We note that your department has stated three core principles that will guide the sentencing review being undertaken by David Gauke – to punish serious offenders, to reduce re offending and to explore tougher punishments outside of prison.
We wish to highlight the incompatibility of these principles. We will never reduce reoffending by relying on punishment inside or outside prison, and a review guided by such a principle will only reproduce violence and harm.
Taking the logic of prison and grafting it onto non custodial sentences will not lead to a safer society because it does not address the roots of the problem.
Safer
Punishing someone assumes that they are the problem. However, crime is the result of systemic oppression of certain sections of society through racialized harassment and economic impoverishment.
The criminalization process comes from the social conditions and profiling a person is subjected to, not some fault in the individual themselves.
This is true whether or not an act of harm has actually taken place. In no small number of cases, prisoners and convicted criminals have done nothing substantive to warrant being in the legal system at all.
They are merely criminalised as scapegoats for the failings of those in power. As the same sentencing review you have said that “this review, along with our prison building programme, will ensure that we never again have more prisoners than prison spaces”.
Surely it is not unreasonable to question whether the aim of such a review should really be about managing prison capacity, or whether it should rather be led by the aim of reducing harm and making society safer for everyone.
Decency
Because if that was the aim, the government would not be building more prisons and you would not be clinging on to the ideology of punishment.
A safer society is not one where more people are under the eye of law enforcement. It is one where fewer people are criminalised. That should be your aim.
We understand that the government faces the constant threat of backlash from the billionaire press. We recognise that they would slander an approach founded on care and rehabilitation and attempt to whip up rage against such an approach.
We want to remind you that you do not have to rise to this threat. The proof will be in the pudding, not what the tabloids say about the pudding.
You have spoken about the way your faith drives you to public service. You have said that the fundamental values of Islam compel you to believe in “decency and fairness “ and “not wanting to live in a society where there is conflict”.
Justice
We urge you to take action in accordance with this, because words alone are nothing without actions to make them a reality.
As it stands, we fear that your government’s plans to reform the prison system are merely efforts to make it look like they are tackling the issue without fundamentally changing anything that risks the liberation of poor and racialized people because of a deep seated fear of empowerment of the matter.
If your government continues a mad tightrope dance between its public legitimacy and the capitalist imperative of oppressing certain groups, none of us will benefit from a safer, more connected society.
Instead, people will continue to be ruined, families broken and human lives devalued and thrown away by a legal system wedded to punishment. British public have long been encouraged to thirst for vengeance, but it is high time government told the truth.
Vengeance does not make us safer, punishment does not heal. You have a responsibility to challenge the narrative of reputation and to address the social deprivation and oppression that leads to crime and false criminalisation in the first place. Only then will we see the true meaning of the word justice.
Yours sincerely,
Louise Lancaster, Cressie Gethin, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Anna Holland. The authors are JSO women prisoners at Send HMP.
