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Publish date: Wednesday 02 November 2022
view count : 51
create date : Wednesday, November 2, 2022 | 3:27 PM
publish date : Wednesday, November 2, 2022 | 3:25 PM
update date : Wednesday, November 2, 2022 | 3:27 PM

In Britain, a jail sentence is often a death sentence. What’s going on in our prisons?

Last year, 371 people died behind closed doors. We want justice for them – and an end to a cruel, complacent system.

ritain has the most draconian prison system in western Europe. Recent deaths in police custody have increased public consciousness of state violence and its relationship to institutional racism and sexism. And yet we are still often oblivious to the inherently harmful and too often fatal consequences of imprisonment that affect our most vulnerable people beyond the scrutiny of the general public.

Last year, 371 people in England and Wales died in prison behind closed doors – the highest death toll since records began. Yet, despite this, there has been near silence on the issue. On the few occasions when prison deaths have garnered attention on a national scale, they have often been dismissed and even rationalised on account of the status of those who die as prisoners – as if they deserved what was coming to them.

People in prison are some of the most marginalised in society, with experiences of institutional care, homelessness, educational disadvantage, addiction, mental and physical ill health, and abuse, underpinned by poverty and inequality. Many have been failed by other statutory agencies before entering the criminal justice system.

What is clear is that deaths in police custody and in prison are two sides of the same coin. Both occur at the hands of the same criminal justice system that disproportionately polices, prosecutes and imprisons the most disadvantaged and vulnerable people, and are most sharply felt across the intersections of race, gender, disability and class.

Across successive governments, prison expansion has become a de facto policy. In 2021, the government outlined plans for the biggest prison-building programme in England and Wales in more than 100 years. It would raise the prison population to close to 100,000 by 2026.

This latest project fits neatly into a broader historic move towards punitivism. In the last 30 years alone, the prison population in England and Wales has ballooned by 70%, with Britain having the highest imprisonment rate in western Europe.

Official statistics provide useful quantitative analysis of deaths in prison, but they can obscure the human stories behind them.

Tommy Nicol was a 37-year-old mixed-race Middle Eastern man who was being held under an indeterminate imprisonment for public protection sentence. He took his own life in 2015, six years after he was jailed on a minimum four-year tariff.
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Sarah Reed was a 32-year-old mixed-race Black woman who was remanded to prison for the sole purpose of obtaining psychiatric reports. Her mental health worsened severely in prison and she was treated as a discipline problem.

Mohammed Afzal was a 22-year-old man of Pakistani background who lost almost a third of his body weight during his 48 days in prison.

Garry Beadle was a 36-year-old white man on remand with a history of mental ill health and was briefly homeless. He told an officer he was a suicide risk, but the officer did not fully record this. He died after only six days in prison.

Thokozani Shiri was a 21-year-old Black man with HIV/Aids. Prison healthcare failed to provide him with life-saving antiretroviral medication during two periods of imprisonment. He told a prison officer: “I can’t breathe … I need to go to hospital,” but an ambulance was not called until five days later. While he was in an induced coma, prison staff restrained him with handcuffs.

An 18-year-old mother gave birth on her own in prison without medical assistance. Her child, Baby A, died, with a pathologist unable to determine if they were born alive or stillborn.

These tragedies reflect recurring issues arising from deaths in prison. Prisons, by their very nature, are dehumanising places that create and intensify vulnerability to violence and premature death.

The poor standard of mental and physical healthcare, ignored risk warnings, a failure to implement suicide prevention plans, the overuse of segregation, and slow emergency responses – as well as indefensible levels of neglect and despair – are problems that cut across all deaths in prison.
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