The problem with ‘green’ prisons

Last summer,  the British government unveiled their new prison expansion project, Alliance 4 New Prisons (A4NP). It is just one £1bn-sized part of a pledge to spend £4bn of public funding on creating 18,000 new prison places. Under the plan, 4 new male prisons have been proposed: one confirmed next to HMP Full Sutton in East Yorkshire, another planned for North-West England and two more in the South-East. An additional 500 places are being built for women, although this action contradicts the government’s stated policy- and the Female Offender Strategy of 2018 which categorically stated its intentions to reduce the number of women being sent to prison. 

Also coming online are the following prisons in the government’s expansion pipeline. HMP Five Wells is to be completed this year, which cost £253m, and the Glen Parva project in Leicestershire is expected to be finished by 2023 and is already estimated to cost £286m.

Accompanying the announcement of A4NP came the ‘green’ promise. These new ‘green’ prisons will be installed with heat pumps, solar panels, and low energy lighting; they will also be built using recycled concrete to reduce their embodied emissions. The government’s promise is that these prisons will produce 85% less carbon emissions than existing prisons and will require half the amount of energy. Four UK-based construction firms – Kier, ISG, Wates, and Laing O’Rourke – have been appointed through an alliance contract to take on the project, a move intended to foster innovative carbon-neutral solutions and to “[maximise] the social benefit of this significant capital expenditure”,  to quote ISG’s chief operating officer.

The government has unveiled this massive expansion plan as  ethical, and ‘green’ – for if something is green, surely it must be ethical? 

Perhaps not, lets consider greenwashing. Wikipedia defines greenwashing as a ‘marketing spin’ to make a company’s practices appear more environmentally friendly than they actually are. 

Businessnewsdaily’s Adryan Corcione has an interesting take on greenwashing: namely, that it also involves using more money on marketing tactics to demonstrate greenness than on the actual strategies to reduce environmental impact.

Greenwashing is concerning enough when it concerns corporations – but it is all the more insidious when it is being employed by our governments. Yvonne Jewkes and Dominique Moran’s illuminating 2015 paper on the paradox of the ‘green’ prison delves into precisely why the use of a marketing tactic by governments to push through certain projects and policies is so effective and so dangerous.

‘In recent years concerns about climate change […] have moved being ‘green’ from fringe to fashionable to fundamental. Uniting the political right and left in moral, ethical and, sometimes, self-righteous accord, an environmental conscience has […] become the only position to adopt on a broad range of issues.’

In other words, the portrayal of greenness as a bipartisan issue can be a ploy to carry through oppressive, right-wing policies – and with it, so, the political strain of greenwashing is born.

By picking apart the language of the A4NP announcement, the greenwashing becomes painfully clear, exposing the lies and inconsistencies that are beneath it. Former Lord Chancellor Robert Buckland claimed, in something of an A4NP tagline, that the project will “cut carbon emissions as well as reoffending”. He marries the concepts of carbon neutrality and reoffending, using one to justify the other. But do more prison places equal less reoffending? As many activists and experts have already pointed out: absolutely not.

Reducing reoffending is intrinsically linked to rehabilitation and employment opportunities – something on which, according to the government website, the government is only spending an extra £550m, compared to the £4bn going to build‘green’ prison places.

Apart from using fashionable, ‘green’ language to uphold the penal complex, Buckland’s claim about cutting carbon emissions is in itself a textbook example of greenwashing. Building more prisons does not cut carbon emissions overall; it just means that these prisons will emit less than pre-existing ones. Building new prisons will always increase emissions. Also, the claim that these prisons will emit 85% less than existing ones wilfully omits the fact that the prisons’ embodied emissions – the emissions produced when building them – will be much more. 

You know what would produce no emissions at all? If we didn’t build any new prisons.

You know what would cut carbon emissions as well as reoffending? Spending £4bn on renovating pre-existing facilities and on rejuvenating chronically underfunded rehabilitation programmes, employment support, youth programmes, and facilities for vulnerable mothers and children, all of which have been crippled by years of austerity. 

If we reduce reoffending, we reduce the need for more prison spaces. This will subsequently reduce the carbon emissions of the UK prison complex. If non-custodial sentences are increased for non-violent offences, this will free up more prison spaces.

Fundamentally, building any new building is not good for the environment, no matter what language a government or corporation disguises it with. And more prison places do not equal less reoffending, even if a government official puts them side by side, as if it is that easy.

Call to action: use the template letter attached here and ask your MP to help stop the madness of building more prison places.