Ye may have noticed over the New Year a prison riot in England, with prisoners staging an uprising over searches for contraband booze. What wasn’t reported as much was that in the USA a much bigger and more important protest by prisoners -- a one day strike, which crossed racial lines as Black and White prisoners refused to work for one day in protest at prison conditions in the USA, with demands for a living wage, decent healthcare, nutritional meals, access to rehabilitation, fair parole hearings and family visits.
The prison industry in the United States is big business as outlined here -- “prison workers provide ninety eight percent of the total market for equipment assembly services. They produce ninety three percent of paints and paintbrushes, ninety two percent of stove assemblies, forty six percent of body armor, thirty six percent of all home appliances, thirty percent of all microphones, headphones, and speakers, and they even manufacture twenty one percent of all office furniture”.
Prisoners don’t only make commercial goods, they’re also an important part of the US Military Industrial Complex -- they produce “100% of all helmets ammunition belts, bullet proof vests, Identification tags, shirts, pants tents, bags and even canteens are produced by prison labour”. This means that by jailing a large whack of it’s own population the United States can afford to keep supplying it’s massively overstretched military maintain bases around the world and invade other countries.
This massive industry has been used by the largest corporations in the USA to undercut workers rights and make a killing -
* A Washington company “hired” prisoners to wrap software for Microsoft.
Golden arches, golden shackles? Oregon inmates produce electronic menu boards for McDonalds.
* In New Mexico, inmates take hotel reservations by telephone. California convicts took TWA airline reservations over the phone — during a flight attendants’ strike.
* Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest of the nation’s 88 private prison operators, teamed up with Company Apparel Safety Items in the first partnership between a private prison and a private manufacturer.
* Next time you’re turning the lights down and getting all comfy, consider this: Prisoners in South Carolina made lingerie for Victoria’s Secret.
Using prisoners as virtual slave labour has meant that for once, the practice of American jobs being outsourced to the Third World has reversed, for example an assembly factory in Mexico and sweatshop in Indonesia were closed down with their trade brought back to the USA -- because even prisoners can be paid less than workers in the developing world, as little as 25c an hour.
Not only can companies in the USA get prisoners to make all their crap on the cheap, they can actually run prisons themselves. Since the 1980’s the private prison industry in the USA has boomed (more on this later).
As the US prison population skyrocketed, the ruling class in the United States did what it always does, and pointed to the free market for a solution to it’s jailing of millions of it’s own citizens; It let private prisons ease the burden on the Federal Government. The problem is that even the US Bureau of Justice says the efficiency savings private prisons were meant to make ““have simply not materialized.” What happened was that a spate of violent prisoners escaped because privatised prisons cut corners for profit -- just like Railtrack in the UK, privatisation of what should be a not for profit social service resulted in a disastrous risk to people’s safety.
This graph makes sense when you realise the War on Drugs kicked off in 1980.
The reason the prison industrial complex has grown to become such a massive part of the US economy is simple -- the prison population in the United States has quadrupled in the past 20 years. The USA imprisons more people than any other country in the world at any time in human history. With only 5% of the world’s population, the USA has almost 25% of the world’s prison population. A whopping 2,500, 000 Americans are behind bars.
Despite this massive increase in prisoners, reports of crime have actually decreased in the same 20 years. The right-wing in the USA claims the two are related -- more people in jail, less violent offenders on the streets. But the overwhelming majority of prisoners in the USA are held for non-violent crimes.
The massive increase in jailed Americans is due to the beginning of the “War on Drugs” in the 1980’s. Just like the prohibition of alcohol in the 20’s, politicians in the US used the massive crack cocaine epidemic that hit the states as an excuse to jail hundreds of thousands of people, so they could pose as being tough and win votes for fighting a “war” (this was during the Cold War where fighting an actual war abroad to win elections was frowned upon by the Soviet Union).
The majority of people arrested were not drug dealers though -- they were actually drug users. The penalty for drug use in the USA makes the UK look like Bob Ainsworth’s psychedelic drug paradise -- you can get 5 years without any chance of parole for possessing 3.5 ounces of smack/5 grams of crack.
This means those jailed for drug offences are predominantly poor and Black. As well as looking back to the war on alcohol, the “War on Drugs” helped reintroduce another American tradition; making lots of Black men slaves -- almost 40% of the US prison population is made up of Black males, despite them only making up 12% of the population.
While black males were jailed en masse, many of the people who were actually responsible for letting crack into the United States were protected because crack cocaine helped to fund anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua. The CIA actively assisted the distribution of crack cocaine in the USA so they could illegally arm these rebels, and unlike their victims, none of them have ever done any jail time for it.
At least one polis gets it.
The war on drugs itself was biased against Black males, with people who smoked crack (the cheap form of cocaine taken by poor folk, a lot of whom were also Black) being treated much more harshly by the Justice system than cocaine in it’s pure form (the kind of cocaine taken by people in the Justice system). For example you’d need to get found wi 500 grams of pure cocaine to get the same punishment (5 years) as someone wi 5 grams of crack. Cocaine is a hell of a drug (for jailing lots of folk).
The War on Drugs, and the massive increase in prison population and jailing of Black males means there are more Black men in jail than in college than the USA. SSY is still waiting for Mr-Change-You-Can-Believe-In to rectify this situation but we won’t hold our breath. As Stephen Fry outlines below, keeping lots of young black guys in jail makes a few white guys in Washington a lot of money.
Well done American ruling class, I see what you’ve done there.
There are some cases where encouraging folk to work in prison is something Socialists should support -- it keeps them active, it can help rehabilitate them, teach them new skills and prepare them for life outside. But the fact is right now, rehabilitation in the United States isn’t just frowned upon as being too liberal, it’d be a hammer blow to large parts of the economy. Societies are ordered by what makes money for the people in charge of it, and there’s no motivation to stopping the Justice system from jailing millions of folk in the USA -- the opposite in fact.
People on the conservative right in the USA often attack Socialists for all the dodgy stuff that happened in the Soviet Union -- one of which was the Gulag, a massive Prison Industrial Complex which used to exist in Russia. Aside from the fact we don’t actually support that, the Gulag system in the Soviet Union was a massive white elephant which lost the Soviets millions of roubles as prisoners dug meaningless canals to nowhere. These projects were quickly scrapped by the Soviet leadership after Stalin kicked the bucket.
In contrast, the US Prison Industrial Complex is very, very profitable for the people who can get a cut out of it. The War on Drugs may have failed to stop drug use in the USA but it has been a roaring success for the shareholders of hundreds of companies, private prisons and military suppliers who have jailed drug addicts to use as slaves.
People who commit the worst, most violent crimes of murder, assault, rape etc shouldn’t be anywhere else but behind bars but those Americans who get addicted to drugs should get help from their Government to go clean, instead of working for years in the 21st century equivalent of cotton picking.
More evidence, as if it was needed, that Nick Clegg is a giant walking sack of shit with a ministerial car: yesterday at Prime Minister’s questions he said the government was going to close Yarl’s Wood, a hellhole private prison for asylum seekers who have done nothing wrong.
But, a bit like when the Lib Dems promised in government that they would stop locking up kids, only to lock up and then deport a baby from Glasgow, it turns out this claim was about as true as the SDL claiming they’re not racist. The government’s real powers were quick to make sure everyone realised that in fact only the “family unit” (i.e. the bit where they lock up parents and their innocent kids) will be closed, but the centre as a whole will remain open. (Even on this minimal commitment – please note it hasn’t actually happened yet!)
Yarl’s Wood is a place where our society locks up people who have fled torture, rape and other horrors from around the world. Very often, their suffering in other places is the result of our government’s policies. When they get here, they are denied the right to live in relative safety in the UK, stuck in a private prison run for profit by 21st century evil megacorp SERCO, and eventually deported back to countries where they face extreme danger.
Earlier this year, innocent women locked up in Yarl’s Wood went on hunger strike to protest their incarceration, and the abusive, racist treatment they faced from SERCO’s staff.
Anyone with even an ounce of humanity or decency in their body who got into power would tear the prison walls down right away. Nick Clegg and his ConDem chums have proven that they’d like people to think they’re decent human beings, but in fact they’re duplicitous wankstains more interested in implementing an extreme-right economic programme than basic human rights.
Britain's shame: Yarl's Wood
You’d think this blatant porkie would have got Clegg in a spot of bother, but instead of being angry at him for lying from the dispatch box, all the media and political commentators are going mental about a point earlier on in the day when he actually told the truth!
In the posh boys debating style that Westminster is famous for, he was clashing with Jack Straw, and said, perhaps without thinking it through, that, “We may have to wait for his memoirs, but perhaps one day he will account for his role in the most disastrous decision of all: the illegal invasion of Iraq.”
This presents his Tory chums with a bit of a problem: they voted for the Iraq war back in 2003, and absolutely backed the idea that it was legal.
For once however, Clegg was telling the truth on this one. Under international law, the UK and US had no authorisation to send their troops into Iraq, and the rest of the world had to sit back and accept it because they didn’t know what else to do about George W. ‘Monkey with a razorblade’ Bush. In Britain, the then Labour government tried to pretend it was legal because they got the attorney general to “change his mind” and say everything was kosher in time for the invasion.
Now, the fact that the Deputy Prime Minister has said what we all know, that the war was illegal, from the government dispatch box, might give some more leverage to people who want to take the UK to court for war crimes and flouting of international law in invading Iraq.
Nothing to worry about lads, it's all legal and above board
To try and clean up the mess, the same beleagured government spokespeople were forced to insist that the deputy PM was speaking in a personal capacity (at Prime Minister’s questions! It doesn’t get much more official than that!), and that his views were not those of the government.
Nick Clegg is obviously a bit of an idiot if he thought that this would have no implications when he said it. But the sad thing is it’s obscured what is a big issue: privatised prisons which we use to lock up innocent people. The fact of the matter is, I don’t really care about the legality of the Iraq war. If the government at the time had managed to get a legal fig leaf for what they were doing it would still have been wrong, and no amount of debating after the fact will change that. What is happening right now though is that we have a piece of human garbage as deputy PM who keeps claiming he’s going to stop locking up kids and innocent people but never actually seems to make good on it.
Gareth Myatt and Adam Rickwood, who both died in custody in 2004
After a five year battle, campaigners in England have managed to uncover a shocking manual demonstrating that serious physical abuse of vulnerable young people is officially sanctioned in privately run detention centres for young people.
Secure Training Centres (STCs) are units designed to house young (17 and under) offenders who have been sentenced to custody or in remand. So even if they are not formally called that, they are prisons. There aren’t any in Scotland, but the ones down south are all run by private companies.
The staff manual on ‘Physical Control on Care’ has been kept classified by the Youth Justice Board, which oversees the centres. Activists have been battling for years to get it released under Freedom of Information laws, and have previously been given copies with large sections blacked out. Finally, courts have ordered the document to be released, and what it shows is outrageous violence is part of the official regime in STCs.
Some of the measures the manual deems acceptable include:
- Use an inverted knuckle into the trainee’s sternum and drive inward and upward.
- Continue to carry alternate elbow strikes to the young person’s ribs until a release is achieved.
- Drive straight fingers into the young person’s face, and then quickly drive the straightened fingers of the same hand downwards into the young person’s groin area.
- Forcing children to “adopt a kneeling position” while steel handcuffs are put on them.
- Grab the neck and chin to “take control of the head.”
In other words, employees of private companies, with the government’s blessing are taught to deliberately hurt young people who the state has locked up. This is just what is officially legitimised – legal rulings have found other common practices in STCs to be unlawful, such as “nose distraction”: hitting someone hard on the nose.
If it’s not acceptable for a teacher to physically abuse children, why is it ok for them?
The instructions are not just for the self-defence of STC workers, but also aimed at guaranteeing compliance with “reasonable requests or direct orders.” STCs are for youth who are deemed too vulnerable to go into mainstream young offender’s institutions. In STCs, the regime is supposedly aimed at rehabilitating young offenders, providing them with intensive education “25 hours a week, 52 weeks a year.”
In reality most of the people who find themselves in STCs are likely to have come from extremely difficult backgrounds, and will have suffered abuse, personal and social problems, and are likely to have difficulty engaging with formal education. But they are unlikely to find any sympathy or support in an STC, for-profit hell holes where private companies make money from locking up children. The abuse they suffer at the hands of staff will ensure for many a life spent in and out of prison, filled with rage, misery and despair.
The Children’s Rights Alliance for England, has been fighting to get hold of the documents since the deaths in custody of two different teenagers in 2004. Gareth Myatt, 15, was held down was held down by three staff in Rainsbrook STC in Warwickshire. He choked on his own vomit and died. Adam Rickwood hanged himself at Hassockfield STC in County Durham. Last year a judge ruled that shortly before his death unlawful force had been used to restrain him.
Hassockfield STC, where Adam Rickwood died
While we shouldn’t pretend that there isn’t also a brutal regime in state young offenders’ institutions (where some techniques now banned in STCs, such as using pain as a “distraction”, are still permitted), it’s particularly disturbing that this abuse is going on in privatised, profit making prisons run by companies like SERCO and G4S. These companies are making pain and misery their business; SERCO also runs the Yarl’s Wood Immigration Detention Centre, where earlier this year detainees went on hunger strike to protest their brutal and humiliating treatment.
What this underlines is the importance of fighting privatised prisons every step of the way. In the US the prison industry is a huge business, and underpins the whole economy of many rural areas. Under these conditions, the criminal justice system becomes nothing more than a supplier of these businesses’ main natural resource: young prisoners, who can then also be used as free labour, or modern day slaves. It would be a good idea if we could find out if any major meetings or offices exist for some of these companies in Scotland, and make it our business to disrupt their profit making from abuse.
These guidelines were formulated under a Labour government, and now the ConDems are just as willing to defend them. Until this month, the government was prepared to go all the way to fight the release of the manual in court, but finally caved and released it. The Ministry of Justice has since defended its contents, saying “staff need to be able to intervene effectively, to protect the safety of all involved.”
SERCO: Scumbags
The way vulnerable youth are treated by the criminal justice system in the UK is horrifying, and will only contribute to the growth of violence, mental illness and misery throughout our society. It might be shocking to realise that this kind of abuse doesn’t take place in Guantanamo Bay, but to people we could have gone to school with or grown up alongside, right under our noses. The next time you hear some right wing politician or media wank talking about the need to crack down on youth offenders, or use tough love (surely one of the most disgusting euphemisms for abuse in this context), remember what it’s really like in one of these places. It’s time we realised that locking up young people rarely solves any of the complex social problems created by capitalism, and when those incarcerated face violence and abuse it only guarantees that the pain and humiliation will have consequences for the rest of the victims’ lives, and the lives of those around them.
If you’re reading this and you’re worried because you think someone is suffering or is at risk, the best advice is to contact local children’s services and the NSPCC.
The ConDem government has announced what should be good news: the practice of detaining children at Dungavel is to end.
Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre is a prison for asylum seekers who are to be deported. Parents with children have been held there, in some cases for more than a year. However, the fact that in Scotland we imprison kids horrified many, and the centre has been the site of repeated protests. More than that, there has been in a political consensus in Scotland that this is wrong, and that it must be ended.
This was something the Lib Dems had pledged to do, something which, alongside their pledge to scrap Trident and introduce a fairer tax system (neither of which will now happen since they jumped in to bed with the Tories), helped give people the impression that they could vote for a mainstream alternative. This has since proved to be a cruel lie.
However, it has emerged what the ConDems plan to do about the imprisonment of children in Scotland: they’ll move them to England. Great work guys!
It’s been announced that families will now be taken to Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in Bedfordshire, supposedly because this has the facilities to accommodate them. You can paint this whichever way you want, a child in prison is still a child in prison.
As we’ve reported previously, Yarl’s Wood was recently the site of a major hunger strike of inmates, who were demanding their freedom and better conditions. They were subject to physical and verbal (racist) abuse. It’s a privatised prison, run by the sinister company SERCO. It’s no place to send children.
Although there are many great groups down south operating to help refugees and those locked up in Yarl’s Wood, it’s no accident that the new government wants to get them out of Scotland. The debate on asylum in England is further to the right than it is here, with all the focus on cracking down. That isn’t to imply that Scotland has some amazing record of welcoming people and anti-racism. But there is a consensus that locking up kids in Dungavel is wrong, due at least in part to the tireless support work of SSP MSPs on the issue from 2003-7. This means that what’s politically unacceptable here can be got away with in Bedfordshire. The Lib Dems should receive absolutely no credit for stopping kids imprisonment in Scotland only to continue it in England. They should instead by mercilessly hounded for the lying hypocrites they are.
But to get practical about what we need to do: Despite the fact that the ConDems had already announced that child detention was to end, on Monday Seher and Wania Shabaz were detained at Brand Street Reporting Centre in Glasgow, and sent to Dungavel.
Seher and Wania Shabaz
Twenty-five year old Seher has been living in the UK for three years, after she was forced into marriage against her will. Her husband was physically and sexually abusive, and threatened to kill her. She was locked in his flat in Blackburn for days at a time. She begged her family in Pakistan to take her back, but they were unsympathetic.
In May last year her daughter Wania was born, and she decided she couldn’t cope with the abuse any more, so she phoned the police. They referred her to Social Work, who said they couldn’t help her because she wasn’t a British citizen. In December she left and came to Glasgow.
Here, she was put in homeless accommodation and assisted to make an asylum application. Her husband followed her to Glasgow, and she had to be moved to avoid him. Her in-laws have been harassing Seher’s family, claiming there was no abuse and that she ran off with another man. If Seher is returned to Pakistan she faces at the least being ostracised, and possibly much worse, as deserting her husband is viewed as a serious matter. Seher said:
“This is the system I would be returning to if they deport us. They won’t spare me, it’s not a small issue if a girl runs away from her husband or in-laws. Our only value in Pakistan now is if I am dead.”
Seher arrived at Brand Street to report in, as all asylum seekers have to do every two weeks. Despite never having shown any risk of absconding, she was detained and taken to Dungavel. She said:
“I told them I was signing every two weeks and I am continually running from a very bad situation, why are you detaining me? They said to me “This is what we have decided”. I said I have a small baby and I have none of her clothes or baby things. They said that was not their problem and I was put into the back of a van and after an hour my baby and I were taken to Dungavel. I just could not stop crying. My baby was due for medical treatment today (Tuesday, May 18th) and despite giving them a medical letter at the detention centre they insisted on detaining me. This is just a prison. We are kept locked in in the family area. But why? We have never ran away or tried to break the law. I can’t take my baby out for fresh air when she needs it. That is the worst thing, not being able to play in the open with her, and I don’t like her seeing the barbed wire or to know what it means – that we cannot leave.
“I just want to be able to raise my daughter in peace, find work and stand on our own two feet and make a simple life for us. Nothing else. My daughter is just a baby, she has done nothing to harm anyone. I just ask the government to release us from here.”
Groups working to support Seher, like the Unity Centre and Positive Action in Housing fear that she will be taken to Yarl’s Wood today. The journey will probably be in the back of a van, completely inappropriate for an 8-month old baby suffering from diarrhea, and who has been denied medical treatment. This morning Seher says she has been vomiting and is extremely distressed. When she tried to protest what was happening to authorities in Dungavel, they threatened to take her baby from her by force and transport them separately to Yarl’s Wood. Once again, the people responsible for detention have been shown to be cruel racists, who should not be given any authority over a young mum and her baby.
Tory Immigration Minister Damian Green, who apparently has a servant to carry an umbrella over his head like P. Diddy
What you can do: Urgently, get in touch with Damian Green, the new Tory UK Immigration Minister. You can email him on greend@parliament.uk. Better still, phone him up and give him hell about the way Seher and Wania have been treated. His Westminster office is on 020 7219 3911, and the fax number is 020 7219 0904. And his constituency office in Ashford is on 01233 820454, fax 01233 820111.
Also, get in touch with your own MP and MSP, and demand that Seher and Wania are not removed, and allowed to return to their home. You can find the details of how to contact them here.
It’s a simple demand we’re making of the government: let asylum seekers live at home while their claims are being processed. No children, anywhere in the UK, should be in prison. Make your voice heard!
Update: On Wednesday Seher and Wania were taken on a nine hour journey by van to Yarl’s Wood, where they are currently incarcerated, and facing deportation to Pakistan tomorrow. Her solicitor is making representations to the Home Secretary, and is waiting for a response. Now is the time we all urgently need to add our voices to those contacting the government to demand that they be allowed to stay in the UK. Click here for model letters and where to send them.
What’s sickening is if she had remained in a violent relationship she wouldn’t now be facing deportation.
Yesterday all 12 families locked up in Yarl’s Wood sent a jointly signed letter to Nick Clegg pleading that they be let go, and their children, who were born here and speak English as their first language, are allowed to return to school and try and pick up a normal life. The families include two pregnant women and 14 children and babies, who have received no education whilst imprisoned by the UK.
If the ConDem government is really going to end the detention of children, then they should release these families immediately. Please write to cleggn@parliament.uk to let him know how you feel about being a citizen of a country that imprisons children who have done nothing wrong, depriving them of education. Demand that he release them now.
Update, Monday 24th: Despite the best efforts of many, Sehar was deported on Saturday. Despite appeals to Nick Clegg, Home Secretary Theresa May and Immigration Minister Damian Green, guards forced her on to a plane to a country where she faces an uncertain and dangerous future. Whatever happens to her now is on the hands of these assembled scumbags.
We mustn’t ever let people forget that the Lib Dems are full of shit when it comes to asylum. When they claimed they were ending detention for children, ON THE SAME DAY they imprisoned a baby. Their hypocrisy is breathtaking. We must now be very concerned about what exactly the government does have planned, as we can put nothing past these bastards. Does ending detention mean they’ll lock up parents and put the kids in care for example?
Disheartening as this news is, our efforts must now to turn to building awareness and solidarity with the remaining 11 families locked up in Yarl’s Wood, four of whom are on hunger strike.
As the Scottish Socialist Voice explained in a previous IWD special (scroll down to centre pages):
For over 150 years, women and men across the world have demonstrated on International Women’s Day. On that day in 1857 in New York, hundreds of women workers in the textile industry went on strike, protesting casual labour, low wages and poor working conditions. The women were attacked and beaten by the police – their stand was one of the reasons 8 March was officially recognised as International Women’s Day in 1910. So why do we still mark the day now in the 21st century?
The multinational bank HSBC is a major sponsor of the ‘official’, or at least biggest, International Women’s Day celebrations in Britain now. Their website explains:
“Many companies have actively supported International Women’s Day… This is essential if they are to recruit and retain the best female talent, sell their products/services to them, and see more women investing in them.”
But for others, including the Scottish Socialist Women’s Network, the reasons we march on International Women’s Day are the same as why the New York textile workers marched – because we are still fighting low pay, exploitation and oppression.
Photo by Eva Merz
Socialists in Scotland will be marking the occasion with our annual International Women’s Day protest outside HMP Cornton Vale.
Cornton Vale is the only women’s prison in Scotland, and it is notoriously overcrowded – despite the fact that most of the inmates shouldn’t be there in the first place. Just one per cent of women in Cornton Vale are there because they have committed a violent offence. Previous reports have found that 90 per cent of women imprisoned in Scotland have committed crimes related to poverty – through drug and alcohol abuse, non-payment of fines, or just struggling to cope with living below the breadline.
In 2006, it was found that 98% of the inmates were struggling with addiction; 80% had mental health problems and 75% were survivors of abuse.
Former Scottish Socialist Party MSP Rosie Kane was held in Cornton Vale in 2006 for non-payment of a fine. One of her fellow inmates was there for nothing more than throwing some candles and a James Blunt CD out of a window during an argument. You can read about Rosie’s experience in Cornton Vale here.
It costs £37,000 a year to keep one woman in Cornton Vale – that’s money that could be investing in helping women with drink and drug problems, helping poverty stricken women from having to turn to prostitution or theft to feed themselves, their families or their habits. That is money that could help women rebuilt their lives after abuse and trauma. Instead women are being locked up and mistreated over and over again.
Socialists and feminists protesting outside womens’ prisons is often misunderstood or deliberately misconstrued. We DON’T think women are inherently good and gentle and should therefore don’t belong in jail. The fact is that women receive disproportionately high sentences when compared to men who have committed similar crimes. As previously reported in Leftfield, shoplifters (mainly women) are more likely to be imprisoned than sex offenders (mainly men). Women taking a tiny bit of profit-making opportunity from private companies are considered more dangerous criminals than men who pose a serious risk to the safety of women and children. That’s FUCKED UP.
Stop the war on women!
Join us this Sunday, 7 March at 12 noon at Stirling Train Station, to march on Cornton Vale and PROTEST.
Please bring ribbons and flowers to decorate the fence.
If you are a driver, your help ferrying protesters from the train station to the prison would be much appreciated.
Just a quick update to the issue we previously reported about the abuse of women detainees in Yarl’s Wood immigration detention centre.
Meg Hillier, liar and knobhead
The women have now been on hunger strike for three weeks,
demanding their freedom and better conditions in Yarl’s Wood. However, Meg Hillier, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for ‘Identity’ apparently, has written to MP’s with a bunch of straight up lies about the situation in the centre. Never mind, I’m sure she knows what she’s talking about,
the government people working on Identity clearly aren’t clueless.
She writes that women aren’t really on hunger strike, and they are getting food brought in by visitors. In fact this is banned by the guards. 34 women have written from the centre to deny Hillier’s claims. She also argues that the way immigration cases are examined is fair, that women didn’t face serious health consequences as a result of recent events, and that no racist abuse took place. This is all contradicted by the women who are actually there.
Here’s the letter that they’ve written to let people know they’re still on hunger strike:
“We the undersigned have been on hunger strike since the 5/02/10 to date.. At no particular point in time have we gone to eat in the dining room, got food from the vending machines or at the shop. We would also like to point out that Yarl’s Wood has a no food, no drink policy, this has always been the case therefore saying that “visitors bring us food” is untrue.“
Scandalously, Hillier also claims that those on the outside campaigning to help the women are spreading lies that “cause unnecessary distress” to the women in Yarl’s Wood. In fact everyone helping to publicise what goes on in this private prison, run by a textbook creepy company, SERCO, are helping the detainees in their own small way. Publicity and public pressure on the government helps keep these women safe from further abuse. The Black Women’s Rape Action Project are in daily contact with them, and they ask for all of us to tell the world what’s going on to try and prevent the situation getting any worse.
They’ve also asked for supporters to email the government demanding freedom for detainees and an investigation into conditions in Yarl’s Wood. You can email:
· Alan Johnson MP, Home Secretary johnsona@parliament.uk or public.enquiries@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk
· Meg Hillier MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Home Office meghilliermp@parliament.uk or apc.secretariat@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk
You can also find your local MP and email them via WriteToThem.com. I’m not generally a fan of writing to MP’s, you could do it all day on different important issues and it’s often quite a passive way of protesting. But in this case I think it might actually do some good to make the government feel under pressure, so why not take five minutes to support women in Yarl’s Wood.
“HM Inspector of Prisons urgently carries out an independent investigation into reports of violence, mistreatment and racist abuse from guards, being kettled for over five hours in a hallway, denied access to toilets and water and locked out in the freezing cold, which women have made, and a moratorium on all removals and deportations of the women who took part in the hunger strike pending the results of that investigation”.
While it’s a bit far away for any SSY members who aren’t living in exile down south to make, there’s an important protest in London tomorrow against the brutal treatment of women detained in Yarl’s Wood Imigration Removal Centre.
Since February 5th over 50 women in the centre had been on hunger strike in protest against their detention and conditions. On Tuesday guards went in to break the protest up violently. Many were “kettled”, that is trapped by guards, in a small airless corridor for 8 hours with no access to food, water or toilet facilities. Others were trapped outside in snow for hours without warm clothes or shoes. Emergency services were denied access to the centre, and the women have been unable to access medical treatment.
But most shocking have been the reports of abuse by the guards. There has been widespread verbal racial abuse, as well as brutal physical assaults that left one woman unable to stand and another with a finger nearly severed.
Cristel Amiss, of Black Women’s Rape Action Project, told The Guardian: “Over 70% of women in Yarl’s Wood are rape survivors, many are sick and vulnerable. Why are they being punished for raising serious injustices?”
Yarl’s Wood, which is just outside Clapham in Bedfordshire, is a privately run facility controlled by a genuine British 21st Century evil megacorporation, Serco Group. As well as running detention centres and private prisons, they operate electronic tagging services, airports on behalf of the occupation in Iraq, provide fleet support to the navy and run an unprecedented private contract for the maintenance of the UK’s Anti Ballistic Missile System at RAF Fylingdales. They’ve been called the biggest company you’ve never heard of, because behind the scenes they are slowly taking over a whole raft of things the state used to do.
Yarl’s Wood holds 405 women and children in detention, usually awaiting deportation back to countries which they have fled for their lives. Since it opened in 2001 it has been a site of constant protests and hunger strikes. Between 2002 and 2003 it was closed for over a year following a fire.
Today (Thursday 11th) activists in support of the women are taking part in a running protest at their treatment, culminating in a previously planned mass demo tomorrow outside Serco’s offices in London, which are at:
18-22 Hand Court (off High Holborn), London, WC1V 6JF.
On 8 March, 
It costs £37,000 a year to keep one woman in Cornton Vale – that’s money that could be investing in helping women with drink and drug problems, helping poverty stricken women from having to turn to prostitution or theft to feed themselves, their families or their habits. That is money that could help women rebuilt their lives after abuse and trauma. Instead women are being locked up and mistreated over and over again.
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