Prisoner rights have proliferated in jurisdictions throughout the world. How and why these rights matter, however, is the subject of trenchant debate among researchers, prison reformers and campaigners. For some, they offer the only realistic guarantee of minimum standards for a vulnerable population at the mercy of the state. They are conducive to better prison conditions, more effective re-integration and greater political accountability. For others, however, prisoners’ rights matter, but for altogether different reasons. In an environment where control, deprivation, and suffering are routinised features of daily life, prisoner rights legitimise current practices by perpetuating the idea that imprisonment is, or could ever be, humane.

At a time when prisons across the UK (and elsewhere) are engulfed by endemic violence, rising prisoner numbers, record levels of self-harm and suicide, and severe staff shortages, the panel will examine the role and effectiveness of prisoner rights. Drawing on empirical, doctrinal and theoretical insights, it will critically discuss whether prisoners’ rights matter in the context of these ongoing and persistent crises. By exploring these topics and a range of cross-cutting themes, the panel will assess the sufficiency of key prisoner rights, options for reform and alternatives to rights-based governance and imprisonment.

While the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the Nelson Mandela Rules) includes a requirement for both internal and external inspections, this requirement, is limited to ensuring prisons are managed inline with existing policies, laws and regulations. The rule is less clear as to whether facilities should be open to academic research, which tends to go beyond questions of management and compliance. While access to conduct research in prisons is generally difficult, academic research whose stated goal is to examine the implementation of human rights principles should fall in line with the Mandela Rule provision for inspection to “bring[] about the objectives of penal and correctional services, and that the rights of prisoners are protected.” As this paper shows, however, such access is not granted easily. Drawing on interviews with scholars in Australia who study supposed human rights based prisons, I examine the numerous challenges of gaining access and conducting research in such prisons, the benefits of conducting such research, and recommendations for improving the process of obtaining approval and access for conducting such research.

The Welsh Language Act 1993 established the principle that the Welsh and English languages should be treated on the basis of equality. These legal protections extend to Welsh-speaking prisoners, with the UK Ministry of Justice committed to ensuring that the English and Welsh languages are treated ‘equally’ with ‘no obstacles’ in place to prevent the use of Welsh in Wales or by prisoners held in England ‘whose preferred language is Welsh’. Despite the 1993 Act, however, there remain long-standing concerns over the treatment of Welsh-speaking prisoners. In this paper we look to build upon existing research to determine whether the linguistic rights of Welsh-speaking prisoners enshrined in European and domestic law are respected in practice. Drawing upon interviews with former prisoners, we will consider the challenges facing Welsh-speaking prisoners and the impact of the Welsh and UK governments’ overlapping powers on the language rights of prisoners.

I use this paper to confront my own scepticism about the role of rights in prisons. It is hard to think of a more apposite target for the critique of rights than prison. As a liberal, colonial project human rights are used by powers of the Global North as a gatekeeping device to control access of countries of the global to resources. Within prisons, rights frameworks allow for bureaucratic domination of prisoners. I argue that this is a central mode of prison’s violence. Against this, scholars and activists around the world continue to evoke rights as the basis of emancipation. Lara Montesinos Coleman’s recent book, Struggles for the Human, simultaneously acknowledges and unpacks the ‘violence of legality’ while arguing that grassroots movements can frame human rights in ways that advance social justice. Her account offers hope that the liberal monopoly on both the idea and the critique of rights can be disrupted by looking to the situated struggles of movements of marginalised communities. I consider how her transformative account of human rights might be applied to the uses and abuses of prisoner rights. Is there hope that rights might yet protect people in such a rule governed machine as prison? Let’s find out.