British government policy of criminalising prisoners

British government policy of criminalising prisoners treated convicted paramilitaries as ordinary criminals rather than soldiers or political prisoners. It changed not only how they were classified, but also how they lived in prison: individual cells and issued uniforms replaced the clothes and collective association permitted under internment. Republican prisoners resisted that imposed identity through the blanket protest, the dirty protest and hunger strikes, turning prison conditions into a contest over whether their cause—and their status—could be recognised.

From internment to criminal conviction

Internment officially ended toward the end of 1975. Under the new approach, people suspected of paramilitary activity would be charged and, if convicted, treated as ordinary criminals. The change could look like a matter of labels, but the book presents it as a conflict over political identity. The British government would not call the Troubles a war; the IRA, by contrast, regarded its volunteers as soldiers who, if captured, should be held as prisoners of war.

The practical contrast with internment was substantial. Interned people were generally allowed to wear their own clothes and associate freely with their paramilitary colleagues. After the policy shift, convicted prisoners were confined individually in the new Long Kesh H Blocks and issued prison uniforms. The uniform made the government’s classification visible in daily life: an IRA volunteer and a common thief were given the same clothing.

Resistance inside prison

In autumn 1976, republican prisoners refused to wear the uniforms and began the blanket protest, wrapping themselves in blankets instead. Their demand was for special category status, which would effectively recognise them as prisoners of war. The authorities refused. As relations between prisoners and guards deteriorated, guards beat protesters on trips to shower or use the toilet and limited their access to towels. Prisoners then stopped leaving their cells, and the protest escalated into a refusal to wash.

The dirty protest developed through successive acts of resistance and retaliation. Prisoners tipped chamber pots so urine ran beneath their cell doors into the corridors. When the problem of human waste arose, Brendan Hughes, the prisoners’ commanding officer, suggested smearing it on the walls. Naked, unwashed men covered their cells with waste; guards dragged them out to hose them down while other staff cleaned with water and disinfectant. Maggots and the threat of disease followed. The grotesque conditions did not displace the underlying dispute: prisoners sought the right to wear their own clothes, associate with one another and receive mail, while the authorities continued to refuse special status.

The government’s position and the hunger strike

By the time Margaret Thatcher took office, several hundred men were participating in the dirty protest. Tensions were heightened by the IRA’s targeting and killing of off-duty prison officers, but the government did not relent. Northern Ireland secretary Roy Mason had ended internment and special category status in 1976, describing IRA prisoners as thugs and gangsters. Thatcher likewise rejected the political framing of republican violence, insisting that there was no political murder, bombing or violence and that there would be no political status. Her succinct formulation, “Crime is crime is crime,” condensed the policy into a refusal to distinguish political motivation from criminal conduct.

In autumn 1980, Hughes announced a hunger strike and asked for volunteers. More than a hundred prisoners came forward; seven were selected, and Hughes led them, unwilling to ask a subordinate to undertake what he would not do himself. They began refusing food in the last week of October. When the strike ended without the government conceding the prisoners’ central claim, Bobby Sands began another hunger strike on 1 March 1981. Four days later, the death of nationalist Member of Parliament Frank Maguire created a by-election, and republicans proposed that Sands run for the seat from prison. The candidacy brought the dispute over prisoner status into electoral politics: winning could make the government’s treatment of a hunger-striking prisoner as an ordinary criminal harder to sustain publicly.

A contested classification

The policy’s force lay in joining legal classification to the arrangements of everyday confinement. Individual cells and uniforms imposed the ordinary-prisoner category materially, while refusal of political status denied the prisoners’ account of themselves as participants in a war. Their protests answered that denial through the body, clothing, sanitation and, eventually, hunger. The sequence shows how a policy designed to depoliticise imprisonment instead made the question of political status the centre of prison resistance and a matter of public contest.