Pressure is growing on the British government to close Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre (IRC) in Bedfordshire. On 5 August 2015 the Movement for Justice led the latest in a series of large demonstrations in solidarity with Yarl’s Wood detainees and on 12 August the Chief Inspector of Prisons Nick Hardwick issued a critical report of an unannounced inspection in April, which ‘found that in some important areas the treatment and conditions of those held at the centre had deteriorated significantly, the main concerns we had in 2013 had not been resolved and there was greater evidence of the distress caused to vulnerable women by their detention’.
Yarl’s Wood is run by infamous private security company Serco and holds 350 detainees, the majority of whom are single women, with a few men and some family units. According to the inspectorate: ‘A few detainees were held for very long periods. At the time of the inspection, 15 detainees had been held for between six months and a year and four for more than a year. The longest had been held for 17 months. The Home Office’s own policy states pregnant women should not normally be detained, but 99 had been held in 2014.’
Yarl’s Wood health services are provided by another private company – G4S Justice Health. The inspectorate found that: ‘There were severe staff shortages and women were overwhelmingly negative about access, quality of care and delayed medication… Care planning for women with complex needs was so poor it put them at risk. The available mental health care did not meet women’s needs and this made it particularly unacceptable that a number of women with enduring mental health needs had been detained.’
The prison burns
Yarl’s Wood IRC opened in 2001, with a capacity of 400, and was originally planned by the then Labour government to expand to hold 900 men, women and children, making it the largest immigration detention centre in Europe.
This was not to be, however, as in February 2002 a series of protests and hunger strikes in response to lack of medical treatment and access to telephones, poor food, and arbitrary handcuffing culminated in a protest during which fire spread rapidly through the centre. Although equipped with state-of-the-art surveillance and anti-escape equipment, the prison did not have a sprinkler system and it took an hour for the guards from Group 4 (the private security firm then running the centre) to allow the Fire Brigade access.
The protest and fire were followed by four different inquiries by Bedfordshire Council, Bedfordshire police, Group 4 and the Home Office (later taken over by the Prisons Ombudsman), all mainly motivated by blaming one another, and the criminal trial of 13 detainees for arson, violent disorder and assault. Two men were found guilty of violent disorder and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment; another two pleaded guilty to minor charges. The remainder were acquitted, despite Group 4 hiring professional coaches to train its witnesses. In time-honoured fashion, the British state exacted revenge on those declared innocent by re-arresting them under immigration law.
Locking up children
Soon after the trial, Yarl’s Wood, which had continued to hold a small number of detainees in parts of the centre unaffected by the fire, was officially reopened to house single women and families. From 2009 to 2011 there were continued protests and hunger strikes led by women, many of whom were imprisoned along with their children. Report after report condemned the detention of families in Yarl’s Wood and the Liberal Democrats, who became part of the 2010-15 ConDem coalition government, pledged to end what their leader Nick Clegg described as ‘this shameful practice’. In 2011 the High Court ruled that imprisoning children in Yarl’s Wood was unlawful.
Although the ConDems did detain fewer children than Labour, child detention is far from a thing of the past. In January 2015 The Independent reported that 600 children had been detained since 2011, mainly at the euphemistically named Cedars ‘pre-departure family accommodation’ near Gatwick airport.
Close it down!
On 2 March this year Channel 4 News featured undercover footage shot inside Yarl’s Wood and Harmondsworth IRCs. A Serco manager is shown describing female detainees as ‘animals’ and ‘beasties’ and saying they should be beaten with a stick. Other staff members follow suit, spewing out a torrent of racist and sexist abuse, incitement to violence, disregard for physical and mental health problems, abuse of pregnant women and the elderly, and an attitude to suicide attempts and self-harm ranging from indifference to outright disparagement.
The Chief Inspector of Prisons describes Yarl’s Wood as ‘a place of national concern’ and called for ‘decisive action… to ensure women are only detained as a last resort’ and that ‘Procedures to ensure the most vulnerable women are never detained [are] strengthened.’
The Movement for Justice protest on 5 August was attended by around 600 activists from around Britain, including a large number of former detainees. Current prisoners also participated from inside the centre, waving banners out of the windows, shouting, chanting and making phone contact with the protest organisers with the effect that their words could be heard directly by the demonstrators.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! supports all protests by detainees and their supporters and calls for the closure of all immigration prisons.
16 August 2015
Nicki Jameson
