Capitalism, crime and punishment

Large and unruly crowds would gather at public executions such as the one depicted in “The Idle ‘Prentice Executed at Tyburn” by William Hogarth, 1770. (Pic: Wikimedia commons)

Prisons are in crisis. They’re trapped in a doom loop of overcrowding and violence.

The right wing media is whipping up a frenzy about prisoners being released early. They say that locking people up helps to stop crime. This is a lie.

Prisons make society more dysfunctional, unequal and unsafe.

Britain has the highest rate of incarceration in Western Europe. And politicians playing to a right wing agenda have imposed ever longer sentences. The prison population has doubled over the last 30 years, even though crime rates have fallen substantially.

Prisons are not an answer to violence. They are where violence happens. The number of assaults in prison increased by 30 percent in the year to March 2024.

Over 13,000 individuals self-harmed, up 19 percent on the previous year. Suicides are also on the rise.

Prison criminalises black people. Black and minority ethnic people make up just
3 percent of Britain’s population and 13 percent of the prison population. 

Nearly 5,000 women were imprisoned in 2023. Most were victims of much more serious offences than they were accused of committing.

There is a long and bloody history of the ruling class using extreme brutality to deal with crime. But by the 20th century prisons became the state’s preferred method of suppressing threats to its rule.

Understanding where prisons came from reveals why they are a continuation of a violent system of state repression against working class people.

In feudal times most people were serfs or in service to the lords. As incarceration only works as a method of control if people are free, there was little need for prisons.

Those who stepped out of line were flogged, branded, burnt at the stake, and hung, drawn and quartered. Women were tortured by being held underwater on a ducking stool or forced to wear a heavy metal cage, a “scold’s bridle”, on their heads.  

This violence was necessary to maintain the rule of a tiny number of lords over the peasants who did all the work.

The birth of capitalism transformed the state and created new crimes.

The common land was “enclosed”—it was legally stolen from those who depended on it. MPs were all wealthy landowners who wanted to protect their stolen property.

The Black Act of 1723 listed 200 new crimes punishable by execution, many of them aimed at terrorising the population into giving up the common land. Crimes listed in this “bloody code” included chopping down a tree and poaching a fish.

As the revolutionary Karl Marx wrote, peasants were “first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, then whipped, branded and tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary for the system of wage labour”.

Workers traditionally considered themselves the masters of what they made or transported.

They were used to taking home a chip of wood, a few nails or a pinch of sugar. This all had to be criminalised to defend profits. 

The ruling class was always terrified that the poor would riot. The punishment for illegal assembly was changed from branding to transportation to a penal colony for seven years.

Fears stoked by the French Revolution of 1789 led to more repression. The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 clamped down on collective organisations, including trade unions.

Anti-monarchy reformers were charged with treason, which carried the sentence of being hung, drawn and quartered.

The first modern police forces were there to defend profits. London’s Metropolitan police were founded in 1829 in response to increasing levels of working class agitation.

By the 1830s around 5,000 prisoners, some as young as ten, were transported to penal colonies in Australia every year. Among the thousands transported were the Tolpuddle Martyrs who had tried to form a union in 1834.

Draconian laws did not always work. Juries would often refuse to convict prisoners if it meant they would be executed. This led to the death sentence being abolished for most petty crimes.

Executions, floggings, brandings all took place in public. The sight of pain and suffering was supposed to act as a deterrent. But by the mid‑19th century crowds gathering to witness executions became increasingly unruly. They often celebrated the executed as folk heroes.

It was fear of these crowds that meant the end of public executions. Yet executions inside the prison walls continued until 1964. Flogging remained on the statute book until 1948.

The state continued to expand its reach, regulating more and more areas of working class people’s lives. New legislation led to the criminalisation of poverty through the New Poor Law, the policing of women’s sexuality through the Contagious Diseases Acts and the persecution of LGBT+ people.

By the 20th century, prison and fines were becoming the preferred way of punishing people. Some see this as a sign of advancement.

But the history of prisons is not one of progress from violent retribution to enlightened rehabilitation.

Prisons continued to mean state violence. Suffragette campaigners were routinely tortured in prison. Force feeding was not just an agonising oral experience. It was also used vaginally and anally to inflict physical and mental damage to women who simply wanted to vote.

Ideas of educating and rehabilitating prisoners began to filter slowly into the criminal justice system. But such reforms were never more than cosmetic.

Austerity cutbacks in support services and the neoliberal erosion of welfare provision mean that today prisons are more violent, more harmful and more abusive. The rich and powerful are always more interested in protecting their property and their power than they are in protecting working class people.

They decide what is a crime and what isn’t. Marital rape was not recognised as a crime until 2003 because women were seen as the property of men.

The ruling class routinely commits what revolutionary Frederick Engels called “social murder”. He meant the preventable deaths caused by poor working conditions, malnutrition and a lack of social care. No-one is held accountable for these crimes. Destroying the environment is not a crime. But protesting effectively against that destruction is.

Prisons are not there to make us safer and more secure. They don’t address the causes of crime—the sick system that we live in.

Capitalist society breeds hostility and antagonism. We are encouraged to see others as competitors who threaten our well-being and security.

Addressing crimes such as fraud, robbery and theft means taking money away from prisons and giving it to drug and alcohol services, to mental health support, to the provision of homes and jobs. It means breaking cycles of violence and abuse through support and care.

Some campaigners want to see crimes like rape punished with longer sentences. Convictions for rape are historically low because women are not believed. Women who do come forward find their lives scrutinised and their experiences dismissed.

But higher conviction rates will not stop violence against women. Addressing this violence would mean striking at the heart of a system that oppresses women and girls.

It would mean challenging the sexist attitudes that exist throughout society and ending a system that treats women as second class citizens.

It would mean properly funded support for survivors rather than leaving them reliant on a criminal justice system that fails them.

Struggles that bring together people of all backgrounds—whether it is workers on a picket line or women leading protests over Palestine—can start to erode sexist ideas.

And revolutionary upheavals show glimpses of the potential to undermine the violence endemic to capitalism and to challenge oppressive ideas and behaviour.

Engy Ghozlan was part of the Egyptian Revolution in 2011. “I smoked in Tahrir and it was fine and remember thinking, I’m smoking in Tahrir and no one is looking or saying anything to me. And I was never sexually harassed there either,” she recalled.

The criminal justice system is part of the capitalist state. The state is not a neutral body that stands above class divisions. Whenever our rulers face resistance from below, the state unleashes repression against working class people.

Throughout history, revolutionaries have resisted criminalisation and dreamt of a world without prisons. The French Revolution of 1789 opened with the ­storming of the Bastille. In January 2011, Egyptian people stormed the police stations. 

During the Gordon Riots of 1780, the London crowd broke into Newgate jail and freed the prisoners. Graffiti on the prison’s burnt wall declared the prisoners had been freed ­courtesy of his majesty, King Mob.