Privatising prisons

Thank you for your comments on this thread
(I know I did not start it).

Especially thanks to one member for your message.

Prisoners do not have a cushy life by any means, and there is always the politics of being an inmate which for a new inmate can be daunting and frightening.

Prison officers do not care about the prisoners. They stand by and watch things happening. They allow cruelty and injustice, and in some cases they seem to enjoy seeing misery.

People who say the inmates get play-stations must be on another planet.

If you were locked up in a cell for 23 hours with no TV wouldn't you go mad? To me, this is a form of torture.

Another aspect of this is the lack of support for families. You have to find everything out for yourself. They have Visitor Centres at prisons. They are dreadful at informing families what they can and cannot do. Nine times out of ten you find out something crucial from another visitor. That can't be right !

The whole thing needs looking at and changing. This is only one life after all. We are great at celebrating what's good about life, so why shouldn't we change what is clearly a failing system, and make that workable

There used to be a prison in Suffolk where the inmates, mostly young men, looked after heavy horses. I believe they became very proud of their charges and were able to enter them in local shows. They learnt to put the horses' interest before their own, expended a lot of energy in grooming, tacking up etc. Seemed such a good idea, but for reasons I'm not aware of, the unit was closed.

My nephew had a terrible childhood despite the alleged involvement of the social services. He needed to be removed from his parents and put up for adoption but instead it was decided that his parents had rights which were more important than his. Please don't think I stood by and watched without doing anything but that's another story.

After a troubled time at school he turned to alcohol, drugs and crime. By 15 he was in a teenage secure unit. He's now 30 and has spent over 10 of the last 15 years in units and prison. In fact, he's now so institutionalised that he can't exist in the normal world and committed his last crime in order to go back to prison.

This suggests to me that our current system doesn't work. This young man is so used to being locked up that he can't function when he isn't. He's not the only one because recently a man broke every car windscreen in my daughter's street because he was desperate to go back inside.

I'm not justifying my nephew btw just giving an example of how the system doesn't work.

Privatisation won't make it better. We need to ask ourselves why we incarcerate people. Is it to remove them from society? Is it to punish? Is it to rehabilitate? Or are we simply locking them up and forgetting about them? What about the people we put in prison who have mental health problems and really should be in hospital?

Whatever the reason they don't cease to be human beings and as such need to be treated with decency no matter what they've done. Have you ever seen a lion in a cage pacing up and down with boredom and slowly going insane? Imagine what being locked in a cell 23 out of 24 hours does to a human being.