Thursday, May 15, 2014

The Sinister Shadow State


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.