Abstract
This essay takes the publication of Bill Griffiths’ Collected Poems as an opportunity to look again at his poems about prison. While sequences like Cycles and War W/Windsor have long been acknowledged as highpoints of the so-called British Poetry Revival, the broader social context of their composition has been overlooked. I link Griffiths’ work in the 1970s with mass protests in English prisons, and the activism of Preservation of the Rights of Prisoners (PROP). I suggest that the uncollected sequence An Account of the End signals a break in Griffiths’ work, and pick up the thread again in the early 1990s. I argue for the importance of an essay, HMP: Revising Prison, a poem, Star Fish Jail, and a hybrid work of journals and letters, 76-Day Wanno. These works, written in the wake of the Strangeways prison riot, combine prison activism with aesthetic experimentation. The essay combines archival sources, close textual scholarship, and historical investigation.
Highlights
There were 344 deaths in prison custody in the 12 months to March 2017, up 54 from the previous year
The number of incidents requiring hospital attendance rose by 21% to 2,740
In the 12 months to March 2017 there were 344 deaths in prison custody, an increase of 19% compared to the previous year, at a rate of 4.0 deaths per 1,000 prisoners
Summary
Deaths up 19% overall, self-inflicted up 11% In the 12 months to March 2017, there were 344 deaths in prison custody, up 54 from the previous year. In the 12 months to March 2017 there were 344 deaths in prison custody, an increase of 19% compared to the previous year, at a rate of 4.0 deaths per 1,000 prisoners. There were 113 apparent self-inflicted deaths, up 11% on the previous year. There were 10 self-inflicted deaths at a rate of 2.6 per 1,000 prisoners. Homicides in prison custody remain relatively rare, accounting for around 1% of all deaths over the last ten years. Natural-cause deaths were at a rate of 2.3 per 1,000 prisoners, up from 1.9 per 1,000 in the previous year. The number of ‘other’ deaths is not directly comparable with earlier years. It is likely the number of deaths of the remaining classifications will be revised upwards once classifications have been made
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