The Abolitionist No. 1 (1979)

Introduction / Commentary by John Moore

This first edition of The Abolitionist was published by Radical Alternatives to Prison (RAP) at the start of 1979. Britain had a Labour government which was attempting to break union militancy resulting in widespread strikes and the ‘winter of discontent’. Economic policy had introduced a period of austerity based on neoliberal monetarism and social policy had become more punitive. Although Margaret Thatcher was in opposition, the Labour government was already introducing the policies that were to become known as Thatcherism. The journal was therefore born into a hostile environment - as the editorial acknowledged at a point, which for abolitionists was ‘when the going is at its roughest’.

The first issue of the Abolitionist opens with news from a RAP project - The Newham Alternatives Project (NAP) and from a RAP branch. Newham Alternatives Project was set up in 1974 in east London. It aimed to reduce the number of people being sent to prison from Newham. The scheme was an action/research project which provided support and activities for women and men who on conviction, had their sentences deferred. The idea was that when they returned to court their participation in NAP would provide sufficient evidence for magistrates to restrain themselves from sentencing them to prison. Bristol RAP regularly produced a League Table identifying how rates of imprisonment ranged across the country, with people in some areas four times more likely to be imprisoned than those appearing before magistrates in a different part of the country. Bristol RAP’s League Table highlighted that it was the wealthier and middle-class areas that imprisoned the most, an observation that had provoked a strong rebuke from magistrates, with one, Mrs. Viola Chadwick-Healey of Lewes in Sussex, declaring that Bristol RAP were ‘very naughty’.

In the article ‘The Home Office and The Liquid Cosh’ Frank Kelley highlights the use of drugs as a control technique within British prisons, a major issue for RAP and the prisoners’ rights group PROP during the 1970s and 1980s. The article highlights the setting up of the Medical Committee Against the Abuse of Prisoners by Drugging a coalition that included, as well as RAP and PROP, the National Council of Civil Liberties, MIND, SCODA, Release and a number of psychiatrists. One of the distinctive features of RAP which set it apart from establishment reform groups such as the Howard League was its rejection of the ideas that prisons could reform or ‘cure’ offenders. This (and similar) articles provide important context to this position. Other articles in this first edition included Betty Potts on French prisons, Ian Cameron on media reporting, Mike Nellis on the authoritarian and punitive backlash underway against the 1969 Children and Young Persons Act, and Frank Kelley on Labour and Conservative party policies on ‘Law ‘n Order’.

The edition advertised a speakers’ co-op established by RAP and a number of other groups to promote critical perspectives on the penal system; Roger Woddis’s poem The Ballad Of Holloway written in support of RAP’s campaign against the redevelopment of Holloway Prison in the 1970s; and a cutting from the Daily Express where Herbert Johns describes his experience of Strangeways. It included Ros Kane’s report of her visit to the Special Unit at Barlinnie Prison where she met Jimmy Boyle; an alert from PROP about plans to reintroduce the segregation unit (aka the cages) at Porterfield prison; and the first part of a review of Mick Ryan’s The Acceptable Pressure Group focusing on the Howard League and RAP. [For further discussions of this important book please see editions 2/3 and 5.]