Even if you didn’t know much about it, you might consider the head of the official Government inspectorate of prisons an unlikely source for reactionary, authoritarian rhetoric about the UK’s “cushy” and “comfortable” prisons. You’d probably find it still more unlikely if you knew anything about Nick Hardwick, the man who currently holds that position. Hardwick has had a fairly prestigious career working in the broad area of human rights issues, as Chief Executive of both the Refugee Council and Centrepoint, a “charity and housing association for young homeless people”, as well as working for the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders. Though he has moved into (doubtless more tightly constrained) “official” public sector roles recently, this is hardly the CV of an aspiring Richard Littlejohn. 

Judging by recent press reports, however, your assumptions would be dead wrong. On 24 December, the headline of a Telegraph article by Home Affairs Editor Tom Whitehead exclaimed:

 “Jails are so comfortable inmates get themselves locked up” 

The source of this story was identified in its subheading: 

“Prison is so comfortable for some inmates that they are getting themselves locked up again after being released, according to the Chief Inspector of Prisons.” 

The next day – no doubt realising a saleable story was in the offing – the gutter press got in on the act. The Daily Express reported: 

“JAIL’S SO CUSHY, VILLAINS REOFFEND TO GO BACK IN” 

Its first paragraph reinforced this line: 

“LIFE behind bars is so cushy for some inmates they “sleep their way through sentences” then ­ reoffend, the boss of the UK’s ­prisons service has revealed.”

 Fellow Richard Desmond-owned paper the Daily Star likewise reported: 

“LAGS JUST LOVE OUR SOFT CELLS” 

Again continuing in its first paragraph: 

“BRITAIN’S jails are so cushy that lags get locked up again on purpose after being released, says the UK’s prisons chief.” 

It’s worth noting the sheer prominence accorded this message by its positioning. Newspaper journalism is generally written to a particular formula, with which many reporters will be familiarised during their training: the “inverted pyramid” of news reporting, with information considered most important “front-loaded” in the headline and top of the article. News articles thus deliberately reflect the way readers take them in – receiving the most information from the top, and becoming progressively less likely to read or digest the rest.

On closer inspection, though, this reporting began to look more than a little suspect. In the text of the Telegraph article were numerous direct quotations from Hardwick on the problems inside prisons, yet none said anything about the “comfort” of life inside. Indeed, while quite a few direct quotations from Hardwick appeared in all of the stories, none of the different words describing comfort used by the papers (“comfortable”, “soft”, “cushy”) ever did. This was surely rather curious. If, for these papers, this was the key, “take-home” message contained in Hardwick’s statements, you’d expect a direct quotation to have appeared in at least one of their reports.

In reality, the “comfortable prisons” story was a complete fabrication. There is no recorded example of Hardwick making any such claim, and whenever he has touched on the subject of the level of “comfort” in British prisons, he has always stated the opposite.

Take the most recent (September 2011) HM Chief Inspector of Prisons in England and Wales Annual Report, for instance, which covers 2010-11. On the second page of his introduction to the report, Hardwick states explicitly (referring to another continually recurring meme in the UK’s right-wing press): 

“People are sent to prison as a punishment and even a short sentence in the best run prison is a very severe punishment indeed. I have found no holiday camps.”

He also states:

“What had the strongest impact on me were the men in local prisons locked up for hour after hour, day after day in small shared cells with unscreened toilets.”

 As the Independent reported in late November,

“Mr Hardwick said conditions were still “disgusting” at some prisons, citing inmates at one high-security prison – Long Lartin in Worcestershire – who had to slop out at night.”

Hardwick also described the unpleasant and frequently degrading conditions in a November article for the prisoners’ paper Inside Times: 

“Lots of cells are little more than a large toilet. Two men in a space not much wider than my outstretched arms – and about three times as long. The air thick with cigarette smoke. An unscreened toilet. Graffiti on the walls. Furniture for one. Meals eaten in the cell, one man at the table, another next to the toilet with his plate on his lap.

[...]

“In our survey, less than half the prisoners said that they received enough clean and suitable clothes. No clean pants. I suppose that does not sound too terrible but it would be like that throughout your sentence. There would be nothing you could do to fix it. You would get the message, wouldn’t you, that you were of absolutely no consequence at all?

“It seems to me that this loss of autonomy, the inability to fix even the simplest things for yourself, must terribly undermine rehabilitation.”

Hardwick has also featured in widespread media reports recently noting the alarming conditions facing many of those convicted for offences during the 2011 Summer riots. Many were moved into prisons struggling to deal with them, targeted for violence by the inmates already inside – some associating them with media reports of destruction in their home towns – and frequently became involved in gangs as a self-protection measure. Imprisonment thus “actually drew some young people into a violent culture for the first time”. Many were also placed on suicide watch.

The roots of media lies and authoritarianism

Why, then, does this kind of absurdist reactionary rhetoric – often founded on complete fabrications – so frequently appear, and what can be done about it? There are a number of plausible explanations, all of which probably play a role. As one recent study by Cardiff media researchers has noted, the stereotype of the right-wing British public – like that of the right-wing American public – is largely inaccurate when it comes to economic matters, but is borne out in terms of authoritarianism. (Another study likewise found that, while on economic matters the public were somewhat to the left of Guardian readers, the latter were markedly more liberal on issues of crime and punishment). To some extent, media coverage will reflect demand from reactionary sections of the public: in Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News, “give them what they want” is one of the unwritten “rules of production” impinging on newsrooms. Who “they” are is not given, though, and it is a real possibility that such right-wing sentiment is over-represented in the commercial media on account of its dependence on advertiser-friendly demographics.

The political economy of the media undoubtedly plays a role in other ways. Ownership by the wealthy does not rule out the existence of more liberal papers – such as the Independent – but is likely to bias reporting away from criticism of the powerful and toward attacks on the weak, marginal, and socially deviant. Studies of “moral panics” have suggested that the press’s structural reliance on powerful “official” sources tends to mean media coverage becomes part of a spiral of self-reinforcing authoritarian responses. Equally, ordinary crime coverage tends to flourish because it is relatively cheap and attention-grabbing, as well as unthreatening to powerful interests. The resulting prominence given to crime coverage has been shown to impact greatly on public perception and fear of crime, and on demands for authoritarian responses. Equally, the media have been found generally to cover crime in an “episodic” rather than a “thematic” way, with crime portrayed as a series of isolated, shocking, disruptive events, rather than as a broad, ongoing phenomenon with social roots. This encourages a general conception of crime as a matter of individual moral evil rather than collective failure, and a greater desire to punish perpetrators. Hardline Tory right-winger Michael Howard summed up this line of thought during his 2005 election campaign: “I know what causes crime: criminals!” Thus authoritarian public opinion is in part a product of, as well as an influence on, media coverage of crime.

The ability of the press to print flagrantly false information – on any subject – is also a matter of great importance. Richard Desmond’s Star and Express simply exempted themselves from the remit of the self-regulatory Press Complaints Commission in early 2011. Following this body’s disgraceful role in the hacking scandal, however – the PCC was itself complicit in the cover-up – it has few serious defenders left, and has earned itself the status of a national joke. As former Telegraph editor Max Hastings put it back in 2002: 

“some British newspapers flourish on habitual indifference as to whether what they print might be true or not. And the editors of such titles ... are invited to take their turns as members of the Press Complaints Commission.”

 There is one final factor worth considering, however, and that is inequality. As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett note in The Spirit Level, there is not only evidence that violent crime tends to be greater in more unequal societies, but that inequality tends to produce the harsher sentencing associated with the dehumanising of criminals. Unequal societies are more highly sensitised to status and class distinctions, as economic differences become encoded in cultural and social distinctions. Such social inequality tends to evoke a “bicycling response”, resembling the pose assumed by cyclists: bowing to those above you and kicking down on those beneath you. More unequal societies thus spend less on social programmes to address social problems at the root, and more on harsh authoritarian responses – policing and prisons – which are not only ineffective but a good deal costlier. As Pickett and Wilkinson reveal, whereas evidence that harsh punishment works is simply non-existent, the opposite is true of more liberal measures aimed at humane treatment and rehabilitation. Authoritarian responses to crime are thus based not on evidence, but on the level of political demand for retribution.

 Pressure works

Tackling authoritarian misrepresentations in the press means taking on a lot: the dominance of the media by power and wealth; its reliance on officialdom and elite sources; its ability to tell flagrant lies, with accountability only to itself; and the UK’s historic and growing levels of inequality. As the study cited above suggests, improving access to education is also likely to play a significant role. In the meantime, we can continue to expose deceptions and distortions as they occur, and to challenge them as best we can. In this case, following some pressure, all three newspapers ultimately changed the headlines, subheadings and opening paragraphs of the online versions of the articles in question, removing all the details about “comfortable”, “cushy” and “soft” prisons. Much of the damage will already have been done when the articles were first publicised and circulated – while the original reporting is still extant in reproductions of the articles elsewhere, as well as in the numerous Telegraph twitter feeds, and in the Express’s editorial. Nevertheless, these changes must surely be considered a small victory – and a demonstration that pressure works. Whether it will work quite so well when the amorality of the press is no longer in the spotlight remains to be seen – but we must nevertheless be sure to keep the pressure up.