The British prison system is a vile sewer which men and women can enter in good health and come out broken or never emerge at all. Newer prisons are soulless places, lacking basic medical care and facilities, while the old, crumbling ones in use for two centuries are over-run with rats, cockroaches and other vermin. The Chief Inspector of Prisons routinely makes recommendations for ways in which the government can at least patch up some of the devastation, but these are never heeded.
On 15 November 2023, the Chief Inspector issued an Urgent Notification in relation to Bedford Prison, requiring action by the Prison Service within 28 days. Among other points this noted that:
Bedford had the third highest rate of recorded self-harm in the adult male estate. Care for prisoners at risk of self-harm was undermined by an inadequate mental health service and weak case management.
New prisoners were placed into dirty, graffitied cells.
- The use of force remained very high, with too many examples of excessive force and unprofessional behaviour.
- Three-quarters of prisoners lived in overcrowded conditions. Most spent more than 22 hours a day locked in their cells. The wings were dirty and there was a
- widespread infestation of rats and cockroaches. Some cells had broken windows and black mould on the walls.
- The segregation unit was squalid, staff were forced to use sandbags and wear Wellington boots due to overflowing sewage pipes after heavy rain.
- Prisoners expressed real frustration at their inability to get anything done, for example, accessing property, applying for a job or adding families’ numbers to their phone.
On 21 November, just days after this damning indictment was published, 42-year-old remand prisoner Melvin Grant died in hospital, having been taken there from the prison a week earlier. His treatment graphically illustrates many of the points highlighted by the inspectorate. Melvin’s brother Morris spoke to FRFI:
Morris: Initially Melvin was in prison in south London and he was able to phone and we’d visit once a week or more frequently. But when he went to court, they said there was no space in Thameside prison so they sent him two hours away to Bedford. After that we didn’t have any communication with him. We were trying to get visits booked but the phone would just pick up and put down, so over four to five weeks we didn’t have any communication at all.
The first we knew of him being in hospital was when my mum called me at work on 14 November, crying down the phone, saying a chaplain from Belmarsh prison had come to Melvin’s home address and told his nan he was in intensive care in a bad way, that he’s tried to take his own life. That was the first contact with that prison.
So I came home and we drove up to the hospital. The doctors said he’d been brought in because of strangulation cutting off the air to his brain but nobody from the prison could tell us anything. They said when they found him he was breathing and they took him to hospital. The hospital was trying to work out what had happened and was doing tests. They said he’d been admitted to hospital before, a few days earlier, but nobody had told us anything about that.
FRFI: So they are saying that your brother was suicidal and self-harming, but nobody contacted you at all?
Morris: On the last day a deputy governor came with a police liaison and spoke to us, saying Melvyn had tried to take his life on three occasions. Before then, it was just the imam. I told the governor I was finding it very hard to accept this as I’ve known my brother since he was young and this is totally not in his character, and I can’t believe that his mental health had deteriorated that much in four weeks for him to take his own life. And we see him all the time usually, so my mum is very upset because we think that if he’d been able to see his family it could have changed his mindset.
Nobody at all contacted us before he was taken to hospital and hardly anybody has contacted us since. We didn’t know any of that about the state of the prison until afterwards. It’s a disgrace.. Even now, nobody has come to explain anything to us. No Independent Monitoring Board, no Ombudsman, no governor. Nobody has been in touch.
FRFI: So now there will be an inquest and you have a solicitor for that, but prior to then, what do you want to tell people?
Morris: We want awareness. We want transparency. Where you have individuals suffering from mental health problems, if there’s any sign at all of their doing anything to themselves, let their loved ones know. A chaplain can get you on the phone to have a call with your family; they can arrange for private visits with family. They can do all these things but no one did anything.
Now we are trying to piece it all together, even to work out his whereabouts in the prison, where he was when he supposedly tried to take his life the first and second times. We want to be able to help people not have to go through this again. We know we’re not the first but the way they just came to my mum’s house, said this has happened to your son, and then everything is internal. There’s no respect and no accountability. The staff on the wing just ignore prisoners’ applications and complaints. And the governors cover up for them, so it goes all the way from the bottom to the top. The prison should be shut down and the governor should be sacked. That’s what we would like to see.
Nicki Jameson
For more on the Grant family’s fight for justice for Melvin, see @justiceformelv on Facebook or justice.4.mg on Instagram
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 298 February/March 2024
