Prisons - new material (73)
01 July 2009
Detainee escorts and removals: a thematic review, Ann Owers. HM Inspectorate of Prisons, August 2009, pp. 36. This short thematic review by the Inspector of Prisons echoes earlier findings by The Independent newspaper almost two years ago and last years major report, “Outsourcing Abuse”, by Birnberg Peirce and Partners, Medical Justice and the National Coalition of Anti-deportation Campaigns, which stressed the routine violence and racism that detainees are subjected to by employees of private security companies carrying out removals on behalf of the state. Here HM Inspector warns of “worrying gaps and weaknesses in the complaints and monitoring process”. Owers says that asylum seekers deported from the UK are at risk of suffering ill-treatment and abuse by immigration officers and security personnel in a chaotic removal system. http://www.justice.gov.uk/inspectorates/hmi-prisons/docs/Detainee_escorts_and_removals_2009_rps.pdf
Unlocking Value: how we all benefit from investing in alternatives to prison for women offenders. New Economics Foundation November 2008, pp. 50, (ISBN 978 1 904882 41 1). Using “Social Return on Investment” analysis this report highlights how “a criminal justice system focused on short–term cost control and narrow re–offending targets is letting women offenders down and costing more in the longer term.” It found that community service sentences work better and are less expensive, concluding that imprisoning non-violent female offenders “does not work”. Available as a free download at: http://www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/temp/Unlocking_ValuespspreportspNovsp2008.pdf
Recent developments in prison law - Parts 1 and 2, Hamish Arnott and Simon Creighton, Legal Action, July 2009, pp. 10-14, August 2009, pp. 19-23. Part 1 of this update reviews legislative changes relating to the Parole Board (Amendment) Rules 2009 SI No 408 and developments in case-law concerning the Parole Board, tariff decisions, and repatriation and the Royal Prerogative of Pardon. Part 2 looks at developments in case-law concerning medical treatment, category A prisoners, escape risk and close supervision centres, prison discipline, prisoners’ property, home detention curfew, sex offender registration, ‘near miss’ investigations and searching.
‘Hearing Voices’: Punishing women’s mental ill-health in Northern Ireland’s jails, P. Scraton and L. Moore. International Journal of Prisoner Health (Special Issue on Prisoners’ Mental Health) Volume 5, no 3, 2009, pp153-165. Informed by primary interviews and observational research conducted by the authors with women prisoners in Northern Ireland this article focuses on prison as an institutional manifestation of women’s powerlessness and vulnerability, particularly those enduring mental ill-health. It contextualises their experiences within continua of violence and ‘unsafety’. It also considers official responses to critical inspection reports and those of the authors’ research reports for the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission. It demonstrates that three decades on from publication of the first critical analyses of women’s imprisonment, the conditions of gendered marginalisation, medicalisation and punishment remain. This is brought into stark relief in the punitive regimes imposed on those most vulnerable through mental ill-health.
The Violence of Incarceration P. Scraton and J. McCulloch (eds.) Routledge 2009. Conceived in the immediate aftermath of the humiliations and killings of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq, of the suicides and hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay and of the disappearances of detainees through extraordinary rendition, this book explores the connections between these events and the inhumanity and degradation of domestic prisons within the ‘allied’ states, including the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK and Ireland. The central theme is that the revelations of extreme brutality perpetrated by allied soldiers represent the inevitable end-product of domestic incarceration predicated on the use of extreme violence including lethal force. The myth of moral virtue works to hide, silence, minimize and deny the continuing history of violence and incarceration both within western countries and undertaken on behalf of western states beyond their national borders.