The “Scrubs” - beatings, mock executions and racist threats
01 November 2003
The Prison Service has accepted that prison officers at Wormwood Scrubs have subjected prisoners to sustained beatings, mock executions, death threats, choking and racist abuse. It concedes that 14 prisoners were seriously assaulted by officers at the Scrubs, and that the prisoners suffered at least 122 separate instances of assault between 1995 and 1999. The admissions were made in the process of settling the prisoners' claims. The Prison Service has also settled a further 32 cases without admitting the prisoners' claims. A total of £1.7 million has been paid out so far.
The Prison Service has admitted that prison officers tried to cover up assaults by bringing false disciplinary charges against inmates and that senior officials in the jail and in management failed to investigate the assaults properly. Inmates who tried to complain were threatened and beaten to keep them silent. One officer assaulted an inmate who had been to raise his concerns with the chaplain, jumping on his ankle while asking "Will the chaplain help you now?" Prison Service documents name 14 officers as being involved in the assaults and one who took part in the cover-up. Four of these are still at the Scrubs, a further seven at other jails. Two have been promoted. Details of the incidents revealed include:-
- An Irish inmate being pinned to a bed and choked as eight officers beat him, with one shouting for the prisoner to call him "English master".
- Prisoners being psychologically tortured by officers by threatening to hang them and bragging that they had done this to other inmates without being caught. As an example, from the Prison Service documents, cited by the Guardian: "The officer... proceeded to choke the claimant with one hand while prodding him with the other. At the same time, the officer (said) "You terrorist scum, you'd better plead guilty to assaulting me, because if you don’t we’re going to fucking hang you, we hang shit like you. Another officer then said Get the fucking sheet. The officers left the cell."
- One inmate was attacked in August and September 1995 and the Prison Service admits that he was assaulted by a "welcoming committee" of six prison officers who forced him to strip for a squat search then kicked him in the testicles; he was denied exercise and assaulted again after complaining to a junior governor, and was at this point told by officers:
We will kill you. We will get away with it. Don't think we haven't done it before.
Subsequently, he was beaten into unconsciousness by up to eight officers, and a prison officer stopped a call from the inmate to his family when he began to talk of injuries suffered to his legs and ribs. On September 16 1995 the inmate, having seen a prison doctor about earlier injuries, was assaulted by up to five officers, who beat him then pinned him to the bed, made a noose from his bed sheet, fixed it to the cell bars then lifted the inmate up, gagged him with a towel, and placed the noose around his neck.
One of the out-of-court settlements concerns an allegation of rape after a beating by prison staff, wherein the claimant, in his statement, says he was then held on the floor. He could feel his buttocks being forced open. He felt an object being forced into his anus...a lubricated penis". A second inmate, currently suing the Prison Service, alleges that he was beaten and sexually assaulted by a different officer, who pushed a baton into his anus.
Wormwood Scrubs was at the centre of a police investigation which began in 1998 (see Statewatch vol 8 no 2, 3/4, 5 and vol 9 no 3/4). Three officers were jailed for violence against prisoners. The investigation clearly did not act as a deterrent. At least four of the assaults admitted by the Prison Service took place after detectives had arrived at the jail in March 1998. Warnings from two chief inspectors of prisons, Sir Stephen Tumin in 1994, and Sir David Ramsbotham in 1996 also went unheeded. In 1998 the prison's