ABSTRACT
Overwhelming and conclusive studies have demonstrated austerity’s negative influence on public services. It imposed structural reconfigurations, scaled back operations, and contracted out services to private organisations. The impacts of these changes were experienced primarily by society’s most vulnerable groups, which heavily depend on them. To date, however, no research has systematically considered how austerity impacts the governance of prison healthcare in England. How austerity impacts different prison establishments remains unknown. Without such efforts, we risk failing to understand adequately how austerity punishes prisoners beyond their loss of liberty. This book provides the first empirical evidence of how austerity unevenly and detrimentally impacted prison healthcare, prison regimes, and prisoners.
This chapter introduces the book’s key argument: austerity is a political experiment that has failed to reduce the burgeoning national debt, failed to control the governance and delivery of healthcare services effectively, and failed to improve prisoners’ health in England. It defines key terms, outlines research questions, summarises the study methodology and methods, and provides chapter-by-chapter summaries. It explains how, after a decade of producing the same results, the government remains reluctant to scrap the agenda. With Brexit and COVID-19 possibly causing a creeping recession, these failures have become ever more perilous.
