We’re looking at a busy weekend for the country’s criminal justice system, already permanently running red hot. The activist group Defend our Juries is organising a mass protest in London on 9 August to oppose the government’s ban on Palestine Action (PA), which was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in early July. The stated purpose is to overwhelm the police and courts to prove the proscription is not just immoral in their eyes but unworkable.
I have my own difficulties with the proscription of PA, not because I remotely support their aims but because I believe they act more as an organised criminal enterprise for which we have actually already got some quite draconian legislation. This could be used to close down such flagrant disregard for our laws and criminal damage. As ever, we seem paralysed not for want of new powers but for our feebleness in enforcing existing ones.
How might the whole system handle the threat of being overwhelmed?
Policing will be stretched on Friday and Saturday when anti-migrant protests are also taking place in multiple locations (with inevitable counter protests). It won’t be stretched to breaking point, but certainly to the exclusion of their needed presence in neighbourhoods tortured by high levels of crime and incivility. But it is in our prisons, the very fag end of this exhausted and impoverished system, where we might see the greatest impact.
The report from Dame Anne Owers on prison capacity this week laid out again some uncomfortable messages for the Conservatives from their time in office. People have been saying for years that slashing the number of small prisons, culling experience from frontline officers, all while the prison population was static and then rising was a recipe for disaster. Those policies have long been responsible for ruinous criminal justice austerity, sending every metric of jail control, order and decency into the abyss. This means that we have little wiggle room in the system and many potential threats if large numbers of, for example, protestors are remanded in custody at any one time.
The situation has changed little compared to a year ago, when the summer riots forced the whole system to less than a hundred cell spaces short of gridlock. This prompted the new government to abandon its tough on crime credentials in the name of pragmatism. A year on, we now have headroom in our male adult prisons of about a thousand cell spaces. This, by the way, was paid for by the mass emergency early release of patently unsuitable offenders, many of whom have gone on to reoffend. While this figure might seem a lot, bear in mind that at last year’s Notting Hill carnival alone, for example, police arrested 334 people.
So how might the whole system handle the threat of being overwhelmed? Expect to see tactical policing of protests that will result in evidence-gathering for arrests later on rather than collar-feeling. Expect to see passive protestors dealt with at the low end of the tariff range for offences under sections 12 and 13 of the Terrorism Act 2000 which criminalise verbal support for or physical displays in favour of PA. The punishments extend from fines to 14 years in prison.
HM Prison and Probation Service is already in ‘gold command mode’ to centrally coordinate the movement and release of offenders from reception prisons to create additional capacity for those who will be remanded in custody. One of the paradoxical twists in the desperate search for prison spaces is that Operation Early Dawn (where do they get these names from?) will likely be invoked to use police custody for additional cell capacity. The very same custody centres that might become overwhelmed with incoming protestors.
But the greater problem will be twofold: prisoners forced to move hundreds of miles from home at no notice to accommodate an influx don’t always take this lying down, quite apart from wrecked resettlement plans. Moreover, the prospect of managing significant new numbers of radicalised protestors from opposed factions is a daunting one in prison environments already unstable due to staff shortages, drugs and appalling levels of violence. We can hope for peace but also pray the system is ready for anything.
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