Scott - Against Imprisonment

An Anthology of Abolitionist Essays

David Scott

With a Foreword by Emma Bell

I would like to thank all of my excellent friends and colleagues at the Open University for their encouragement, especially Avi Boukli, Victoria Canning, Mary Carter, Vickie Cooper, Linda Copeland, Lynne Copson, Deborah Drake, Julia Downes, Ross Ferguson, Samantha Fletcher, Jacqui Gabb, Sian Hamlett, Kier-Irwin Rogers, Gabi Kent, James Mehigan, Gerry Mooney, Adam Nightingale, Alison Penn, Abigail Rowe, Steve Tombs, Amanda Vaughan, Louise Westmarland and Nicola Yeates. Many thanks are also due to my friends and family for their constant encouragement and helpful distractions, especially Fabrice Andrieux, Michelle Denham, Neil Denham, Ian Nickson, Emily Nickson, Kim Nickson, Michael Parkin, Richard Wilbraham, Sue Wilbraham, Eric Wilbraham, Doug Wilbraham, Helen Maher, John Roland Scott, Ben Scott and Ian Scott.

I would also like to thank all the activists engaged in struggles against inequalities and the penal industrial complex in the United Kingdom I salute you for your commitment, solidarity and direct engagement. Finally I would also like to say a special thank you to all my friends in the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control. In particular, thank you Chris Allen, Kym Atkinson, Anne Alvesalo-Kuusi, Giles Barrett Alana Barton, Anette Ballinger, Vanessa Barker, Andrea Beckmann, Monish Bhatia, Michelle Brown, Tony Brockovich, Tony Broxson, Tony Bunyan, Bree Carlton, Eamonn Carrabine, Mick Cavadino, Kathryn Chadwick, Gilles Chantraine, Becky Clarke, Roy Coleman, Deborah Coles, Mary Corcoran, Janet Cunliffe, Tom Daems, Marion Dammit, Pamela Davies, James Deane, John Dennison, Anita Dockley, Andrew Douglas, Anne Egelund, Yarin Eski, Billy Frank, Peter Francis, Stratos Georgoulas, Joanna Gilmore, Barry Goldson, Helena Gosling, Fabrice Guilbaud, Penny Green, Sarah Greenhow, Simon Hallsworth, Emily Luise Hart, Anne Hayes, Andrew Henley, Paddy Hillyard, Jim Hollinshead, Antoinette Huber, William Jackson, Janet Jamieson, Andrew Jefferson, Robert Jones, Elton Kalica, Laura Margaret Kelly, Sarah Lamble, Alessandro Maculan, Margaret Malloch, Thomas Mathiesen, Simon Mackenzie, Maureen Mansfield, Maeve McMahon, Will McMahon, John Moore, Linda Moore, Wayne Morrison, Bepe Mosconi, Ida Nafstad, Martin OBrien, Christina Pantazis, Georgios Papanicolaou, Justin Pich, Hannah Pittaway, Scott Poynting, Paddy Rawlinson, Rebecca Roberts, Mick Ryan, Simone Santorso, Alvise Sbraccia, Holger Schmidt, Sebastian Scheerer, Phil Scraton, Joe Sim, Ann Singleton, Paula Skidmore, Ragnhild Sollund, Faith Spear, Carly Speed, Lizzy Stanley, Rene van Swaaningen, Sarah Tickle, Katherine Tucker, Waqas Tufail, David Tyrer, Francesca Vianello, Reece Walters, Steve Wakeman, Tony Ward, Lisa White, David Whyte, Patrick Williams, Tunde Zak-Williams and Per Jorgen Ystehede.

Despite all of the help of the above I take responsibility for any errors that lie within.

Dr David Scott works at the Open University where his research interests include the ethical and political foundations of penal abolitionism; the relationship between abolitionism, human rights and social justice; critical social theory and the concept of crime; and critical approaches to poverty, prisons and punishment. He is a former editor of the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice and the co-founding editor of the European Group Journal Justice, Power and Resistance. He also worked at Edge Hill University, the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, the University of Central Lancashire and Liverpool John Moores University.

Emma Bell is Professor of British Politics at the University of Savoie, France. She is the author of Criminal Justice and Neoliberalism (Palgrave, 2011) and is a former coordinator of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control.

There is currently little public debate about the rights and wrongs of punishment. Save in the case of the fight against terrorism, even the theme of law and order has found itself at the margins of political debate and was not even considered as one of the publics top five concerns in the last general election in the UK (British Election Study, 2017). The Labour party manifesto sidelined the issue of punishment to focus on police numbers and police practice, notably promising to fight against racial bias (Labour Party, 2017). At a time when the political heat is off, and the public appear to be more concerned about the looming Brexit and the effects of austerity on their daily lives, those of us who are concerned about promoting a radical new non-penal agenda need to work towards putting the issue back in the spotlight on our own terms. In the following collection of essays, David Scott provides us with a roadmap of how to do this.

Scott systematically dismantles widely-accepted justifications for punishment on ethical, political, philosophical and practical grounds, forcefully demonstrating that the only clear purpose of imprisonment is the infliction of pain and suffering on all those who come into contact with the prison place, whether as detainees or staff. He provides us with fascinating glimpses from his own ethnographic research into what he describes as modern-day cathedrals of pain. Turning the utopian myth that prison works on its head, he invites us to imagine real utopian non-penal alternatives to punishment that respect human dignity and deliver genuine social justice.