On 20 January 2015 the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee published its report on ‘Managing and removing foreign national offenders’. The report laments the lack of progress towards increasing deportation rates since the ‘foreign national prisoner scandal’ of 2006 and concludes that the Home Office needs to toughen up and start putting more prisoners on planes to their country of origin. In stark contrast, a Briefing Paper published by the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), Hidden despair – the deaths of foreign national prisoners, shows the grim reality faced by this group of prisoners. Nicki Jameson reports.
In 2006 Labour Home Secretary Charles Clarke was forced to resign following a furore surrounding the ‘revelation’ that during the preceding seven years, 1,023 foreign national prisoners who had completed their criminal sentences were not considered for deportation but were instead released in the same way as British citizens. As we wrote at the time:
‘The numbers concerned are in effect tiny – in the region of 90,000 people are released from prisons in England and Wales each year – and the danger to the public negligible, but it was more than enough for the government’s opponents and the press. Just before the local elections, for papers like the Daily Mail the combination of bogeymen was irresistible. Every attack on terrorists, asylum seekers, benefit scroungers, out-of-control youths, drug addicts, paedophiles and generalised low-life scum came together in a mighty cacophony of outrage against “foreign convicts” and the soft Home Office that had let them out.’ (‘No to double punishment’, FRFI 191 June/July 2006)
To the dismay of the Public Accounts Committee, since 2006 the number of foreign national prisoners in England and Wales has remained fairly constant at around 10,000, while the number deported each year fluctuates between 4,500 and 5,600. As the report states: ‘Processing foreign national offender cases for removal starts too late, takes too long and costs too much’; indeed it is expensive: the cost last year of ‘managing and removing foreign national offenders was estimated at some £850 million – £100 million more than managing an equivalent number of British national prisoners’.
From any political perspective it is irrefutable that the British state machinery for processing prisoners’ deportation cases is completely inefficient. Investigations into prisoners’ status rarely begin until the final months of their sentence. This means that many who will eventually be permitted to remain in Britain – as asylum seekers, migrants with sufficient family ties or because they are European Economic Area citizens – are detained under immigration law way after their criminal sentences have ended. Even prisoners who actively want to leave Britain frequently face lengthy bureaucratic delays in the processing of their removals.
All this, in addition to the removal of legal aid for most immigration cases, creates terrible stress for many prisoners, as is set out in the IRR briefing, which documents the self-inflicted deaths of eight foreign nationals. It is striking when reading of these tragic deaths how few of those concerned have been convicted of serious crime and how many were imprisoned purely for offences themselves connected to immigration.
The IRR briefing, written by barrister and activist Frances Webber, details the tragic deaths of:
- Iranian Nariman Tahmasebi (27), Lewes prison, 2002 – sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for using forged travel documents. He had been refused asylum and ‘Despite his telling guards that he had overdosed in Iran after being beaten by prison guards, and that he would contemplate harming himself if he was threatened with return to Iran, they did not treat him as a suicide risk.’
- Indian Sikh Avtar Singh (39), Canterbury prison, 2007 – serving 15 months for using a false passport.
- Darfuri asylum seeker Abdullah Idris (17), Chelmsford prison, 2007 – sentenced for affray. He was served with a routine notice telling him that when his sentence ended he would be detained for deportation. No one told him that no Darfuris were being deported to Sudan at that time so his removal was in practice highly unlikely
- Sri Lankan Vinith Kannathasan (18), Chelmsford, 2008. He had serious mental health problems and was being held on remand for an alleged sex offence.
- Ghanaian Delaile Abusah (24), Pentonville, 2008 – imprisoned for a passport offence.
- Satnam Singh (25) from India, Birmingham prison, 2010 – held on remand. ‘[He] was not provided with a professional interpreter for a risk assessment after he was seen chewing electrical cables and exhibiting distress and agitation…A mental health nurse who said Singh should be under constant supervision…was overruled by the deputy governor, and despite two unsuccessful suicide attempts, he was not placed on suicide watch before hanging himself on the third attempt,’
- Riliwanu Balogun (21), Glen Parva, 2011 – serving an extended sentence for serious assault. Originally from Nigeria, but with no ties there, having been in Britain since he was seven, he was transferred from Woodhill prison and ‘information about self-harm and suicide attempts, and about his immigration status was not passed on’.
- Vietnamese Tuan Ho (22), Chelmsford, 2011. A victim of trafficking, ‘[h]e had recently accepted a “voluntary return” to Vietnam after being convicted of production of cannabis, but on the day of his death, his Vietnamese cellmate was transferred to an immigration removal centre.’
None of these men posed a serious danger to British society; yet all were subject, not just to the single punishment of imprisonment, but to the double punishment of imprisonment and threatened deportation. Both IRR and FRFI are among those who have always opposed and campaigned against double punishment. Frances Webber explains how for a time in the 1990s ‘deportation was widely (although not officially) acknowledged to be a double punishment for foreign prisoners’ and that it was consequently rare for people, especially young people, who had spent the best part of their life in Britain and had put down roots here, to be deported. All this was swept away after 2006, as the Labour government brought in ‘automatic deportation’ legislation with the presumption that foreign prisoners would be deported unless they could make out the legal case as to why they should not, accompanied by a vicious media onslaught against the judges who had ushered in the temporarily more progressive regime.
The IRR is doing vital work in exposing the horrific reality of life for the most vilified and marginalised prisoners and shows that there is an urgent need for a renewed political campaign against double punishment.
Hidden despair: the deaths of foreign national prisoners can be downloaded from www.irr.org.uk – a full length report of the IRR’s research into BME deaths in police custody, prisons and immigration removal centres 1992-2014 will be published in February 2015.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 243 February/March 2015
