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UK: Officers suspended at "brutal" Scrubs

01 May 1998

A senior manager and eight prison officers have been suspended from duty following allegations of systematic brutality at Wormwood Scrubs prison in west London (see Statewatch Vol. 8, no. 2). Among those suspended was the woman manager of the jails's segregation unit (punishment block) who faces a disciplinary hearing. Senior officials at the jail have asked the Metropolitan police to launch a full-scale investigation into the allegations which have been described as the most serious for a decade.

A legal dossier of the prisoners' claims has been compiled by solicitors Hickman and Rose and includes accusations of intimidation, racism and beatings against eight officers that, in one case, amounted to systematic torture. Two prisoners were removed from the prison for their own safety at the end of March after an alleged new round of threats from prison officers aimed at coercing them not to testify. Commenting on the situation Nick Flynn, of the Prison Reform Trust, observed: "None of the safeguards, the watchdogs or monitoring systems seem to have worked. They appear to have fallen into disuse at Wormwood Scrubs."

On the day following the suspensions over half of the officers working at the prison reported in "sick" in sympathy with their suspended colleagues, causing serious disruption at the prison and forcing more than seventy staff from other London jails to be brought in to replace them. These events, which were acknowledged as a "protest action" by the director-general of the Prison Service, Richard Tilt, meant that prisoners spent longer in their cells and visits were disrupted. For the Prison Officers Association, vice-chairman Ron Adams, complained that his members had been under severe stress and the absences reflected "a genuine level of illness": our members were breaking down in tears he complained with a straight face. At the end of May the Prison Service received a number of new allegations of "medium scale" assaults by staff.

In early 1997 the Prisons Inspectorate, in a report on Wormwood Scrubs, stated that they were "horrified" at conditions in the prison. Prophetically, the report observed that the attitudes of the prison officers "have no place in the modern world" - unfortunately, Richard Tilt seems not to have read their report.

Guardian 1.4.98, 28.5.98.