Oppose private detention centres and prisons
by Steve Wallis
14th March 2005
On Wednesday the 9th of March, BBC1 showed an illuminating programme on life in private prisons, entitled “Prison Undercover – the Real Story”, concentrated on Kilmarnock Jail, but similar conditions doubtless exist in other private prisons.
The programme was part of a two-part series, the first of which was entitled “Detention Undercover – the Real Story”, about Oakington Detention Centre, shown the previous week. The first programme revealed physical violence and racism within a private detention centre, in which asylum seekers and other immigrants were being locked up (including children for long periods of time, denying them the right to an education).
A common theme within both programmes was the fact that the overriding factor in the management of the detention centres and jails was private profit, rather than providing a service.
The system of fines whereby private detention centres and jails get fined for certain indiscretions, such as the smuggling of weapons inside, meant that pressure is put on workers not to report such occurrences or merely to report them to their superior officers who usually fail to pass on such reports to independent or government authorities.
One of the reasons for fines in the detention centres was the number of escapees from the centre, and the centre authorities deliberately targeted asylum seekers from a particular Eastern European country (men from whom had tended to abscond in the past) who had mobile phones, and put them in a secure wing on spurious grounds (e.g. looking at the outer fence, which is pretty much unavoidable and impossible to argue against); a racist policy driven by profit.
The programme on Kilmarnock Jail was particularly disturbing. They have had such a high turnover of staff, partly due to the low wages they are paid and partly due to low morale. One of the wings contains most of the particularly dangerous prisoners, and they intimidate staff to the extent that they are allowed the free run of the jail, including getting into other wings and peddling hard drugs.
From time to time, searches are carried out for drugs, weapons and mobile phones inside prisoners’ cells. Many of the prison officers go into the cell and watch TV for the approximate ten minutes that it is supposed to take to search someone’s cell. This allows drug dealing, riots and conducting criminal activities from within the prison to go on unhindered.
The most disturbing aspect of the programme, however, was the attitude to suicide watch. Three prisoners who committed suicide inside the prison were featured. The first of them should have been put on suicide watch, being young and vulnerable, just arrested on remand and hooked on hard drugs, but he wasn’t and committed suicide by hanging himself during his first night in the jail.
Suicide watch is supposed to ensure that vulnerable prisoners are visited at least once every half hour, but the suicide watch forms were repeatedly falsified, in advance and in retrospect, due to the low staffing levels. There have been seven suicides in the six years that the jail has been open. Two prisoners who had died to this policy were featured and their relatives were understandably outraged that it was still happening due to having the policy exposed in inquests into their deaths.
The prison company defended itself at the end by saying that the level of suicides was comparable with those at prisons in the public sector, and there has not been a suicide there for two years. Even if this is true, this is due to pampering prisoners by going along with their every need, and even giving them TVs and PlayStations in every cell. This is obviously an economically viable way of keeping order (although there have been riots), and I don’t deny the right of prisoners to have ways of entertaining themselves, but you must question the rationale behind giving prisoners better conditions of life inside than they get in the outside world. This must naturally reduce the incentive for prisoners to ‘go straight’.
In both cases, undercover BBC reporters infiltrated the centres and produced incontrovertible evidence with hidden camera. Despite the fact that there was supposedly a metal detector on entry to the jail, and there was metal in the camera, it got through without difficulty. This gives a clue as to how prisoners are able to smuggle weapons into jail, and at the level of collusion between the prison authorities and criminal gangs.
On one occasion, after about two weeks’ training, the BBC reporter undercover in the jail was left on his own in an 80-prisoner block without any keys, despite the fact that the prisoners’ cell doors were unlocked. On a later occasion, he was left with another new recruit in similar circumstances. It was just good fortune that prisoners did not take advantage of the situation.
The first programme revealed how another undercover reporter infiltrated the service that takes prisoners to airports and between detention centres. They exerted a lot of physical violence against the asylum seekers, sometimes due to maliciousness and sometimes due to understaffing. On one occasion, the undercover officer only had one other officer with him taking an asylum seeker assessed as dangerous to a detention centre, despite the fact that it was explained in his training that three people are needed to forcibly restrain somebody who struggles safely.
The private companies responsible for running the detention centre and prison have suspended or removed from front-line duty officers exposed in the programmes, and started conducting investigations. New Labour has put off carrying out its own investigations, independent of the private companies that would doubtless try to cover up the worst aspects of their misrule of these places. The government clearly does not want to take action until after the general election.