An Accidental History of Prisons and Race in Late Twentieth Century Britain
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Event details
Join us for research seminars hosted by the Department of History with a selection of visiting academics, alongside University of York researchers. All students and staff are very welcome.
A zoom link will be made available for distance learning PhD students on request. Please contact Dr Purba Hossain (purba.hossain@york.ac.uk) if you have any questions.
You can view the full schedule for the semester here: History Research Seminar Schedule Autumn 2025
Speaker: Dr Liam J. Liburd, Assistant Professor of Black British History, Durham University
Abstract:
In late 1977, Grassroots – a newspaper produced by the British Black Power organisation, the Black Liberation Front – published a front-page article exposing prison officers in Wandsworth prison as proud supporters of the white supremacist organisation, the National Front. I came across these reports of British fascism flourishing behind bars while researching the British Black Power movement’s analysis and understanding of fascism in Britain. I initially took these reports to be apocryphal or hyperbolic – I was wrong. In trying to corroborate these reports, I ended up following a trail of identical claims made in the national press, in anti-fascist magazines, in the publications of the prisoners’ rights movement, and recorded in Home Office files. Out of a web of anecdotes about fascist ‘screws’ emerged a fragmentary history of race and the prison system in post-war Britain.
This paper explores this fragmentary history focusing, in particular, on the 1970s – the decade in which, as Stuart Hall and his co-authors explored in Policing the Crisis, an ‘law and order’-oriented authoritarian populism came to dominate mainstream politics. In doing so, it also navigates the history of penal policy, prison politics, and the changing structure of the Prison Service in late twentieth century Britain. Ultimately, it considers the ways in which institutional racism and what is typically termed “extremist” racism could collaborate in a carceral context.