In this episode, George Miller talks to the author of What are Prisons for?, prison inspector and visiting professor of law at Oxford Hindpal Singh Bhui, about why we lock so many people up.
Prison populations have increased hugely in the past fifty years and vast sums of money are spent to keep over 11.5 million people behind bars, so you might think there is overwhelming evidence that prison ‘works’.
However, hard evidence for this claim is lacking. ‘If we are to understand more about the purpose of prisons,’ Hindpal Singh Bhui argues, ‘we need to look much further and deeper than official statements and dominant narratives.’
Listen to the podcast here, or on your favourite podcast platform:
Scroll down for shownotes and transcript.
What Are Prisons For? is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £8.99.
Dr Hindpal Singh Bhui OBE is an Inspection Team Leader at HM Inspectorate of Prisons and a Visiting Law Professor at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford.
SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
1:50 – What was your earliest impressions of prisons?
4:34 – What is your current role?
5:51 – What are prisons for day in and day out?
11:43 – Who gets sent to prison and why they get sent to prison?
16:15 – Do you think that the abolitionist position helps take the debate forward?
20:12 – How do you begin to have a mature debate about change?
24:36 – Are prisons a sort of epiphenomenon on top of deeper, wider social problems?
27:28 – Were there any things that you discovered where you came upon something surprising or enlightening?
30:10 – What is an example that you think is inspiring or points in a positive direction?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
George Miller: Hello and welcome to the Transforming Society podcast from Bristol University Press. My name’s George Miller, and I’m the editor of a new series from BUP that launched last spring. Over the next few years, what is it for will explore the purpose of a range of institutions, beliefs, ideologies, and other things that go to make up the contemporary world from free speech to AI, nuclear weapons to conspiracy theories. The expectation is that the answer to the question will most probably be complex and up for debate, but that it’s worth asking in order to think about how the future could be better.
What are prisons for has just joined the series, along with the Olympics and history. Its author is Hindpal Singh Bhui, OBE, who’s an inspection team leader at HM Inspectorate of Prisons and a visiting law professor at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford.
Hindpal has worked in prisons for over 20 years, undertaking hundreds of visits to places of detention around the world. He writes early in the book, as he reflects on the global situation of incarceration, ‘prison populations have increased hugely since the 1970s, and extraordinary sums of money are spent to keep over 11.5 million people locked up. You could therefore be forgiven for assuming there is overwhelming evidence that prison works. However, hard evidence for this claim is lacking. If we’re to understand more about the purpose of prisons, we need to look much further and deeper than official statements and dominant narratives.’
When I spoke to Hindpal before we got onto those questions, I was curious to hear about the very earliest impressions prisons had made on him when he was young.
Hindpal Singh Bhui: Well, when I was a child, I didn’t really have much sense of what the prison might be, all it was. It was probably reruns of Escape from Alcatraz and the sense that prison was somehow romantic, a highly closed environment to my imagination, to my mind, as well as to me physically. And then over a period of time, I started to develop more of a relationship with the idea and the reality of a prison. And that was mainly because I lived near one. I used to walk past it every day, and I looked up and I thought, “Hmm, that looks a bit forbidding.” But I didn’t really do anything to understand any more than that, other than gathering in all of the popular culture stereotypes, which everyone is subjected to all of the time. And that was pretty much it, I’d say, for a number of years. All I had was this kind of idealized sense of what prison might be.
Well, actually, idealized is probably the wrong word. I mean, I think I had assumed that prison was all things awful, and everyone in it was awful, and there were no redeeming qualities, and I had no nuance, no layers to my understanding of the institution. And I’d say that that probably continued through to the time when I became a probation officer. And at that time, I wasn’t really that interested in prisons. I was interested in rehabilitation, I was interested in redemption, I was interested in helping people. And to me, prison was the antithesis of that. It felt like a failure, it was a social failure. To be connected with it almost felt like a personal failure.
So I did everything possible to avoid having much to do with prison, and I was working with people who I tried to keep out of prison explicitly. I used to write court reports trying to persuade magistrates and judges that this was a very bad idea. So it’s kind of unusual that I ended up working in one. I had no intention whatsoever of working in a prison, but I had an opportunity, and I thought, I’ll do this for a couple of years, and then I’m out of here. And 25 years later, here I still am.
George Miller: Yeah, so can you just say for listeners what your involvement with prisons is now on the practitioner side? We’ll come to the academic side in a bit, but what is your current role?
Hindpal Singh Bhui: So my current role is as an inspector of prisons. I’ve been a prison inspector for a number of years, and that entails using a human rights framework to understand what goes on in prisons, talking to prisoners, talking to staff, simply hanging around and observing, and making sure that there’s a sense of the whole experience of prison. So I do that for the inspector of prisons for England and Wales, but I also work for the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture, which means that I get to go around prisons in other countries as well.
It’s quite an intense experience. So the whole inspection week is taken with lots and lots of conversations, lots of hard thinking, a big team of people trying to understand what’s going on around them, and trying to bring nuance into a world which is often lacking in it, and exposing to the outside world what’s happening in the name of the public. So that’s fundamentally what I try and do.
George Miller: So I mean, on one hand, you could see your role as being answering the question, what are prisons for day in and day out? But on the other hand, I guess, sometimes you’re dealing with much more practical pragmatic issues and problems in your inspection, and it’s maybe more nuts and bolts than that. So where does that big question sit in that day-to-day inspection of prisons role?
Hindpal Singh Bhui: Well, I think I quickly became aware that the day-to-day operation of the prison wasn’t really giving me the answers I was looking for. You can look at the official statements of purpose of prison and you will hear that it’s about punishment, that it’s about rehabilitation, protection of the public, incapacitation, those sorts of words abound in the prison world. It didn’t really help me to make sense of why we were using them. I couldn’t quite understand why cramming, in my first prison job, there were about 1,000 prisoners crammed into an old Victorian institution, living in conditions which were bordering on, if not becoming, degrading. And that to me didn’t seem to be fulfilling any of those stated purposes very well. Maybe the purpose of punishment was fulfilled, but I’m not sure if any of the others were being fulfilled.
And so I felt like I needed to have a deeper understanding of exactly what was going on here. And that’s partly because of my own personality, and I needed to feel that what I was doing was justified. Yeah, remembering that I started off in this world of probation, this world of ideals, about helping people and feeling that people always had a capacity for change. And I didn’t feel that the prison was helping the individuals I saw there every day to fulfill that potential. And why not? Why not? We invest enormous sums of money in prisons. We hear people talking about rehabilitation all the time. And as far as I could see, none of this was really going on. Maybe in small silos, people were trying. And I have to say that a lot of the staff I came across were working heroically, I thought, to try to make the best of a very bad situation. So they were trying to compensate, I thought, for a system which was largely malfunctioning.
And so to make sense of this, I felt like I needed to take a step back, not just look at the official statements about prison, and not even just look at the detail. The detail is incredibly important, I think, to understand the big picture. And by detail, I mean speaking to the people who live and work in prisons on a regular basis, trying to understand their perspectives, trying to really listen to what they’re telling you about their everyday experience. So that’s really important, to understand the big picture.
But to get a real sense of what prison is for, I think you need to go much further back. You need to work out how on earth this institution first appeared, because it doesn’t make sense. If you look at the statements of purpose and you look at what’s actually being delivered, they don’t connect very well.
And so I started to move backwards in time, trying to understand the present through an understanding of history. And the further back I went, the more I felt like I was starting to get it, starting to understand what was going on here. Not that I was coming to any great conclusion about why prisons exist in their current form, but at least I was understanding how they came into being, and all the contradictions which surrounded that. Prisons have only existed for about, in their current form anyway, for about 300 years. So the question for me was, were they always incredibly logical? Were they always the obvious solution to social problems and to people breaking society’s rules? And it took a bunch of enlightened individuals 300 years ago to come up with this bright idea of finally putting into practice what was always the right answer. Or were they a choice? Were they a political choice? And if they were, could a different choice have been made?
And I think I’ve largely concluded that they probably were mostly a choice. I think it’s very difficult to foresee a world without the prison at the moment, but I think we need to try. We need to think about what a different approach to social problems and to people breaking society’s rules would look like. And personally, I’m not sure if we could do without some kind of confinement. In fact, I’m pretty sure in myself that we probably need in complex modern societies to have some way of controlling people who are greatly out of control and actively dangerous to others. But I certainly don’t believe that cramming the numbers we do into prisons at the moment is a sensible or logical or progressive step.
George Miller: I want to come back to that question of reform versus abolition versus penal enthusiasm. But before we come on to that, something that I took from your book is that you think it’s really important to understand who gets sent to prison and why they get sent to prison. So I wondered if you could, you know, you’ve just been talking about the 300-year history. I’m not asking you to summarize that here, but just maybe pick out what you think might be salient or what you think is worth attending to in this question of in history. Because I guess what you’re saying is that the current setup we have is massively informed by what our predecessors did. You know, there’s a sort of inheritance, there’s a legacy there. So what happens if you begin to zoom in on this question of who gets sent to prison and why they get sent to prison?
Hindpal Singh Bhui: Yeah, I think that’s a more important question the more a prison’s for, because it starts to uncover a murky story, which goes back to the beginning of, the very beginnings of involuntary confinement, I’d say. So consistently around the world, you will see that prisons are filled with people who are relatively disadvantaged. Prison is an institution which operates mainly to confine poorer people, mainly to confine people who’ve got illnesses, people with neurodiversity.
If you look at the prison system in England and Wales, for example, you know, the vast number of people here have mental ill health, ranging from anxiety disorders and, you know, what are sometimes termed minor health problems to acute psychosis. Is prison the right place for either of those groups? Well, you know, it’s a difficult question to answer for the people with low-level problems, but certainly not for people with, you know, very serious mental health problems. Vast number of people in prison can’t read or write. Vast number have problems with communicating. A disproportionate number of people in our prisons, in the West, are Black or foreign national.
And so I think you need to really start to dig into, you know, why are these groups in prison? Why is it that prison is considered to be the right place for people who have got mental health problems, for example? Why is it that Black people are disproportionately imprisoned, you know, more disproportionately in England and Wales, by the way, even than in the States? And if you look at the States, I think you can start to, you can start to understand the power of the abolitionist, of abolitionist thinking in the US when you look at the racialized nature of the American prison system. And there, I think things are a little clearer than they are elsewhere, but the story in the US helps to inform what goes on in places like England and Wales, I think.
So it really struck me that after the end of slavery, very explicitly, American lawmakers, people in the American government, started to find different ways to control Black people through iniquitous laws, which resulted in people being prosecuted and taken to prison. And you ended up in a situation where people who were being very overtly controlled through slave plantations were now being quite overtly controlled through prisons.
And there seemed to be a tragic irony to former slave plantations being repurposed to become institutions holding primarily Black people in situations of confinement. And so I think, you know, you have to understand that history to see how those trends have reverberated downtime through history and to the current time. And, you know, I think an understanding of that past helps us to see how generational disadvantage has led to the prison populations that we have today.
George Miller: So you’ve got a deeply problematic institution, which has got this legacy from the past. And it’s clear that it’s not doing what it claims to do. That’s, you know, we lock up a lot of people, but, you know, if rehabilitation is one of the key things and avoidance of recidivism, it’s clearly not working. But you said a little bit earlier that you’re not an abolitionist. You think that there’s probably got to be some role for prison.
Do you nonetheless think that the abolitionist position helps take the debate forward? Is it, you know, potentially beneficial to have people who are campaigning for abolition because it really asks a radical question and it avoids becoming obsessed with sort of tinkering around the margins and making small incremental changes that don’t actually change the overall picture?
Hindpal Singh Bhui: When I say I’m not an abolitionist, I always felt uncomfortable saying that because I hate labels. And I feel as though, you know, despite the fact I use, you know, very broad labels in the book to help understand, you know, broad positions, I personally find it great on me because I think we end up in siloed ways of thinking. And in fact, the abolitionist position is much more nuanced than we often think it is. So abolitionism isn’t just about getting rid of every prison tomorrow. No, it’s about having a vision which can help us to move towards a better future.
Now, some abolitionists do think that we can get rid of prison altogether at some point. And that idea, I think, is premised on the view that when society changes sufficiently, when inequality is addressed, when all the inequities which lead to people being more at risk of being pulled in by the criminal justice system and therefore going to prison are ameliorated, then somehow we will end up in a society where the prison will become obsolete. I tend to think that’s pretty speculative.
Certainly, if you deal with inequalities in society and if you have a much better functioning social order, I’m sure that the prison populations will naturally start to go down. I’m not so sure that I want to live in a society which is so well ordered that no one ever breaks the rules to the degree that we want to exclude someone from our communities. I feel as if this is way too speculative for me.
But the vision of abolitionism, I think, is tremendously exciting and it should drive us. One of the things I’d probably fall more naturally into the liberal reform mold, I guess. I often argue for incremental reform and I think that’s very important to help us to move forwards. But one thing which disappoints me about liberal reform is its common lack of ambition. I think it’s important to have a bigger vision. I don’t think it’s contradictory to the aim of incremental reform, to have a big ambition for the future. And I think abolitionists, or so-called abolitionists, can provide more of that vision, whereas liberal reformists, I think, can provide more of the current day changes which can help to improve conditions on the ground that people are experiencing quite poor conditions at the moment.
George Miller: Where do you see the views of the public, the general public, in a democratic society feeding into the kinds of prisons that we have? Because if you were to go into a newsagent or a supermarket or to go online and look at the press in this country, which is largely right wing, you would get an impression of a public that is really quite harshly punitive and really very intolerant of anything that appears to be a liberal reform. So I guess you’ve got two things, though. You’ve got both the, you know, what is the general will of the people, and also how that is presented and perhaps amplified or distorted by the kind of press and media that we have. So in that kind of landscape, how do you begin to have a mature debate about change?
Hindpal Singh Bhui: Yeah, I mean, I think that one thing we need to bear in mind is that the public is much less punitive than we tend to think they are. So I, like you, have had some fairly uncomfortable conversations in newsagents or taxis with people who are probably far more punitive than I like to think that I am. But I often reach a position in those conversations where I kind of get where people are coming from. You know, I understand the depth of emotion. I understand why someone is not willing to be generous towards those who have committed some early heinous, damaging, harmful offences.
And so where do you go from there? And I think the first step is to have those conversations. We can’t withdraw from engagement with people who disagree with us. It’s really difficult because, you know, particularly I think, you know, with some of the people I really respect in abolitionist circles, I feel as if there’s some withdrawal from the debate in those areas because people who think that prison might be a solution to some of the scientists’ problems are considered to be reactionary and not worth listening to. I think they probably are still in the majority.
And I think that’s partly because of the lack of mature debate, lack of information. I think debate’s driven far too much by shallow analysis, which appears in newspapers, shallow analysis, which comes from the mouths of politicians. And we just have to keep on engaging with that debate. And what we mustn’t do, I think, is to try to beat a path around the public.
You know, one of the things I talk about in the book is the experience in Finland, where people who were considered to be penal experts created some really positive change. You know, they made sure that the policies being followed were good policies. You know, the prison population went down. The crime rate didn’t go up. There is, by the way, a very tenuous link between crime rates and prison populations. So great, this seems to be a marvellous way forward. I’m not sure if that argument holds much water, though, if you believe in democracy. I think you do need to engage with the public. You need to inform, you need to find commonalities.
So, for example, I think one of the biggest debates, which we probably don’t talk about enough, is voting rights and prisons. If prisoners are to come back out into society, then surely we must see them as citizens, and not just when they’re back out again, but while they’re inside. And give them voting rights and make sure that they’re engaged in the political process. Make sure they have a stake in the society to which they will return one day. I think those sorts of reforms are the ones we need to be looking at. And continuously engaging with people is terrifically important. I just think that the main message for me is, don’t withdraw.
George Miller: You were looking across a wide range of different international examples, and you’ve mentioned today Finland, and you’ve mentioned the United States, which has got its own history and its own legacy in the United Kingdom. And in the book, you touch on countries as different as Brazil and El Salvador. And I’m sort of listening to you talk, I’m sort of forming this sort of thought that perhaps the prisons we get are manifestations of the complexion and the problems and the dysfunctions of society. Is it the case that every society has found its own flawed solution in inverted commas to the problems and the way they express or conceive those problems? And those are sort of manifested in the prison. And the prison is like a sort of epiphenomenon on top of all these deeper, wider social problems.
Hindpal Singh Bhui: It’s a solution, but I think the reason why it’s considered to be a good solution by many governments is that it’s a very easy recourse as well. It’s not merely a solution to social problems. It’s a solution to political problems. And that’s why if you look back at history, you can see that prison has been used not to punish people who break legitimate laws, but to support economic development, for example.
So Russia is a great example. Labour camps were used to ensure that people were contributing to the economy. Political indoctrination as well. That’s a big purpose of prison around the world. Where it comes into sharpest relief, of course, is mere conquest. So if you look at the colonial regimes, when they started to become more influential in the countries they went to, how did they buttress their power? How did they control local populations? Well, they used prison.
Again, a fantastically malleable, powerful resource. No pretence whatsoever of rehabilitation or of reform. It was simply to control populations. So it’s a very easy way to exercise state power. And because of it’s so easy, it can be used in very, very different ways as well by different governments. And it has been across the world. And so we need to be mentally wary of how it’s used. And I think that’s why the poverty of the debate around prisons is something which should concern us all. We need to get more nuanced in our thinking about it and to understand that it’s not simply about breaking legitimate laws. It’s about all sorts of other things.
George Miller: Well, I mean, that’s where, without turning this into an advert, I hope that your book, I mean, that’s kind of the idea behind your book, to contribute to the debate in an approachable, accessible, but well-informed way so that we can get beyond the sort of polarisation, the silos that you mentioned earlier. I’m always curious when authors in this series, they’re writing on very big questions, but they’re writing in a very small book. And I’m always curious to know if their research took them down unexpected or eye-opening avenues, perhaps, that they hadn’t encountered before they started working. Were there any sort of things that you discovered or areas you investigated where you hadn’t been before where you came upon something surprising or enlightening?
Hindpal Singh Bhui: Yeah, I think the thing which struck me the most probably when I was doing the research was, well, I knew that prison wasn’t particularly good at reducing crime. What I hadn’t realised was that there was pretty good evidence, Albert, of some instances in which it’s greatly increased crime. So I thought it was worth publicising this fact in the book. I was particularly interested by the example of Brazil, where brutalising prison regimes, where governments were, you know, had resorted to this easy recourse of sticking lots of people in prison, not looking after them very well, not even attending to basic needs of having enough food, having enough water, having a basic level of safety. That wasn’t being done.
And so prisoners organised. And through this organisation was created a massive criminal network which supported prisoners, you know, doing quite a lot of good actually inside prisons. But then criminal networks tend not to, you know, lead to great outcomes in general. And, you know, they spill outside of the prison walls and have been running enormous drug operations in Brazil and across borders.
So this to me seems like a terrific example of how prison can be an extraordinarily malign influence on societies. You know, this criminal organisation is now causing havoc, not just in that one country of Brazil, but across lots of other South American countries. And I can’t think of a better example of why we need to really think about how we use our prisons.
George Miller: Last question. You mentioned Finland earlier, and I wondered if you could end on some other example that you think is inspiring or points in a positive direction or offers even, you know, scope for further exploration or something that’s worth thinking about that perhaps has not been incorporated into more mainstream thinking in the, you know, the Anglo-Saxon sphere.
Hindpal Singh Bhui: Well, one thing which really concerns me in the England and Wales context is the massive level of overcrowding. Because if you’ve got an overcrowded prison system, you know, virtually everything else falls by the wayside. There’s lots of firefighting going on. There’s lots of, lots of staff leave because they can’t do the job that they want to do. Prisons aren’t being looked after very well. The whole system starts to collapse around you.
So I, when I was looking for points of optimism, I tried to look in the UK as well as outside. And I thought it was really interesting to find that between the wars, prison population in England and Wales went down quite substantially. And that was because of the political leadership. You know, well, it was for a number of reasons, but I think political leadership was a major reason which led to a reduction in the population. Winston Churchill, you know, was the Secretary of the Home Department in the early 1900s, saw the tremendous human and economic waste of prison and decided that, you know, he wanted to try a different approach. And so pushed the Home Department to reduce the use of prison and succeeded.
Things changed of course after the Second World War, but I thought this is a great example. You know, it could have gone either way. The prison population could have expanded between the wars as well. There’s nothing really different about social trends then. But here was a leader who had the force of personality and the vision to take the system in a different and more progressive direction. So if it was done then, I mean, I’m not saying we have, you know, a lot of leaders of the caliber of Churchill between the wars, but if it was done then, then maybe it could be done again in future.
And yeah, so that was a real eye-opener. And actually you asked me earlier on about what surprised me. That surprised me. I hadn’t realized that was going on in this country because in my mind, you know, everything could have been getting worse for a long, long time. So it gives me hope that, yeah, there are examples not just in Scandinavian countries, but from our own history, which we can go back on and perhaps dredge up and look at more closely and use as an inspiration for future change.
George Miller: I was talking to Hindpal Singh Bhui, whose book, “What a Prison’s For” is available now. There are more details about it and the other new titles in the series on the Bristol University Press website, bristoluniversitypress.co.uk. That’s it from me for now. So thanks for listening and goodbye.
What Are Prisons For? by Hindpal Singh Bhui is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £8.99.
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