This is a comprehensive, detailed and humane account of the thousands who came into custody during the years of the Northern Ireland conflict and how they lived out the months, years and decades in Irish and English maximum security prisons. Erupting in 1969, the Northern Ireland troubles continued with terrible intensity until 1998. The most enduring civil conflict in Western Europe since the Second World War cost almost 4,000 lives, inflicted a vast toll of injuries and wrought much destruction. Based on extensive archival research and numerous interviews, this book covers the jurisdictions of Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and England, providing an account of riots, escapes, strip and dirty protests and hunger strikes. It paints a picture of coming to terms with sentences, some of which lasted for two decades and more. Republicans and loyalists, male and female prisoners, officials and staff, families, supporters, clergy and politicians all played a part – and all were changed. The narrative includes some of the most remarkable events in prison history anywhere – mass breakouts, organised cell-fouling and prolonged nakedness, and hunger striking to the death; there are also accounts of the prisoners’ very effective parallel command structure. The book shows how Anglo-Irish and intra-Irish relations were profoundly affected and how the prisoners’ involvement and consent were critical to the Good Friday Agreement that ended the long war. The final part of a trilogy dealing with Irish political prisoners from 1848 to 2000 by renowned expert Seán McConville, this is an essential resource for students and scholars of Irish history and Irish political prisoners; it is also a major contribution to the study of imprisonment.

Comparisons of prison in the United States and Great Britain are used to formulate central issues that relate to the adjudication of offenses committed within prisons and the imposition of punishments for them.

Originally published in 1976, A Taste of Prison deals with a very sensitive area of concern in the system of trial and imprisonment in Britain at the time. It describes the conditions at Winchester Prison and Winchester Remand Centre for both adults and young persons who were held in custody before trial or who were awaiting sentence. Despite the fact that many of these persons would not subsequently be sent to prison by the courts, the conditions they experienced were in many respects no better and in some respects worse than those for persons sentenced to imprisonment. Moreover, as this study shows, the special provisions for these persons embodied in the Prison Rules and Standing Orders of the Prison Department often meant little in practice – either because they remained unaware of their rights or because they were unable to take them up for various reasons. The authors discuss the function of remands in custody within a changing prison system, analyse recent trends in the numbers of persons received into the prison system on remand, and assess their contribution to the prison population. The implications of the findings are discussed in the context of the prison building programme and the uses to which existing buildings could be put. Finally, the authors make a number of proposals for the improvement of the regime for remand prisoners.

In the previous few years English penal policy had undergone considerable change. Originally published in 1975, the contributors to The Use of Imprisonment focus on the use of imprisonment in such a time of transition, and examine various aspects of penal policy – administrative, organizational, staffing, legal, philosophical. The volume provides a valuable introduction to penal policy and administration, and to some of the central issues in the penological debate at the time. Influenced mainly by events in the United States, interest had been growing in England in prisoners’ legal rights and in the laws affecting imprisonment. This complemented an increasing mood of scepticism among many psychologists, sociologists and other social scientists in relation to the aims and methods of reformatory imprisonment. Such thinking, although still largely divergent and amorphous, had gone far towards undermining the penological axioms and aspirations of the last few generations. The precise direction of new policy was still unclear, but the essays in this book make various informed suggestions as to the future, and also provide an examination of the present state of several key areas. They emphasise the failure of the treatment model of imprisonment, while at the same time recognising the need to be cautious about breaking down the prison walls and bringing treatment ‘into the community’.