Death and Resistance: A Dispatch from HMP Low Newton
A friend of mine in Bronzefield once told me as we trudged around the yard that her worst fear was the guards taking away her means of suicide. To have this final act of autonomy stripped from her was the most torturous deprivation she could imagine. I have thought about this often, especially in the wake of the genocide in Gaza and a recent suicide at HMP Low Newton on the 13 February 2025. At the time of writing, I have been in prison for 308 days, held on remand along with 17 others collectively known as the Filton 18.1 We have been charged with involvement in a direct action to disrupt an Elbit Systems factory in Filton, Bristol, that produces weapons including drones currently being used to commit genocide in Gaza. We were arrested and held under the Terrorism Act, though we are charged with non-terror offenses. Currently I am in HMP Low Newton, but I have also spent time in HMP Bronzefield and HMP Polmont. Watching the stream of liberal mainstream reporting on the genocide from my cell, I have spent much time reflecting on the subjugation and resistance of Palestinians, and parallels with the control of incarcerated people in the UK.
Staff did their best to repress the spread of news of the suicide in Low Newton but, inevitably, it was common knowledge within 20 minutes; everyone knows what a ‘code blue’ signifies and, when followed by a prison-wide lockdown, it can only mean one thing. It was therefore considered a suspiciously thoughtful gesture when the death was officially announced to prisoners the following morning. A woman we had never seen before, in a rose-gold satin blouse and immaculately shiny heels, informed us of the ‘sad passing’ and invited us to talk to staff if we felt the need. These perfunctory preliminaries out of the way, she proceeded to the main purpose of her address: information control. We were warned against spreading rumours and urged not to speculate over the cause of death. The suicide was referred to as a ‘shock’ and a ‘tragedy’, as if it were an anomalous freak accident – something entirely unprecedented that would never recur – as if, I thought to myself, we’re not trapped in a death factory presided over by primly coiffed eugenicists with sympathetically knitted brows.
If an inmate here were to take the satin-bloused woman at her word and confide in an officer, however, they would immediately be placed on an ACCT. I don’t know what the acronym stands for, despite having been put on one myself when I first arrived (against my vehement protests), but everyone knows they’re bad news. You are moved to a bare cell (known colloquially as a ‘suicide cell’), sometimes made to strip and put on ‘anti-ligature clothing’ and subjected to a militant regimen of half- or quarter-hourly checks, right the way through the night. These checks take the form of an eye appearing at the peephole in the door or wall, accompanied by a dazzling flashlight when your own light is switched off, and a harsh bark of your name if you do not stir to indicate your continued existence. One of my friends, incarcerated as a child and now in her 20s, endured this treatment for an entire year. Needless to say, the aim is not to assuage suicidal feelings, but merely to prevent their being acted upon under the state’s watch.
Scarcely a week goes by without a new inspection report denouncing the ‘mental health crisis’ in UK prisons2 and the appalling conditions compelling so many to consider death their only way out. According to the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, a prisoner took their life every three and a half days in 2023, while an essay in Inside Time pointed out that, in 2024, more people died in Scottish prisons than died in Scotland of homicide. But our appetite for such sensational statistics obscures their elision of innumerable near-deaths: the attempted suicides, the disabilities arising from endemic medical neglect3 and the crippling effects of inhumane regimes that see increasing numbers of prisoners locked in tiny cells for upwards of 22 hours a day.4 The story of my friend Sandra5 is disturbingly typical. In agony for weeks, she begged to see a member of prison healthcare staff; after weeks of waiting, she was finally seen and her concerns dismissed. She lost over two thirds of her body weight and could barely shuffle down the corridor, having to lean on another inmate’s old zimmer frame. It wasn’t until an officer returned from leave and was shocked by how tiny and frail she’d become that an ambulance was called. By the time she arrived at the hospital, she was in multiple organ failure and it was too late to salvage much of her bowel, which had to be removed and replaced with a stoma bag. Weighing just five and a half stone, the doctors weren’t sure Sandra would survive the operation, so a kind nurse agreed to get word to her family, whom the prison hadn’t notified lest she tried to escape. Sandra’s children stood around her bed and wept, and her brother lambasted the guard for the cruel indignity of the chain around her wrist that appeared to weigh as much as she did. The guard, far from being moved, delayed the operation – unwilling to heed doctor’s instructions to unshackle Sandra in order to enter the operating theatre without the prison’s consent. Having made her peace with death at 41, Sandra survived. Had she received medical attention months earlier, however, she would not have required such drastic, life-altering surgery. My neighbour, Katie,6 came to prison on codeine, prescribed by her doctor a decade earlier to manage the pain of nerve damage in her spine from an incorrectly administered epidural. The prison nurse told her she could not have codeine and would have to make do with paracetamol. To manage the withdrawal, she was prescribed methadone – a heroin replacement drug. In two months, Katie will be leaving Low Newton with a methadone addiction having never taken heroin in her life.7
While these examples are extreme in consequence, they are mundane in cause. Prison medical staff, when we are able to see them, are routinely suspicious of our reported ailments, having been trained to perceive all prisoners as grasping, scheming work-skivers and drug-fiends.8 Illness or self-harm that requires a hospital trip is treated as an escape attempt by default – hence, the guard’s reluctance to unshackle himself from Sandra, even as she was being wheeled into theatre. (Another inmate recalls the time she went to hospital and the guard chained to her was even sceptical of the doctor’s insistence that he could not remain chained to her as she entered the MRI machine. Once again, calls had to be made for authorisation before she could undergo the scan.) The context of this medical neglect and distrust is an environment inherently deleterious to health. As well as the psychological stress of being exiled from our lives and surrounded by hypervigilant hostility, we receive poor nutrition, with meals consisting predominantly of cheap, highly-processed carbs, and unless our jobs entail activity, opportunities for exercise are few. It is little wonder that, according to Inside Time, one in five prisoners has type 2 diabetes.9 Decent sleep is hard to come by, eluding those of us who can’t get comfy on the thin blue plastic mat on a solid shelf that passes for a bed, or who are disturbed by the night patrol’s flashlight skewering the darkness of our cells. It is a peaceful night when these are the only impediments to sleep; much worse are those in which the quiet is shattered by the shrieks and howls of inmates in distress, or the dreadful, hollow thuds of someone bashing their head against the wall or door. At first, these sounds would bring a sympathetic lump to my throat; now I clamp ear defenders over my earplugs and endeavour to sleep on my back.
These realities cannot be distilled into punchy headline figures, even while they constitute a campaign of slow death, shaving years from our life expectancies in addition to the years the state robs us of our lives on the outside. Similarly, popular analysis of the devastation caused by Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians privileges death toll above all other measures, insidiously conveying the false impression that the wounded, the diseased, the starved, the traumatised and the bereft are going to be ok. The extensively documented IOF policy of ‘shooting to cripple’10 rather than to kill is often erroneously taken up by Western audiences as evidence of the army’s commitment to the preservation of life. However, in a context of strategic resource deprivation and targeted infrastructural annihilation, where the supply or withholding of medical care, fuel, electricity, food and water are all controlled by the Israeli oppressor, the sustained and deliberate practice of maiming is tantamount to condemnation to a slow and agonising death. Crucially, these deferred deaths aren’t attributed to the IOF – artificially lowering a death toll that already provokes mild discomfort for the Western governments financing the genocide when they invoke Israel’s pretext of ‘self-defence’. It is a tactic devised not only to appease Western liberals but to deny Palestinians the dignity and honour of martyrdom when death becomes their only option. In 2016, reports by the BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights documented the kneecapping campaigns in refugee camps throughout the West Bank, detailing the declarations of an Israeli commander who fully grasped – and revelled in – the significance of this denial. Captain Nidal avowed, ‘I will make all the youths of this camp disabled’, while Israeli journalist Amira Hass reported for Haaretz that Nidal ‘tells young people there will be no martyrs in the camp, but “all of you will end up on crutches”’.11 Jasbir K. Puar, author of The Right to Maim, describes this as ‘targeting for death, but not killing’12 and observes ‘it is as if withholding death … becomes an act of dehumanisation: the Palestinians are not even human enough for death’.13
It is an irony frequently remarked upon that the Western states providing the majority of the funding for the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) are also those that furnish Israel with billions for munitions – which are then used to raze the schools and hospitals that the UNRWA constructs. Another such intractable hypocrisy is evident in the UK government’s stance on prisons. The HMI Prisons annual report for 2023 to 2024 pronounced that we are in ‘desperate times’, noting that suicide and self-harm had increased ‘significantly’ in men’s prisons, and in some institutions had doubled. Meanwhile, the rate of self-harm amongst those incarcerated in women’s prisons is nine times higher than in the men’s estate. And yet, at the end of 2024, Lord High Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice Shabana Mahmood announced the government’s ten billion pound plan to build four new prisons over the next seven years, creating a further 6,400 places to accommodate the ever-increasing incarcerated population of the UK. Perhaps the contradiction here isn’t obvious; after all, might not more prisons reduce the strains caused by overcrowding and couldn’t an influx of money be used to rehabilitate and support prisoners? I would counsel anyone inclined to such optimism to note the conspicuous absence of any mention of cultural changes in Mahmood’s announcement. The emphasis is solely on physical expansion, with no one appearing to be troubled by the glaring question: why is the number of prisoners continually on the rise? Of course, to pose such a query would be to acknowledge that ‘criminals’ are a socially manufactured population, and from there it’s perilously tricky to avoid concluding that, in fact, all the prejudices we like to congratulate ourselves on having overcome as a society are alive and thriving, having been subsumed under the rubric of criminality. The simple truth is that more prisons can only mean more dead and disabled prisoners. And how could it be otherwise? Any attempt to meaningfully engage with the root causes of a prisoner’s despair would necessarily lead to prison abolition – and then all these guards would be out of a job. We do not have capital punishment in this country, but what we do have is an ever-expanding, ever more oppressive prison estate, along with rapidly proliferating state apparatus of surveillance, control and discipline, as a consequence of which death and disability may not be the explicit intention but are undeniably the result.
In both Israeli and UK state propaganda, disingenuous rhetoric around intentionality is accorded hefty weight in the evaluation of its results. Each article and report exposing the extent of prisons’ failings is replete with obligatory handwringing and head-shaking, empty condolences for victim’s families and assurances that everyone involved is doing their utmost to ensure that the exact opposite of what is happening happens. It hardly matters that most prisoners are repeat reoffenders14 (since incarceration does not reduce recidivism15) because the intention is to reduce reoffending. And yes, former Chief Inspector of Prisons Peter Clarke declared the UK prison suicide and self-harm rate ‘a scandal’,16 but what you need to understand is that all prison staff are committed to respecting and caring for prisoners, nurturing us to achieve our potential and leave behind our nefarious criminal ways. By the same token, we really must stop harping on about the fact that after a year of genocide, nearly 70% of Israel’s victims were women and children, since if you were paying attention to both sides, you would know that Israel has ‘no desire to harm the population’, as Netanyahu said at a news conference in December 2023. A useful heuristic for surpassing this gulf between lip-service and reality is Stafford Beer’s principle, ‘the purpose of the system is what it does’. It is meaningless to insist on a purported intention that is consistently at odds with the result. If Israel truly intended not to kill civilians, the IOF could refrain from bombing schools, hospitals and densely crowded refugee camps. If the UK government sincerely wished to reduce overcrowding in prisons, it could stop recalling people for such ludicrously minor infractions of their licence as arriving ten minutes late to a probation appointment, as was the case for another friend I met in HMP Bronzefield.
In prison, as in occupied Palestine, the spectre of death is a constant, whether sudden or slow, sought out or fought against. But while inflicting death is a sharp and effective tool of biopolitical control – disappearing undesirable populations – so too is death’s denial. In specifically targeting children for maiming, the IOF simultaneously earns points for humanitarianism from wilfully credulous western liberals, and incapacitates any future resistance. It is a calculated counter-insurgency technique anticipating Elon Musk’s prediction that the traumatised and grieving orphans of martyrs would surely grow up to join Hamas.17 This observation was perceived by some as a rare moment of insight from Musk, but in fact it betrays people’s incomprehension at the profound scale of the debilitation of Palestinian children. Nevertheless, Musk struck at an important truth: death is galvanising. How many westerners know the names of more dead Palestinians than living? How many find Palestinians more persuasive and palatable as victims when massacred than when resisting? Death’s power to awaken, incense, politicise and move to action is what compels both the UK and Israel to consciously withhold death from their respective surplus populations. Both states sustain these populations in conditions of total immiseration and despair, such that they are too weak to fight back while also refusing a death that would sublimate their struggle.18 The point here is not to have more martyrs, more prison suicides. I do not even want more lives to have to be given over to revolutionary struggle. What I want is for us to ask ourselves: why wait for death’s arrival to animate our resistance? No one else gets to determine the threshold of our tolerance for injustice but we the people. It should never have come to genocide and it should never have come to mass incarceration. However, a fortunate corollary of the fact that so many similarities exist between conditions of imprisonment and occupation under Israel is that the same strategies of resistance can be applied to both struggles. In helping to free Palestine we cannot but challenge the fallacious logics underlying the consensus that prison is a viable solution to social problems. Equally, in striving towards prison abolition, we commit ourselves to fighting for a world in which no one can strip any other being of their liberty.
References
1 To learn more about the Filton 18 and support their campaign for freedom, please follow @freethefilton18 on Instagram and Twitter.
2 ‘Mental Health Failings at Gartree and Lewes Found After Inmate’s Death’, Converse, August 2024; p. 7; ‘Prisoners are Poorly’, Inside Time, May 2024, p. 11; ‘IMB Watch’: Forest Bank, Drake Hall, Guys Marsh, Inside Time, May 2025, p. 15; ‘Lives at Risk over Inaction on Prisons, says Report’, Converse, August 2024, p. 23; ‘Teenager Kills Himself at Scottish Young Offender Institution’, Converse, August 2024, p. 33; ‘IMB: Leicester Prison Under Pressure’, Converse, August 2024, p. 35; ‘HMP Liverpool is a cluster death site ... completely inhumane’, ‘IMB Report Published: HMP Liverpool’, Converse, October 2024, p. 16; ‘HMP Ryehill: Self-Harm Cases Up 40%’, Converse, October 2024, p. 33; ‘Rochester Prison: Urgent Notification’, Converse, October 2024, p. 38; ‘HMP Durham – Risk Assessment Concerns Raised Again After Cell Suicide’, Converse, January 2025, p. 39.
3 ‘You Can’t Visit Him Today, He’s Dead’, Inside Time, May 2024, p. 15; ‘We’ve Lost Your False Leg’, Inside Time, October 2024, p. 11; ‘The Mount: Third Critical Death Report in Three Months’, Converse, October 2024, p. 10; ‘Woman Told Officers She Felt Suicidal’, Inside Time, November 2024, p. 14; ‘Naked Barking Man Wasn’t Treated’, Inside Time, February 2025, p. 14; ‘A Deadly Diagnosis: If You Have Cancer in Prison, You’re More Likely to Die From It’, Inside Time, February 2025, p. 16; ‘No Help for Self-Harmers’, Inside Time, May 2024, p. 2; ‘Not a Place for Disabled Prisoners’, Inside Time, May 2024, p. 4; ‘Hopeless Healthcare’, Inside Time, May 2024, p. 9.
4 ‘Endless Bang-up’, Inside Time, November 2024, p. 26; ‘The Figures Say It All’, Inside Time, November 2024, p. 26.
5 Not her real name.
6 Another pseudonym.
7 Horrifyingly, this appears to be standard practice. A prisoner at HMP Parc testifies that ‘healthcare is an absolute shambles – they take people off their pain relief and put them on methadone scripts’; ‘No Structure Here’, Inside Time, November 2024, p. 6.
8 The nurse made an ‘error of judgement’, having ‘mistakenly believed he had taken drugs’; ‘Prisoner Died After Nurse Called Off Ambulance’, Inside Time, February 2025, p. 15.
9 ‘One in five prisoners has type 2 diabetes’, Inside Time, 31 December 2024, https://insidetime.org/newsround/one-in-five-prisoners-has-type-2-diabetes/#:~:text=The%20data%2C%20released%20to%20The%20Times%20following%20a,sugar%20in%20the%20blood%20to%20become%20too%20high. Accessed 11/05/2025
10 ‘Specially trained Israeli units, then, shoot in a calculated manner in order to cripple, while keeping the statistics of Palestinians killed low’; Tanya Reinhart, Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948, p. 114. Puar, citing Reinhart (p. 113): ‘In 2002, Israeli linguist Tanya Reinhart analysed “the policy of injuries” during the Second Intifada ... Citing interviews with IDF soldiers from the Jerusalem Post, she selects a representative sample from Israeli sharpshooter, Sergeant Raz ... who proclaims, “I shot two people ... in their knees. It’s supposed to break their bones and neutralise them but not kill them”’, Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim, p. 131. ‘A delegation of Physicians for Human Rights concluded “that is Israeli soldiers appeared to be deliberately targeting the heads and legs of Palestinian protestors, even in non-life-threatening situations”’; Ephron, Boston Globe, 4 November 2000, cited in Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim (North Carolina, US: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 131. ‘During the Second Intifada, there were reports that the IDF were using “high-velocity” fragmenting bullets that created a “lead snowstorm” effect in the body – scattering the bullet throughout and creating multiple internal injuries ... dumdum bullets, which are banned under international human rights law, are difficult to extract after they entered and exploded outward within the body and usually guarantee that those hit will “suffer for life”’, Puar, The Right to Maim, p. 131.
11 Puar, The Right to Maim, p. 221.
12 Puar, The Right to Maim, p. 139.
13 Puar, The Right to Maim, p. 141.
14 Peter Cuthbertson, ‘Who goes to prison? An overview of the prison population of England and Wales’, Civitas, December 2017, p. 2 https://www.civitas.org.uk/content/files/whogoestoprison.pdf.
15 ‘Abolition of short custodial sentences’, The Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, https://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/case/_new/research/Inequalities_and_Poverty/policy-toolkit/crime-short-custodial-sentences.asp. Accessed 11/05/2025.
16 Jamie Greierson, ‘Prison suicide rate is a scandal, says HM chief inspector’, The Guardian, 9 July 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jul/09/jails-slow-react-deluge-of-drugs-hm-chief-inspector. Accessed 11/05/2025.
17 Elon Musk, quoted in ‘Elon Musk: War, AI, Aliens, Politics, Physics, Video Games, and Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast’, Lex Fridman, 9 November 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN3KPFbWCy8. Accessed 11/05/2025.
18 For a harrowing testament to the belief in death’s power to catalyse change, see ‘Prisoner Hoped Suicide Would Change IPP Policy’, Inside Time, October 2024, p. 12.