Strangeways Here We Come

Channel 5 showed a documentary last night about the 1990 Strangeways prison riot.

The month long sit-in on the roof of the massively overcrowded Victorian gaol just north of Manchester city centre, during which much of the fabric of the building was destroyed, became something of an attraction, both locally and for the national media, sparking a debate about prison conditions, and leading to some improvements at the rebuilt and renamed HMP Manchester when it reopened in 1994 (notably toliets in the cells), although those who organised the protest ended up spending many more years behind bars as a result of it. One of them, already serving a life sentence, described the experience of emerging on the roof above the rotunda, overlooking the tower which was popularly, but wrongly, thought to have housed the gallows before hanging was abolished (it's actually a ventilation shaft), seeing the outside world for the first time in almost a decade and feeling human again (the other iconic landmark on the Strangeways skyline, the chimney of Boddingtons Brewery, finally came down in 2010, three years after the rest of the building was demolished).

Among the other changes at the new HMP Manchester was a ban on prison officers belonging to far right groups, before which National Front badges had been worn openly on the wings, and the closure of the social club where some of them drank heavily at dinnertime.

The prison population has increased dramatically since the 1990s and now stands above eighty thousand, so that, despite the privately-run HMP Forest Bank opening in Salford in 2000, on the site of the former Agecroft power station, as another local prison and remand facility, Strangeways has again become dangerously overcrowded and is still a place where prisoners are merely contained rather than rehabilitated.