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Article Excerpt
Introduction
"MASS IMPRISONMENT" (Garland, 2001a:5), "CARCERAL HYPERINFLATION" (Miller, 2001: 158), and "hyper-incarceration" (Simon, 2000: 285) are terms more or less routinely applied to analyses of contemporary criminal justice policy and practice in the United States. Paradoxically, modern America, the "land of the free," is a place where a "society of captives" (Ibid.) occupies "the new iron cage" (Garland, 2001b: 197). However, the creation of a "prison nation" (Herivel and Wright, 2003), a phenomenon described as "Lockdown" (Parenti, 1999), bears little, if any, relation to the actual volume or severity of crime. Rather, it is steeped in the cynical (re)politicization of crime, in populist posturing, in crudely competitive electioneering exchanges, and, ultimately, in essentialist "zero tolerance" policymaking (Tonry, 2004).
Similar processes have also been evident in the United Kingdom (U.K.)--more particularly England and Wales (1)--since the early 1990s. In 1993, for example, John Major (prime minister at the time) proclaimed that "society" should "condemn more" and "understand less" and Tony Blair (later to become the first New Labour prime minister) repeatedly expressed his determination to be "tough on crime" (cited in Goldson, 1997). Since that time, the adult and child (2) prison populations in England and Wales have multiplied exponentially (Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons, 2006; Youth Justice Board, 2004; 2006a, b). Further, in 1998 (following the election of the first New Labour government in the U.K. the previous year) Jack Straw, home secretary at the time, referred to a "special relationship" with the United States, whereby "the two governments are learning more from one another all the time, there is now a deep ideological relationship" (cited in Pitts, 2000: 3). Implementing repressive criminal "justice" policies through processes of trans-Atlantic "policy transfer" is, apparently, a direct legacy of the "relationship" (Jones and Newburn, 2004; Muncie, 2002). In the shadows of the mass imprisonment "social experiment" in the U.S. (Wright, cited in Silverstein, 2003: 1), successive New Labour governments have imposed a "Lockdown" of their own in England and Wales and, currently, there are no prospects of abatement.
Situated within the wider context of Anglo-American penal expansion, this article focuses more sharply upon the implications of "Lockdown" for child prisoners in England and Wales. It is argued that a comprehensive independent inquiry is required to investigate the politics, policies, and practices that have given rise to the incarceration of growing numbers of children, at younger ages and for longer periods (Goldson, 2005). Such an inquiry is perhaps the only appropriate means of investigating the human costs of re-penalization, the damage and harm endured by young prisoners, and, ultimately, the fatal injustice that cost 29 children their lives in state prisons and private jails in England and Wales between July 1990 and September 2005.
Rampant Punitiveness
A vulgar rhetoric of "toughness" and a criminal "justice" agenda intolerant of "excuses" (Home Office, 1997) have defined the coordinates of a "new punitiveness" in England and Wales (Goldson, 2002a). Major strategic policy documents routinely comprise platforms upon which senior ministers proffer caricatured dichotomies: "decent citizens" and "offenders" (Blair, 2004: 5), "wrongdoers" and the "law-abiding" (Reid, 2006: 3), and express commitments to "protect the innocent" and "pursue the guilty" (Blunkett at al., 2004: 7). Faced with "some of the most fundamental challenges of our time," or so it is claimed, the primary mission is to "secure the freedoms we enjoy in the face of terrorists and criminals who seek to exploit them" (Home Office, 2004: 1). Decontextualized binary constructions and the facile conflation of global "terrorism" and domestic "crime" have penetrated official policy discourse. In this way, increasingly authoritarian "initiatives," "crackdowns," and "targets" are legitimized and ultimately implemented through a raft of repressive statutes.
Since 1997, successive New Labour governments have legislated on more than 50 occasions in the criminal justice sphere and have created more than 3,000 new offenses, one for almost every day they have been in office (Morris, 2006). In a high-profile lecture--part of a series rather conceitedly termed "Our Nation's Future"--the prime minister boasted: "prison sentences are longer... more people are in prison, prison places have expanded by 19,000 since 1997 and are due to expand still further" (Blair, 2006). Expressed as a rate per 100,000 of the national population, the prison population in England and Wales is the highest among countries of the European Union (Home Office, 2003). Spending on prisons has increased by more than 35% in real terms since 1997 (Home Office, 2006: para. 3.42). But the prime minister is equally keen to emphasize that although new "laws have made a real difference," they "have not been clear or tough enough" (Blair, 2006). Accordingly, a further 900 prison places are due to "come on stream in autumn 2007"--taking total penal capacity to 80,400 in England and Wales--and the New Labour government plans to "build an additional 8,000 places and keep under close review whether more are needed" (Home Office, 2006, para. 3.43). Meanwhile, statistical projections--based on the implications of current policy initiatives and assumptions about future sentencing trends--suggest that "more" will indeed be "needed." By 2013, it is estimated that the total prison population in England and Wales will be as high as 106,550 (de Silva et al., 2006). Punitiveness is rampant.
Statistical trends with regard to the imprisonment of children in England and Wales follow similar upward trajectories. Greater use of penal custody for children is made in England and Wales than in most other industrialized democratic countries in the world (Youth Justice Board, 2004: para. 9). Furthermore, the pattern of growth and expansion is continuing (Youth Justice Board, 2006a) and it is causing serious system strain:
[The] substantial increase in the number of 15 to 17-year-old boys being remanded or sentenced to custody ... has had a direct impact on the availability of places.... To manage the situation ... we are taking a number of steps including ... compulsory cell sharing ... in single cells that can be legitimately converted ... and, working with the Prison Service, to bring back into service as quickly as possible cells that are currently out of commission (Youth Justice Board, 2006b).
The "juvenile secure estate" is in crisis.
Child Prisoner Deaths
Child prisoners in England and Wales, as elsewhere in the world, are routinely drawn from the poorest and most distressed families, neighborhoods, and communities (Goldson and Coles, 2005; Martin and Parry-Williams, 2005; Muncie and Goldson, 2006). The biographies of such children are typically characterized by multiple and intersecting modes of disadvantage and systemic neglect, rendering them inherently and structurally vulnerable (Goldson, 2002b).
The "juvenile secure estate" within which they are detained comprises three different types of institution, each managed within a separate but interrelated "penal domain." Secure Children's Homes (SCHs) are normally managed by Social Services Departments (local government agencies) under the national aegis of the Department of Health...
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