Woodhill CSC
FRFI continues to hear horror stories from inside Woodhill Close Supervision Centre (CSC). One prisoner was recently assaulted twice in the same week by guards. Most shocking of all, in a small unit supposedly dedicated to ‘close supervision’, a prisoner, who in April this year cut off his ear in a desperate act of self-harm, in July was able to cut off his other ear. Despite the CSC authorities’ attempts to prevent news of such incidents coming out, family members, sympathetic journalists and the former Prisons Inspector Lord Ramsbotham have been demanding an investigation into these events.
Clarke privatises and closes prisons and announces review of IPPs
On 13 July, Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke announced that in the autumn nine prisons will be put out to tender, and that two open prisons are to close imminently. Prisoners began to be moved out immediately from Latchmere House open prison, which, being situated on a prime site in Richmond, is no doubt destined for a quick and lucrative sale.
Prisons continue to be awash with rumours that the Labour government’s highly unpopular Indeterminate Sentence for Public Protection (IPP) is to be abolished. To date there is nothing in writing; however on 29 June Clarke told Parliament that: ‘We are conducting a review with the intention of replacing the discredited sentence whereby people are locked up for an undetermined and indefinite time… with a tough determinate sentencing regime’.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 222 August/September 2011
