ABSTRACT
Following the construction and acceptance of austerity, this chapter reports the participants’ observations on its implementation. Particularly, it considers the implementation in prison healthcare and the prison regime at a time when the volume of prisoners and complexities of prisoners’ health are burgeoning. The chapter also emphasises how the focus on punishment, security, public protection, and commercialisation inhibits prisoner’s health considerations. Using these aims as the chapter’s conduits, I argue that several issues have become normalised across English prisons. These are the postponement and cancellation of healthcare appointments, increasing wait times to access treatment, insufficient consultation time with health professionals, lack of access to purposeful activities, and violence. In parallel, the increasing magnitude of overcrowding and increasing availability of drugs in these prisons have amplified the unsafe prison environment since the introduction of austerity measures. This chapter then provides insights on the heterogeneous impact of austerity measures on different prison establishments, which is often taken for granted. Together, these findings enable a greater appreciation of the prolonged effect of austerity, not only on the immediate environment of prisons, but also on the level of reoffending, the government’s rehabilitation drive, and the health of the general population.
