The idea of ‘welfare’ has lost all meaning. Just look at the cruel state of women’s prisons | Zoe Williams

One of the fundamentals of modern jail craft is the idea that it’s hard to convince prisoners that you care about their welfare if they’re living in squalid conditions. This has been understood for years, with fluctuating amounts of buy-in from politicians about how important it was to offender management that inmates felt cared about.

Self-harm, meanwhile, has long been an issue of concern. I remember, in the 1990s and 2000s, detailed conversations with prison psychologists about why women’s prisons had disproportionate amounts of it: one idea, which I always found the most convincing, was that women, where they had children, were almost always the main carer, so were in a state of constant anxiety about who was looking after them. Another theory was that psychological interventions such as anger management courses had been devised for male prisoners; women responded differently to the discovery that they could have controlled their anger – by blaming themselves. That was also plausible.

The one thing nobody ever debated was whether or not self-harm was the Ministry of Justice’s problem. Naturally, it is their problem; if you’re keeping people incarcerated, you have to keep them safe. On Wednesday, the chief inspector of prisons published a report on women in prisons in England which found that self-harm was being driven by a “basic lack of decency” in jails. The details are tragic. Inmate calls to their children limited to one a month; remotely situated jails with no transport links so family visits are prohibitively expensive; prison uniforms designed for men; bizarre restrictions such as no underwear in the washing machines. Some of this sounds like performative cruelty, but all of it is rooted in a toxic combination of budget cuts and soaring prisoner numbers: the adult women’s prison population in England and Wales stood at 3,611 in November 2023, and is projected to increase to 4,200 by November 2027, a rise of 16%.

This increasingly punitive approach is completely needless; many of these women are on remand for nonviolent crimes and won’t go on to receive custodial sentences. To put this display of toughness down to political posturing to mask a broken justice system would be speculative. What’s certain is that there have been cuts across the prison estate since 2012, resulting in overcrowding, understaffing, inexperienced staff and inhumane conditions.

We know all that, but we’re failing to articulate the obvious: the fundamental precept of the state’s intervention in a private life is that welfare is paramount. That intervention may also be punitive, but not since Victorian times has prison been understood as punishment alone. If the government, under any circumstance, poses an active threat to your welfare, that alters the contract. Prisoners, having broken the contract already, are always the last to be heard on this (though bear in mind the point about remand – many of these women will be found not guilty).

Academics David Walsh and Gerry McCartney, in Social Murder? Austerity and Life Expectancy in the UK, explore in data and case studies the idea that policies might be causing life-threatening harm to people’s lives. They start with the data – again, it won’t come as a big surprise. Between 2014 and 2018, life expectancy, after decades of continual improvement, stopped increasing across the UK. In some parts of the population – for instance, the poorest 20% in Glasgow – premature death increased by between 6% and 7%.

The authors then look at various policies, through a series of case studies – the changes to disability benefits and privatised work capability assessments are illustrated with the death by suicide of a profoundly depressed man who was found fit to work by Atos. It’s not at all complicated, tracking how cuts to local authority social care budgets, combined with more and more stringent access to personal independence payments (Pip), might lead to malnutrition, nor how the bedroom tax might cause deaths of despair – the case of one woman who killed herself after debts accrued because she had a spare room after her 16-year-old son also killed himself is breathtakingly sad.

The UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Professor Philip Alston, said of austerity after his visit to the UK in 2018, that “the bottom line is that much of the glue that has held British society together since the second world war has been deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh and uncaring ethos”.

Which, again, we knew. But there’s something blocking the next step in this debate, almost as if we don’t want to let that next foot fall: what is your relationship with a state that doesn’t care? Is the phrase “welfare state” now wrong? Do we have to find some other way to describe such statutory provision that has not been dismantled? The concept of nations being “developing” or “developed” is understood; in the first your welfare is haphazardly overseen by a community, before reaching the nirvana of the second, in which your welfare is assured by government. But how do we understand and orientate towards a state that is developing backwards? It feels like some bizarre politeness, or a collective aversion to drama, that keeps us debating policy and society as though our welfare were paramount to it, when that is observably no longer true.

Meanwhile, the Labour MPs of the “red wall”, the very seats where these life expectancy impacts of austerity and its aftermath are most obvious, call upon their leader to talk tougher on immigration – as if that’s what’s driving the Reform UK vote; as if foreigners are what’s poisoning the well. It’s as if they don’t want to understand where voters’ anger is coming from, don’t want to consider its legitimacy. And yet they must. Or their politics, if you could call it that, will be swept away.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
  

• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email [email protected] or [email protected]. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org