Privatising prisons

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.

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.

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

These are often people who have had a very bad start in life, who may have been deprived of a secure family and home (care leavers are significantly over-represented in the prison population), and who often have very few literacy and numeracy skills. On top of that, 10% of men and 30% of women prisoners have received inpatient psychiatric treatment, and many others have mental health issues.

Whilst I think it's a good idea that prisoners actually do something useful for part of the day, and this may include physical work, I also believe they should be housed in decent prisons, given access to fresh air and exercise and given a chance to catch up educationally. I don't think that should just be learning reading, writing and arithmetic, but also the opportunity to enjoy the arts - painting, singing, drama - all of which are known to be beneficial in improving self esteem and creating a more confident and positive approach to life.

Some of the people on a course I attended worked as literacy teachers in prisons and they said the commonly held view that prisoners had a "cushy life" would soon be dispelled if the people confidently putting forward such an opinion actually visited a prison and saw the tragedy of it.

I think the state of our prisons, in a country as rich as ours, is a national disgrace.

You're right about accommodation Nonnie1..
The move-on hostel in our town is closed down. At a guess this is to do with the costs since service charges were expected to be paid by the client...
Until recently I was also the lay adviser on my local public protection board and believe me, the number of registered accommodations were reducing year on year and this was a major headache when looking for supported placements for those being released.

Well said Nonnie

Working with prisons in the past, it really seems to me that education is key but the prisoners and staff all agree that you need a full staffing to make education work.
A big issue is that the courses are being run, but sometimes there is absolutely no one free to walk the prisoner from their cell to the place where education takes place. In some cases tutors have been sitting in empty 'classrooms' and the inmates are sitting getting annoyed and bored in their cells.

Also, some of the 'best' and 'easiest' prisons were the ones that the private sector picked off in the last round - so that makes the statistics of public v private all the more alarming.

I am not prepared to say why but I have a current knowledge of prisons.

Whether they are illiterate or not these mostly young men deserve more than to be left to rot in a prison cell for many hours each day. A lot of them return so incarceration is no detriment.

The food is horrible. The conditions are horrible, and there should be more recreation or gainful employment.

They should be able to gain qualifications while inside, and I'm not talking about health and safety stuff either - proper qualifications.

Some young men on the wrong side of the law have nowhere to live the day their sentence ends. There is nothing to give them any form of hope and that is why they re-offend.

In this day there has to be a change in the way we look at offenders.... I mean we look at everything else differently don't we?

It's not so much about punishment - the punishment is cutting them off from society and the people they love... it's about helping them to rehabilitate so they won't end up back here again. Break the chain.

I'm not joking now, I'm crying as I type this.

Step back when the branch falls thatbag

There's also the thing that my dad was always saying to us about a healthy mind needing a healthy body. Good hard exercise (not excessive, just good) is good for a person.

However, we seem to have digressed from privatisation of prisons. As you were.

I'm off out to saw a HUGE branch off a tree.

Also, diggin holes is not the only kind of hard physical work. What about cutting back brushwood where it is growing over footpaths? What about picking up litter off beaches? There's loads of socially useful tasks people could be made to do to try and teach them some socially responsible attitudes.

What is community work instead of being 'detained at Her Majesty's pleasure' if not this kind of thing?

Depending what kind of hole you want, of course. But to illustrate my point, have a look at some pics of archaeological digs. Even grave digging must involve some skill not to have the sides of your hole collapsing on you, especially when someone was down there with a spade. I guess graves are dug with diggers now. Manipulating a mechanical digger requires skill.

Who said anything about not being able to read?

I maintain there is skill in digging holes. Learning skills is educational.

Rubbish, hard physical labour is not an education of any sort. What good is learning to dig a hole when one cannot read . Soooo Victorian ,

Bollocks. Nothing do with the Age of Victoria, just a well-known educational fact. Children learn by doing more than by any other method.

Plus, for example, I have learned more about gardening by doing it in different situations than I ever would have learned from books. So I'm speaking from first hand experience.

bags you sound like a good Victorian?

Hard physical labour is an education of sorts. Education doesn't have to be all intellectual. Learning by doing is still learning.

I'm not so sure about education being the only way ahead. It sounds bad but these young lads need hard physical labour in fresh air to tire them out. Good food would help too. I don't mean breaking stones though! Heavy unmechanised farm work? After a day of that a good nights sleep would result. Not going to happen of course. Sigh.

Privatisation doesn't work.

To run a prison for profit you need to minimise your costs. Well that's easy. Use fewer and less qualified staff, limit/have no educational facilities, increase the number of prisoners per cell, keep the prisoners in their cells as much as possible, feed the prisoners poor quality food, keep the heating at a lower temperature and make the prisoners wear jumpers.

If you're lucky you get demoralised prisoners who don't have the motivation to complain. However you're more likely end up with a riot. That's not a problem though because you can call the publicly funded riot police to sort it out. Any damage that has nothing to do with security can be left as the prisoners brought any discomfort on themselves. You can also use the riot to convince the government to agree that prisoners can be on lock down for even longer and cut your staffing costs even more.

Of course with no education or attempt at rehabilitation the chances are that the prisoner will reoffend. That's brilliant because you need a constant stream of offenders so that you can keep your facility full and therefore most cost efficient.

It's a win win situation.

An article in the Huffington Post in 2014 quoted:

The Independent, 2009: "Britain's private prisons are performing worse than those run by the state, according to data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

"...Separate figures, also released under the right-to-know law, show that nearly twice as many prisoner complaints are upheld in private prisons as they are in state-run institutions."

"In 2008, 10 of the 11 private prisons in England and Wales came in the bottom quarter of the Ministry of Justice's prison performance league table. "

In 2013, the BBC News site reported:

"Two privately-run prisons are among three the government has expressed "serious concern" over, Ministry of Justice (MoJ) ratings have revealed.

HMP Oakwood, run by G4S, HMP Thameside, run by Serco, and the Prison Service's HMP Winchester in Hampshire, were given the lowest performance rating of one.

".....The ratings come after private security companies G4S and Serco came under fire for overcharging the government by "tens of millions of pounds" for providing electronic tags for criminals."

Dear God we have become more like the USA.
Prisons are one thing that should not be left to capitalism and profit. Since the last election with the lack of the Lib Dems in coalition our country has become more and more hard line right wing.

A large proportion of prisoners are illiterate, some through no fault of their own (dyslexia etc). Trying to educate them would help them integrate in the workplace on release - whether that's done privately or Government funded. Obviously, there would be those who wouldn't accept the help, but it may help some.

The prison system is antiquated. Most of the inmates are younger men, and many of them seem to be locked up for 24 hours a day.
You wonder why there are drugs ? You wonder why they fight?
They need employment and they need to be housed in decent conditions with decent food and dare I say it decent people working there who do not either bring drugs in or turn a blind eye for a back hander.

The prison system need cleaning up. We need to build new prisons and demolish the old victorian ones.

I could say an awful lot but I won't.

If it were privatised it could not be any worse than it is now.

IMHO

G4 runs young offenders prisons - Theresa May's husband has shares in this company