Prison abolitionism and justice: should policing be devolved to Wales?
An essay on Welsh prison abolitionism, podcast recommendations, and minority ethnic Welsh history in the archives
Prynhawn da, and happy belated Hen Galan! 13th January in Wales is "Hen Galan" meaning "Old New Year". In 1752, the British Empire ditched the Julian calendar which had been used since the time of the Romans. Instead, it was replaced with the Gregorian calendar. The “old calendar” is still observed in some bits of Wales.

Traditionally, the time between Christmas Day and Hen Galan is a time for the Mari Llwyd. The Mari Llwyd is a wassailing folk custom that’s indigenous to Glamorgan.
I love these images. It is a Wales that no longer exists, except for in these photos. The Mari Llwyd has seen a huge Wales-wide revival in recent years. The unsmiling portraits of these men near Maesteg remind me of images of family in South Asia- in many of these photos, nobody smiles at the camera. Weddings in Toba Tek Singh in 2021 feel eerily similar to Llangynwyd in the early 1900s. Betty Campbell talks about the practice of Boxing Day Carnival in 1940s Cardiff in an oral history with Adola Dewis, explaining that men went door to door with instruments. The culture of wassailing was popular in Wales, especially among different communities- I wonder if a Mari Llwyd ever made it to Boxing Day Carnival.
In this edition, I am going to explore whether policing and the criminal justice system should be devolved to Wales, and I recommend a bunch of podcasts and videos, too.
Should policing and the criminal justice system be devolved to the Welsh government?
Last Monday saw the beginning of the inquest into the death of Christopher Kapessa at Pontypridd Coroners’ Court. The Kapessa family is represented by Michael Mansfield KC, who also represented Stephen Miller of the Cardiff 3. The Welsh government has also started a new piece of work about the devolution of policing in Wales. The timing of this work is deeply symbolic owing to what could have been achieved in Wales if policing had been devolved sooner.
Today is the beginning of the inquest into the death of Mouayed Bashir, who died in police custody in Newport in 2021. Please attend if you can. @TomBFowler on Twitter will be live-tweeting the inquest from the 22nd of January.
A third anticipated inquest of 2023 is that of Mohamud Mohmmad Hassan, who died following police custody in 2021. Organisations with an ethnicity, race, or youth focus serving communities and people in Wales have remained quiet on this, and remain quiet on the policy landscape of policing in Wales. Likewise, there has been nothing on these cases from the Institute of Race Relations, Runnymede Trust, or other organisations.
Christopher passed away in Rhondda Cynon Taf, Mouayed died in Newport, and Mohamud died in Cardiff. All three of these cases were handled by South Wales Police or Gwent Police. South Wales Police has a notorious reputation, with Keir Starmer of the Crown Prosecution Service bringing a case against them 11 years ago in 2012. Files mysteriously went missing, and later wound up in the west Cardiff suburb of Fairwater. The trial was due to be one of the biggest anti-corruption trials in British history but fell through owing to a lack of disclosure from the police.
Two separate strategies from the Welsh Government
The criminal justice system and the police are not devolved to Wales. The control of policing and the criminal justice system remains in Westminster. This creates a unique situation within Wales and the landscape of the criminal justice system between England and Wales during a period of huge expansion of the non-white population in Wales. Difficult questions about transparency and accountability are met with the response “Policing and the criminal justice system are not devolved to Wales”. The Welsh government stonewalls this area, and the lack of regulation of CJS and policing has created a unique (and toxic) atmosphere in Welsh policing. Policing might not be devolved, but Welsh public authorities have seen a regime that mirrors the racial inequality of their English counterparts.
While these areas are not devolved, there is a chapter on Crime and Justice in the Anti-Racism Wales Action Plan, and another document called the Criminal Justice Anti-Racism Plan. Much of the latter is about boosting minority ethnic engagement with the police, such as increasing the amount of Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic police officers, and the proportion of hate crime that is reported to the police. Most- if not all is focussed on heightened engagement to tackle disproportionality.
Does reporting hate crimes to institutionally racist police forces make us safer?

The renewed conversations on hate crime remind me of this piece that I came across in Daikon zine called “Against ‘Hate Crime’” (which is also available here as an audio version of the article). The piece is about the experiences of hate crime amongst the East Asian and South East Asian diaspora in Britain, placing hate crime as part of a wider narrative and history of racist structures, ultimately rejecting policing as a solution to racist attacks.
The Institute of Race Relations published a report on Brexit in 2016 that showed South Wales had one of the highest increases of hate crimes reported after the Brexit vote- but does reporting hate crime to an institutionally racist police force after the Cardiff 3, Siyanda, Christopher, Mohamud, Mouayed, make Welsh ethnic minorities safer?

After all, Welsh Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic people are more overrepresented in prisons than their English counterparts: even without the devolution of this area to Wales, Wales reflects racism that is deeply embedded throughout the criminal justice system.
The Welsh government started its inquiry into the first phase of work of the Anti-Racism Wales Action Plan last autumn. Dr Robert Jones from the Wales Centre of Governance submitted a response that gave me food for thought below;
“The success of the Welsh Government’s Anti-racist Wales Action Plan is also likely to depend on the impact of the Criminal Justice Board for Wales’ own Criminal Justice Anti-Racism Action Plan for Wales. While the Criminal Justice Board for Wales’ decision to publish its own strategy can be viewed as a credible and worthwhile attempt by criminal justice agencies in Wales to attend to the (often overlooked) distinct Welsh policy landscape, it is unclear why there is a need for two separate (but overlapping) strategies seemingly committed to the same aim. This uncertainty is compounded further by the fact that the Welsh Government’s strategy vows to work alongside ‘partners’ in the Criminal Justice Board for Wales (Welsh Government, 2022:113), while the Criminal Justice Board for Wales’ (2022: 10) plan supports the development of a ‘one public service’ approach alongside the Welsh Government. The existence of two duplicate ‘Anti-racism/Anti-racist’ strategies has the potential to add unnecessary complication to a problem area already characterised by enormous complexity. The publication of two strategies also stands as a clear example of the complications surrounding ‘joined-up’ policy solutions ‘when neither level of government has control over all of the policy levers necessary to effect change’ (Jones and Wyn Jones, 2022: 9).”
The duplication of anti-racist approaches within the criminal justice system will likely be another example of the brittle approach of the Welsh government on race and ethnicity. The question is- when the approach has been so famously brittle, who cares more about Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic people in Wales? Is it Westminster or Cardiff Bay? Should criminal justice and policing be devolved to Wales? Should we give the Senedd control of the South Wales Police? These are questions that will be asked over the next few years in Wales.
Manon Roberts at the Wales Centre for Public Policy in "Improving Race Equality in Crime and Justice" writes on the term coined by Jones and Jones called the jagged edge, referring to the intersecting competencies and responsibilities. This refers to the areas that are devolved, and nondevolved. Roberts suggests deploying "soft power" to ensure that "public bodies in Wales comply with the duties placed on them to tackle inequality and discrimination through the Equality Act 2020 (Statutory Duties) (Wales) Regulations 2011." Under the Equality Act, this data should already be collated and publicly available. The piece by Roberts ends with "a typology of strategies for building trust". These include "community justice strategies", increasing diversity in the police force, and transparency strategies. However, there have now been working cultures that have emerged over the past 30 years that haven’t successfully sought to tackle inequality and discrimination, such as the lack of available data from Welsh police forces. We’re in danger of diversity-washing institutions that have failed vulnerable communities and seek now to damage control the lack of due regard, rather than tackle the cultures that have emerged head-on.
Devolving the police and/or reforming the police
Mariame Kaba is a prison abolitionist who's written a terrific piece called "Police "Reforms" You Should Always Oppose" which is published online and in "We Do This Til We Free Us". It's a "guide for evaluating any suggested reforms of...policing in this historical moment". It asks if the reforms advocate for more police and more policing and if there will be technology used against the public. Instead, she asks "What 'reforms' should you support (in the interim) then?", providing answers such as "Proposals and legislation for data transparency (stops, arrests, budgeting, weapons)", Proposals to simplify the process of dissolving existing police departments", and other items. There’s a grey area of abolition within the Welsh context for an approach that centres harm reduction. For example, a positive part of any devolution of policing in Wales could be ensuring the police meet their minimum requirements on the collection of data (which, technically, they ought to have always done), and the Welsh government being able to use soft and hard power successfully challenging the illegal usage of facial recognition technology.
While preparing the Anti Racism Wales Action Plan, an early message that was received was "a clear belief that public, private and third sector organisations were not meeting their obligations to dismantle systemic and institutional racism. In particular, that many public bodies were not compliant with the Equality Act 2010, and not meeting the public sector equality duty". What would devolution and policing look like in Wales if the public sector equality duty had been met, and what happens to those bodies who have failed to undertake infrastructural development work? Are we playing catch-up in Wales?
Podcasts/Radio
Sekou Odinga sadly passed away a few days ago. Sekou was an American activist, campaigner, political prisoner, and a founding member of the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party. Sekou was also a founding member of the International Black Panther Party chapter which set up an embassy in Algeria. This is an interview on the “Millenials are Killing Capitalism” with Sekou about his experiences, politics, and memories of that period.
June and Jennifer Gibbons were identical twins who grew up in Haverford West in west Wales. They became known as "The Silent Twins" because they didn’t communicate with anyone else apart from each other. June and Joan were prolific writers, but none of their fiction is publicly available in Wales. Their story inspired the 1998 Manic Street Preachers song "Tsunami". BBC Sounds have recently released "June: Voice of a Silent Twin", where, "June Gibbons tells the tragic story of her and her sister Jennifer, twins cut off from the world. After a brief crime spree, they become the youngest women in Broadmoor." A huge thanks to G for sending this podcast to me.
Locating Legacies is a podcast created by the Stuart Hall Foundation, and co-produced by the radical publisher Pluto Press. There are contributions from Kojo Koram, Vijay Prashad, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. It’s ace.
The Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Centre is "one of Europe's leading specialist libraries on migration, race, and ethnicity". They have a Soundcloud page with over 100 episodes spanning Zimbabwean migration to Manchester, Kashmiri experiences, the legacy of partition, first-generation West Indian Windrush experiences, the Pan-African Congress, and more. The podcasts aren't organised into playlists, but this list features all of their "tracks". The first bit of the title refers to the theme of the podcast, such as "Anwar Ditta Campaign- The Legal System Was Against Her", and the second is the name of the podcast episode. This collection spans five years.
Did you enjoy "Lover's Rock" by Steve McQueen? Tune into Countryman Sound's "Blues Party at the Shopfront, Pill, Newport, UK- 1991" to hear an underground reggae Blues party.
From the archives
Sheikh Abdullah Ali El-Hakimi founded a newspaper called “As-Salaam” on Bute Street in the late 1940s. The newspaper is now available online after being digitised by the University of Exeter. I signposted the National Library of Wales to the newspaper, which is acquiring it- and hopefully translating it from Arabic into English and Welsh. But you can still scroll through and admire it- I loved this trilingual advert for Rees and Williams funeral drectors in Cardiff from the 1940s.
I’ve historically written about the lack of Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic representation in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography. It has recently received an anti-racism fund grant to boost the number of Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic people in the dictionary, and created some new entries that are accessible by clicking this link. Is this a step forward, or is it diversity washing? It’s worth considering if they would undertake this work if not for the Welsh government funding. Could writing an entry be up your street? They're looking for writers on: Rufus Fennell (1919 race riots), Dualeh Mohammed Aftaag (Somali Youth League), Harry O'Connell (West Indian Communist in Adamsdown), Olwen Watkins, the Cardiff Race Riot Victims, Iris de Freitas, Mahmood Hassan, Bernice Rubens, St Clair Drake, and others. It gives me food for thought on whether an ethnicity-specific project just reinforces the core nature of the dictionary as white, especially with an all-white board who have overseen the ethnocentrism in the dictionary. It’s not clear how or if the culture has been changed so it’s not “the white dictionary” and then “the ethnic project”, which reinforces Welshness as whiteness and ethnic as the other.
Keith Abdi opens Colin Prescod’s film Tiger Bay is My Home" saying "We're approaching the docks, the beginning of Butetown. You see, the most significant thing about this bridge is that to the majority of people in Cardiff, Butetown starts at Customhouse Street. For the people of Butetown, it starts from the Docks. Once you're over the bridge, then you're in what was called Tiger Bay. Some of my earliest memories when people talking about the riots. It was always the bridge. They came over the bridge, we stopped at the bridge, we armed ourselves at the bridge to stop people coming over". You can rent it online for 2.50. I love the 1980s BAME history music. It’s the only thing getting me through Blue Monday.
Auditorium by Mos Def has recently been making the rounds on TikTok. The week before, Transmission by Joy Division was going around Tiktok! Did you know that Mos Def's Auditorium samples The Battle of Algiers? The Battle of Algiers was banned in Israel when it was released. This piece by Jacob Norris in OpenDemocracy explores the relationship of the Battle of Algiers with Palestinian film. Here’s the Battle of Algiers, with subtitles in English and Spanish.
And before I sign off…
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