison Reform Trust chair, a man known for hiring hundreds of former criminals and braving tabloid fury by saying: “Only a third of inmates should actually be in jail”. Where was this mantra as Starmer declared rioters must feel “the full force of the law”?

“Prison makes people bad,” one ‘revolving-door’ ex-inmate told Media Storm. It took David Breakspear nine criminal sentences to break a cycle in which behind-bars networking, combined with prison’s impact on his employability, sucked him into steadily more serious criminal involvement. “It’s criminogenic!”

Is Labour’s short-term memory a political bias, serving no grace to criminals of far-right tinge? More likely, it is an emergency reflex: stop the disorder now at any cost, let another government pay for it thrice in the long-term. No one in criminal justice shares their illusion that pushing penal reform will take anything less than controversial consistency: so far we have not seen it.

Three years ago, when we first launched Media Storm, “burnt-out” prison officer John Sampson told us: “Prisons are so overcrowded” and “tough-on-crime politics categorically fails”.

Today, we repeat the question he put to yesterday’s government to our new one: “Will we just dig down further into a pit of our own despair, or are we going to come out of the pit and actually build something new?

Media Storm’s latest episode, ‘Prisons: Overcrowding, Operation Early Dawn, and child strip-searchers’ is out now.