19/02/2020
Police Oracle
Work with Offenders profiles an exciting and ambitious new project from the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies.
After Prison
Many readers will be aware of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies which is an independent educational charity whose remit is to advance public understanding of crime and criminal justice.
CCJS has just embarked on a new and ambitious project which aims to radically downsize the prison population in England and Wales. The project, known as “After Prison”, is based on the argument that there is always a better way to use a particular piece of land than as somewhere for a prison. The aim of the project is to stimulate thought and discussion with people who live in the vicinity of prisons about what they would rather see on those sites.
CCJS has embarked on the project because it believes that building support in local areas for alternative uses for prison sites – as decided by local residents – will provide the impetus for campaigning activity to close those prisons. While this might seem quite a radical and aspirational project, CCJS has already had some success, of which more later.
The charity intends to focus its activities around just a few prisons initially, but hopes to expand across the prison estate over time. The role of CCJS is to inspire people who live around other prison sites across the country to build their own campaigns and provide them with the necessary support and advice.
This local activity will be accompanied by nationally-focused work addressing more strategic questions. How do you go about closing prisons? What do you do with all the people currently locked up in them? How do you ensure the workforce have alternative employment on at least equal pay and conditions?
How After Prison came about
The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies has a long history of arguing for a radically smaller criminal justice system, in particular a big reduction in our prison population which, as most readers will know, has long been one of the largest. Currently, in Western Europe, only Scotland imprisons a greater proportion of its population than England and Wales.
The decision to close Holloway prison in summer 2016 as part of then Chancellor George Osborne’s prison building and reform programme provided an opportunity. The Government’s plan with this programme was that it would sell off some of the poorest performing, typically Victorian-era, prisons which were sitting on expensive inner-city lands to the highest bidder and then use the proceeds to build new prisons in the countryside. The risk for Holloway was that the highest bidder was very likely to be a private developer who would build luxury flats, unaffordable to most people living in the immediate area.
CCJS built a broad consortium made up of local faith groups, housing activists, political parties and anti-prison campaigners who, together, carried out a community engagement exercise asking residents how they would like to see the Holloway site redeveloped. They managed to gain 1000 responses, reflecting many different communities within the London Borough of Islington.
Interestingly, the responses were unanimous: people wanted to see the site used to provide genuinely affordable housing, public space and community facilities. They did not want it to be used to build luxury, high-rise flats and gated space.
The charity then spent the next few years working with local people to make sure these demands were communicated clearly and repeatedly to both the Ministry of Justice and prospective developers.
The outcome was better than CCJS could have imagined when they started the project. In spring 2019, after a year of delays, the Ministry of Justice finally announced the buyer for the site. Peabody housing association would buy the site for £80 million, a price which was only 40% of the Ministry of Justice’s original expected return. Peabody’s proposals included:
CCJS realised that their approach with the Community Plan for Holloway could become a model for work in other areas. They learnt by focusing in on a specific site occupied by prison, it was possible to stimulate thought and discussion with local people about what they would rather see on the site. It was much easier to engage people to imagine a world with fewer prisons by focusing on issues in their locality rather than a rather more general campaign to “get rid of the prison system”.
This led the charity to launch the After Prison movement. The timing could hardly be more appropriate since the new government has recently officially cancelled the programmer prison closures while at the same time repeating its promise to build 10,000 more prison places.
If you’re interested in the After Prison campaign, you can receive updates about it by following the link here.