Prison, Poverty & Abolition
By Ruari-Santiago McBride*
Prisons were designed as a tool for social control, built to punish the poor and quell social unrest. The harms prison cause to individuals and families are felt most keenly by poor communities. Prison expansion will only compound this burden. Abolitionists call for divestment and alternatives to the broken criminal justice system.
The history of prisons in Ireland is deeply intertwined with British colonialism, industrial capitalism and urban poverty. Between the mid-17th and 19th centuries tens of thousands of people were transported from Ireland to British colonies in the Americas, the Caribbean and Australia as punishment for committing ‘crimes’ of survival, such as theft of food and clothing, and those involved in political uprisings. This was considered “a relatively cheap way of removing undesirables from society and providing labour in the colonies.” By the mid-19th century, the use of transportation as a penal sanction lessened and began to be replaced with sentences of penal servitude in Britain and Ireland. This shift in colonial governance, from colonial transportation to domestic imprisonment, represented a new way of managing the urban poor created by industrial capitalism and those who challenged the prevailing political order. This moment remains preserved in the bricks of Mountjoy.
Mountjoy opened in 1850 during the midst of the Great Famine, the purposeful starvation of the Irish poor by the British colonial government. Many people fled starving rural communities to seek work and survival in the cities, leading to rapid urbanisation and growing resistance to colonial rule.
Mountjoy was built among the tenements of Phibsborough, an inner-city slum. On the outside, the prison was designed in classic Victorian fashion with a grand façade that aimed to illicit fear among residents of the area. On the inside, it followed Pentonville (London, England), as the second prison designed with individual cells and a regime based around privileges. This new design of prison sought to utilise separation, education, and training to transform ‘convicts’ into ‘productive workers.’ Mountjoy held people convicted of all forms of crime, including those imprisoned for stealing out of hunger and those detained for political activities. During this era of Victorian prison expansion, prisons were not built to protect communities: they were designed as a centralised system of social control to protect the prevailing social and economic status quo.
Punishing the Poor, Containing Dissent
Today, prisons in Ireland continue to be largely situated in working-class, urban communities and filled with people who disproportionately come from urban areas of high social deprivation. Research evidence has shown that there is an intimate connection between socio-economic disadvantage and imprisonment in Ireland. Communities with the highest levels of poverty have significantly higher prisoner ratios (145.9 prisoners per 10,000 population), compared to the wealthiest communities (6.3 per 10,000). Consequently, most people released from prison return to deprived urban communities in Dublin, Cork and Limerick.
Poor people do not commit more crimes than wealthy people. However, they are more likely to live in communities and engage in activities that are targeted by police. The low number of people imprisoned following Ireland’s financial crisis caused by fraudulent banking activities and the lack of criminal prosecutions related to the Epstein files, shows that ‘White collar crimes’ often goes unpunished by the criminal justice system. The overrepresentation of people from economically deprived, urban areas in Irish prisons therefore shows that penal institutions continue to be a government tool to punish the poor[SH1] . Similarly, the arrest and charging of activists for engaging in peaceful protests for Palestine shows that prisons are still used to contain social dissent. It is unsurprising then that in this period of growing social inequality, which has seen rises in material deprivation and a housing crisis that has resulted in record number of homeless people, as well as rising social unrest, which is reflected in a growing number of protest movements, we are also witnessing an ever increasing prison population.
Prison Abolition – Divestment & Alternatives
Despite the stated aim of ‘rehabilitation’, imprisonment causes psychological and physical harm as well as disrupts familial and social bonds. In most circumstances, people leave prison unemployed, homeless and broken. Imprisonment damages people and their bonds to community, creating cycles of poverty and reoffending. Inevitably, these harms have a disproportionate impact on the communities people are released to when they leave prison. Consequently, moves to expand the number of prison places in Ireland will disproportionately impact poor communities.
Penal abolitionists advocate that rather than expand prisons we should dismantle the existing system of penal imprisonment in favour of community-based solutions. Some suggestions put forward include:
Divestment of Funds: Such initiatives would aim to reduce imprisonment rates by redirecting funds from prison budgets to finance education, housing, healthcare, and jobs in communities of most need. Reinvesting funds into services and amenities for these communities would serve to reduce the structural drivers of ‘crime.’
Development of Alternatives: Such initiatives would aim to prevent, respond to and alleviate harms people experience without recourse to the criminal justice system. This would include development models of transformative and restorative justice, community safety initiatives as well as mutual aid networks and educational programmes.
Ultimately, prison abolition requires the redefining of justice as we know it. More than this, prison abolition necessitates a radical reimagining of social and economic relations. Prison abolition demands that we reduce poverty and wage inequality as well as create a fair housing system and a free, accessible health service. It means shifting away from a society that idolises wealth and profit making to one that celebrates solidarity and mutual aid. Prison abolition requires we eradicate inequalities of gender, ethnicity, race, ability and sexuality. It means destroying all forms of hierarchy and building communities based on horizontal democracy. If this is to be achieved, we must practice abolition in our daily lives by talking, writing, and doing abolition. We must invest our time and energy in our communities and work to build realities outside of the criminal justice system.
Ruari-Santiago McBride is an…
IPAN member who works as an advocate for members of the Traveller community in north Tipperary. He has been involved in abolitionist activism for the past ten years. He grows plants, keeps chickens, DJs, supports West Ham United and Bohemians, and is a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
