Prisons crisis
01 March 2004
The prison overcrowding crisis has reached its worst point since 2002. As of 6 April 2004, 75,544 people were in jails in England and Wales, seven above the Prison Services' "useable operational capacity" of 75,437. Inmates are being shipped daily around the UK in search of a bed. In March ministers cut the safety "buffer" of cells that are not filled from 2,000 to 1,700 and moved to accelerate the return of 500 cells undergoing refurbishment. The Prison Service now concedes that it may be forced to cut the buffer on a daily basis. In some areas courts are already holding remand prisoners in police cells.
The courts are increasing inmate numbers by, on average, 200 a week. The prison population has grown by a quarter since the Labour government came into office. On 8 March 2004 the governor of HMP Wandsworth raised his concern at the sharp increase in shoplifters in jail at any one time, from 129 a decade ago, to 1,400 now.
The Prison Reform Trust (PRT) has commented:
Prisoners are being shipped around the country in a game of musical cells to avoid the political embarrassment of having to use police cells. This is the worst form of crisis management.
Juliet Lyon of the PRT added "Do we want to live in a society where more young black men go to prison than to university and where the mentally ill rot in jail instead of getting the treatment they need?" Martin Narey, now chief executive of the new National Offender Management Service, in a recent Guardian interview talked of ensuring "contestability" in the provision of prison and probation services by attracting new providers into the market through a planned programme of market testing. Narey conceded that the public prison sector may lose management of "prisons if they do not return the best tender in terms of quality and cost" and added that he wanted to see more "providers" enter the British market. "Last summer I visited the US and spoke to two providers who are not yet operating in England and Wales. I have started a dialogue with them about the possibility of their bidding for future work." Narey refused to name the companies involved. All of this, though, goes to suggest that, at a time when the increase in prison numbers was already giving rise to real fears for the safety of inmates, Narey, on behalf of the National Offender Management Service, was already seeking to encourage more "providers" to seek to explore avenues for profit in the UK.
It is clear moreover that Narey is seeking to tempt private contractors to expand their interests in England and Wales at a time when the private prison industry is facing setbacks in the USA, due to its appalling record of negligence and abuse. By 2000, not a single state in the USA solicited new private prison contracts and many existing contracts were rolled back or rescinded. The US experience of the private prison industry demonstrates it is a potential source of political corruption ($528,000 federal campaign contributions between 1995 and 2000) and that its network of lobbyists have only one focus - subverting all crime-related public policy to meet the needs of the private prison industry-by taking steps to increase the prison population. Thus, a consequence of seeking to increase the operation of private prison operators in the UK may go hand in hand with increasing the prison population. Further, as US prison activist and co-founder of Prison Legal News, has commented, "Whether private versus public prisons are "better" is largely immaterial and irrelevant. It is like comparing rotten oranges to rotten apples from the prisoner's perspective. But, at least in public prisons, when prisoners are raped due to inadequate staffing, transport vans burst into flames killing the occupants due to no maintenance, or prisoners are held past their release dates, no one can say prison officials did so to line their own pockets and personally profit from the misery of others. With private prisons, most sh