On 2 November 2013 prisoners at Maidstone in Kent took over a wing of the prison in protest at new restrictions introduced the previous day as part of Justice Secretary Chris Grayling’s much trumpeted drive to clamp down on prisoners’ ‘privileges’. In a separate incident the same day, 70-90 prisoners in Rye Hill prison in Rugby, which is run by private security company G4S, refused to return to their cells in protest against reduced association time. On 26 November a small group of prisoners took to the roof of G4S-run Oakwood prison in Wolverhampton – the second protest over conditions at the prison in a matter of weeks. As legal aid for prison law is cut and Grayling ramps up his plans to make prisons harsher and run them more cheaply, he can expect more of this kind of resistance. Nicki Jameson reports.
Grayling is on the right wing of the Conservative Party and among those pledged to put withdrawing Britain from the European Convention on Human Rights at the centre of the party’s manifesto for the next election. In advance of that, he plans to go head-to-head with the European Court of Human Rights by flouting its repeated judgments that Britain must provide some serving prisoners with the right to vote in elections.
The Ministry of Justice (MOJ), over which Grayling presides, is currently engaged in a massive prison restructuring exercise, in which there will be ever greater concentration of prisoners within fewer and larger gaols. This is despite the government publicly committing itself to the idea that prisoners should be located closer to their homes and families in order to aid resettlement. The Prison Reform Trust has labelled the prospect of nearly half of the prisoners in England and Wales being warehoused in 1,000-plus supersized prisons as ‘Titan prisons by stealth’, in reference to the Labour government’s shelved plan to build three massive ‘Titan’ prisons, each housing 2,500 prisoners.
The coalition government is planning to build a 2,000-place prison in Wrexham, north Wales, with the boast that this will bring 1,000 new jobs and boost the local economy, a claim which has been refuted by a researcher at the Wales Governance Centre in Cardiff University. A feasibility study is also underway for a second giant prison in west London.
This is accompanied by increased concentration within existing prisons. In January 2013 Prisons Minister Jeremy Wright announced plans for additional house blocks at The Mount, Bure and Rochester prisons, which will increase their capacity by a total of 1,260 places. Meanwhile, in the past three years 13 small prisons have been closed, with a further six to follow.
The three largest prisons in England are currently all managed by private sector companies, with G4S running Oakwood (1,600) and Birmingham prison – which was previously state-run (1,436), while Sodexho runs Forest Bank in Salford (1,436). Oakwood opened in April 2012 and has been subject to constant criticism ever since; in July 2013 a report by the MOJ – which of course is responsible for awarding the contracts – gave Oakwood and Serco-run Thameside prison in south London the lowest possible performance rankings and the Chief Inspector of Prisons issued a damning report, characterising the prison as inefficient and unsafe.
British-based G4S is the world’s largest private security company, followed by Swedish company Securitas. Alongside the other main British private prison provider Serco, and French company Sodexho, they compete for contracts to imprison, tag and escort criminal prisoners and immigration detainees in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. At the end of October the South African government was forced to take over the running of a G4S-run prison in Bloemfontein, after allegations were made of prisoners being subject to forcible injections and electric shocks. One former prison guard told the BBC that water was thrown onto prisoners to increase the severity of the electric charge.
Earlier this year an inquest jury found that asylum seeker Jimmy Mubenga was unlawfully killed as G4S guards forcibly held him down on a plane deporting him from Britain to Angola. Investigations are currently ongoing into complaints of sexual abuse by women detainees held at Serco-run Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in Bedford (see page 3).
Torture, sexual assault, death – none of these concern the British government when prison places in Oakwood cost it one third of those elsewhere in the prison system. However the outsourcing frenzy has suffered a setback, as both G4S and Serco are currently under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office, after an audit revealed that they had been charging the government for the electronic tagging of people who were either dead, in prison or had not been subject to tagging. The MOJ spent £107m on the two tagging contracts in 2012/13 alone.
The Cabinet Office is also carrying out a second investigation into every current contract with G4S and Serco which is worth over £10m. Until that is complete, the government is unable to sign further contracts with them. The MOJ has also been compelled to cancel the planned privatisation of three Yorkshire prisons, for which Serco had been designated as the ‘preferred bidder’. However, none of this prevents them bidding for future work and both are likely to be trying to snatch their share of up to £500m worth of contracts generated by the current privatisation of the probation service.
On 19 November G4S offered to pay back £24.1m of money billed for tagging prisoners who were no longer actually being monitored. The government rejected the offer, presumably as the real figure is even higher. The following day the Chief Executives of G4S, Serco, Atos and Capita were questioned by the House of Commons public accounts committee and asked to account for a series of fiascos they’d been involved in.
However, so much government work has already been outsourced and so much more of the MOJ’s agenda of privatising punishment depends on this continuing, that even the fact that the state has been robbed of millions of pounds by these companies is not going to stop the process. As the Financial Times reported on 21 November: ‘Francis Maude, the minister who commissioned the cross-departmental contract review, said he expected the companies to emerge “renewed and stronger” from the process…“Our reviews into G4S and Serco’s contracts are rigorous and extensive,” said Mr Maude. “But when they report, and we are satisfied full health has been restored, we will move on quickly.”’
The restoration of ‘full health’ for the profiteering companies will mean yet greater pressure on the physical and mental health of all those herded into their prisons and detention centres. Figures published in the Daily Mirror on 17 November state that the Prison Service’s National Tactical Response Group, has been called to 189 incidents in 81 prisons during the past year. This is only likely to increase and the punishment system is now a ticking time-bomb which sooner or later will explode.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 236 December 2013/January 2014
