Prisons - new material (58)
01 August 2004
Perception of race and conflict: perspectives of minority ethnic prisoners and of prison officers, Kimmett Edgar & Carol Martin.
Home Office Online Report 11/04, 2004, pp.24. This is a Home Office commissioned report that investigates "situations arising between officers and minority ethnic prisoners that involved potential for conflict". Among other findings the report says that 52% of the "ethnic minority prisoners surveyed believed they had experienced some form of racial discrimination in prison within the previous six months." It also reports that only two Prison Officers interviewed "believed the Prison Service could do more to combat racism."
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/.
A Few Kind Words and a Loaded Gun, Razor Smith. Penguin Books 2004 (ISBN:0-670-91544-0). Razor Smith will be familiar to many prisoners and prison rights activists from his writings in
Inside Times, the New Law Journal and the Guardian. His book, subtitled “The Autobiography of a Career Criminal” is a fast-paced and entertaining read from a man who “has been a criminal all my life and I am neither proud nor particularly ashamed of the things I have done”. Importantly, Razor details systematic abuse and brutalisation of prisoners by prison staff throughout the prison system, from his first taste of youth custody at Latchmere House, through the punishment block at Dover borstal, to sit-down protests and punishment beatings at Wandsworth. Razor Smith will not be the first to illustrate the extent to which prisons are sites for the "assault, torture and ill-treatment" of prisoners - Jimmy Boyle, Frankie Fraser, Bruce Reynolds and Vic Dark are among many who have written of similar experiences before him. Because the authors are career criminals and working class, their books are dismissed as "lad-lit",instead of being received as documents of struggles against regimes of systematic violence (interspersed with stories of fast lives and violent times in the criminal world) and so the struggles - from Parkhurst, through Hull, to Strangeways and on - are buried and the violence covered up. It would be a waste of an important book if Razor Smith's autobiography suffered the same fate.
Prisoner-on-prisoner homicide in England and Wales between 1990 and 2001, Ghazala Sattar.
Home Office Online Report 46/04, 2004, pp.24. See
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/
Improving race relations in prisons: what works? Tom Ellis, Catherine Tedstone & Diane Curry.
Home Office Online Report 12/o2 2004, pp.8,
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/