To celebrate the official launch of the organisation as a charity in 2006, the first PRA audio productions to be distributed to an audience beyond the prisons were compiled on the Making Waves Behind Bars CD (PRA 2006). In the title, ‘making waves’ refers to radio broadcasting and audio editing technology, and equally indicates the potential for change and disruption ‘behind bars’. The origins and potential of prison radio can only be examined through discussion of the complex and enduring problem of the prison institution. This chapter begins by outlining some of the key ideas that inform our understanding of the changing role and function of prison and punishment before examining the political, economic and institutional changes which have contributed to the recognition, acceptance and encouragement of radio in the prisons of England and Wales.

Worldwide, the function of prison has become a critical issue, characterised by a rapid increase of incarceration rates, a failure to effectively reduce reoffending, and the exponential criminalisation of marginalised groups. Women are the fastest growing prison population (Davis 2003, p.65) and the dramatic overrepresentation of people of colour and of First Nations Peoples in prisons across the US, Europe, South America, Australia and New Zealand highlight vast inequalities of justice. There are over 11 million people behind bars worldwide (Walmsley 2016). The rate of growth of global prison populations is staggering, increasing over five times in just three decades (Wacquant 2003). In the late 2000s alone, prison numbers grew in 78% of all countries (Dreisinger 2017). Of these, the US represents the highest incarceration rates of any country by far, imprisoning around 1% of the adult population at any time (Harcourt 2010). In England and Wales prison numbers doubled in two decades (Ministry of Justice 2013) and the likelihood of returning to prison is recorded as high as 59% for those serving sentences of less than 12 months (Open Justice 2017).

Over the past half century, prison theorists recognise a fundamental shift in the ways that crime and punishment are conceptualised (Feeley and Simon 1992; Garland 1997; Wacquant 2009; Sim 2009). Whether the dramatic rise of the prison population is considered as a symptom of wider socioeconomic breakdown (Sim 2009) or as central to the functioning and expansion of the neoliberal state (Wacquant 2009), all highlight the impact of combining neoliberal rationalities and practices with the ‘business’ of punishment.