Privatisation was the kiss of death for our prison system
THE SIGHT of a female prison officer at HMP Addiewell entering an inmate’s cell and kissing him, captured on a smuggled mobile phone, seemed like a scene out of BBC drama Time.
However, as Jane Hamilton’s exclusive last week revealed, this was fact and not fiction, and seemingly there are a number of other recordings of exchanges between them not yet made public.
This incident raises a whole range of issues for the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) although I wonder if they will tackle the most pressing – prison privatisation and currently about 15 per cent of prisoners in Scotland, England and Wales housed in jails managed by private companies.
HMP Addiewell is run by Sodexo and is one of the two prisons in our penal estate contracted out by the SPS to the private sector; Sodexo also runs three jails in England and Wales, along with companies such as Serco and G4S.
Prison privatisation emerged in the early 90s with the Tories as a means of tackling overcrowding. In reality, they were confronting the Prison Officers’ Association’s (POA) influence within our jails.
The POA was considered intransigent over how many staff were needed on duty, and carried a threat of strike action.
What better way then to curb its power than “lean” officer staffing and management structures with cheaper imprisonment and showing the union who was “in charge”. We have seen who is in charge rather graphically at HMP Addiewell.
Of course, Tony Blair’s New Labour approved more prison privatisation than their predecessors, but all in all, it is an experiment that hasn’t worked.
Prison privatisation isn’t necessarily cheaper than the public sector; it doesn’t deliver better “treatment outcomes” in prisoner rehabilitation; and the money made is predicated on fewer, less experienced or trained staff – a reality which forms the backdrop to what happened at HMP Addiewell.
Of course, this type of incident could, and occasionally does, happen in a public sector prison but I have no doubt a culture of fewer staff on duty on the landings, which characterises the private sector’s history of running jails in Britain, makes it more common and more likely to reoccur.
So I am opposed to prison privatisation for practical reasons, but also ideological ones.
If it is the state’s responsibility to arrest, try and sentence, it should also be its responsibility to lock people up.
It is wrong, immoral, to make money out of the misery of incarceration and the fact that private companies in Scotland, England and Wales, Australia and, in particular, the US are clamouring for more contracts merely indicates that we have turned prisoners into a commodity like tins of beans, or battery hens.
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It is wrong to make money out of the misery of jail