Dr. Jamie Bennett is a civil servant and academic who is currently Deputy Director for Security, Order and Counter Terrorism in HM Prison & Probation Service. Before this role, Dr. Bennett was in charge of a number of prisons. Strangely for someone in this role, he has a strong and consistent history of anti-prison management activism. In an article entitled “against prison management”, the former prison manager suggests replacing prison management with a “politics of love”.

Bennett spends his time online retweeting Zarah Sultana, expressing “delight” that a project on envisaging prison abolition through science fiction in 2021 was funded by the Government, and presenting “police abolitionism alternatives“ as well as what “everyday police abolitionism” involves.

In 2016, he told an event at Oxford University that “the choice reformers have between working within the system and challenging it“, going on to say that “revolution is not a very British way of changing things; rather, change is usually slow and there are ways of influencing change from within the system.” Guido is pretty sure there is a word for those entering into a system to subvert it…

In August of this year Dr. Bennett appeared on a podcast again advocating “against prison management” where he explained he is trying to

“… wrestle with the organisation and to kind of also through academic work and other kind of public engagement to try and bring a different voice to the debate about prisons and society.”

Sadly for Dr. Bennett, not even his own family seem to buy his loopy abolish prisons ideas…

Some might welcome a manifestly reluctant jailer as a sign that Britain is humane and liberal society. Guido does not think the Home Secretary will be one of them…