Campaigning has begun across northeast England to oppose a new immigration prison due to open in August-September 2021 near Consett, County Durham. This is the first step in a U-turn by Home Secretary Priti Patel on government promises to ensure fewer people, especially women, were held in immigration detention.
The site of the planned Immigration Removal Centre (IRC) has a horrific history. From 1961 to 1988 it was the Medomsley Detention Centre – a notorious youth facility, infamous for sexual and physical assaults against hundreds of young men. A major investigation launched in 2013 saw convictions of five former staff members and an ongoing compensation scheme. The facility reopened in the late 1990s as Hassockfield Secure Training Centre, where in 2004, 14-year-old Adam Rickwood became the youngest person to die by suicide in a British prison, just hours after being subjected to ‘deliberately inflicted pain to secure compliance’. Hassockfield was closed in 2015 and has been empty since. The mothballed facility is now set to become an IRC holding 85 women migrants.
County Durham council had previously approved plans to knock the buildings down and build 127 private houses. However, the Ministry of Justice has refused to relinquish the land and contractors are now patching up the run-down facility. Local Conservative MP Richard Holden has been vocal in his support for the IRC, saying it will bring in 150 ‘good jobs’ and ‘millions to the local economy’, as well as helping to deport ‘foreign criminals’ and ‘failed asylum seekers’. Predictably this has provoked a torrent of racist abuse and bigotry from his supporters on social media.
In addition to Hassockfield, Home Office officials said at the end of February that they are considering a number of ‘smaller capacity detention units’ for women. Planned ‘Action Access’ pilot schemes to provide supported accommodation for women in the community as an alternative to detention have been scrapped without review. Alphonsine Kabagabo, director of the Women for Refugee Women charity, told The Guardian ‘Most of the women we have worked with who have been in immigration detention are survivors of sexual violence and torture. Locking them up has a devastating effect on their mental health.’
Immigration detention is blatantly racist. Successive government have always scapegoated migrants, both asylum seekers and so called ‘foreign criminals’ subject to the double punishment of being locked up and deported after serving prison sentences. This is not simply a call to shut down women’s immigration prisons, but to oppose immigration detention as a whole. As communists in the oldest imperialist country in the world, we stand in solidarity with migrant struggles and oppose all Britain’s racist immigration laws.
Harvey MacFarlane
Get involved:
Email [email protected] for details of local events
Twitter @No2Hassockfield
Facebook group No to Hassockfield
Change UK petition: ‘Stop the new detention centre for women’ www.change.org/p/the-home-secretary-stop-the-new-detention-centre-for-women
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 281 April/May 2021
