PRISON privatisation has been a disastrous failure and must end.
That’s the only possible conclusion from a damning litany of chaos, cock-ups,
lies, fraud and cruelty so staggering that it takes the breath away.
There is no justification for paying hundreds upon
hundreds of millions of pounds to the likes of G4S and Serco to make such a
shambles of running our criminal justice system.
It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry while
leafing through the Howard League’s report. For every Keystone Kops farce — £900
million given to a privateer which bought vans too big to fit into court
entrances — there’s an act of barely conceivable brutality.
A man with terminal cancer kept waiting in handcuffs
in the street while his guards buy lunch at Greggs.
A 14-year-old boy who took his own life after being
unlawfully restrained and beaten — including the “nose distraction technique,” a
slimy piece of PR-speak which translates as “punched in the face hard enough to
make him bleed.”
A woman who says she was forced to clean up the blood
from her own miscarriage. Which country is this? What century is
this?
You’re left asking: Have we got the inside and
outside of these cells the right way round? Shouldn’t the people responsible be
behind bars themselves?
Not just the foot soldiers of G4S and Serco’s
privateer armies but the top brass giving the orders — the executives pocketing
vast salaries paid for with our money.
