Nine asylum seekers on trial for riot and disorder while detained at the UK’s largest immigration detention centre, Group 4-run Campsfield House, have been cleared of all charges (see PPRI #18 and 20).

The prosecution’s case collapsed on 17 June 1998 at Oxford Crown Court after evidence from some 20 Group 4 staff proved unreliable. Footage from 32 surveillance cameras helped undermine the staff’s version of events. One Group 4 witness even admitted to telling “undeliberate lies”.

The riot occurred on 20 August 1997 after a false rumour spread around the facility that Group 4 staff had strangled and killed two detainees during an attempt to transfer them to a state-run prison.

John Allen, a Group 4 supervisor, denied in court that  his officers had held any detainees by the neck. But video footage clearly showed a detainee with a Group 4 officer’s hands around his neck. Mr Allen did not reply to the question from a defence lawyer: “Don’t you think that seeing this, the other detainees would think that he is being strangled?”

The prosecution claimed that detainees threw  missiles at staff, smashed windows, destroyed telephones and surveillance cameras, ransacked the shop and wrecked the kitchen. Staff were said to have been petrified.

When Group 4 officer Mo Stone was asked if she had broken a wall telephone, she replied; “No”.  The lawyer then said: “Are you sure about that? Are you saying that if other witnesses say they saw you break the telephone that they are liars?” The officer replied: “We did pull it apart.”

Officer Caryn Mitchell-Hill said that she had been alone in a corridor and threatened by a detainee. But video footage showed that she was with other staff at the time of the alleged incident.

Jane Essery told police that she had been frightened by the events of 20 August 1997.  But a tape recording of a conversation between Ms Essery and Group 4 managers revealed that she had “felt very calm actually”.

Group 4's John Graham said that he had been threatened by a named detainee. In court, he could not identify his alleged attacker.

Officer Chris Barry claimed that he had been hit on the head, punched, kicked, sprayed with chemicals and had his shirt torn to shreds. Yet close-up video footage showed Mr Barry looking healthy in a neat, clean shirt just five minutes after the alleged incident had taken place.

After the trial, the Crown Prosecution Service admitted that: “The evidence that came out during the course of the prosecution case was not sufficient, in our view, to merit the prosecution being continued.” Group 4 told the Guardian that it had nothing to do with the prosecution other than “supplying witnesses”.

n Group 4 has run Campsfield House since 1993. On 1 May 1998, the company’s contract was renewed for a further three years.

 

 

AUSTRALIA

 

Victoria warns Group 4

        Group 4's contract to run Port Phillip Prison in Melbourne could be terminated unless improvements are made to ensure contract compliance (see PPRI #15-20)

Mr Jeff Kennett, Premier of Victoria, said on 10 June 1998 that a default notice had been issued on 3 June and negotiations were taking place with the company. “Whether they are up to the task of meeting our demands or whether we have to put in a different management team will be addressed with the passage of time,” he said.                Group 4 has since submitted what it calls a “cure plan” to the Government. 

But on 13 June, a prisoner attempted suicide by hanging himself with his shoelaces and on 16 June a remand prisoner was stabbed in the back by another prisoner. Since the prison opened ten months ago, there have been four suicides, ten attempted suicides, at least 40 self-mutilations and two riots.       

On 5 June 1998, the prison was locked down after  two prison officers were attacked and beaten by prisoners with pool cues and socks filled with billiard balls.

The Community and Public Sector Union has alleged that minimum staffing levels have not yet been met. On 5 June, for example, the staff complement was eight fewer than the number imposed on the company by the Industrial Relations Commission following a riot on 11 March.

 

 

UNITED KINGDOM

 

Campaign to stop new prison

        Plans to build a new 600-800 bed private prison at Marchington, in the midst of two rural Staffordshire villages, are being fiercely resisted by local people.

The Prison Service says that the proposed site is strategically important. But residents argue that there are already two state-run prisons in the area, the Prison Service’s arguments are unsound, and private prisons are problematic.

They are calling for a Department of Environment inquiry into the planning process and considering legal action.  They are also organising with groups in other areas. Campaigns to stop new prisons have failed so far in Fazakerley (HMP Altcourse), Bridgend (HMP Parc) and Salford (HMP Agecroft). But in Telford, Shropshire, a  recent campaign stopped a prison being built and an inquiry is due to be held into the proposed private prison at Peterborough. Contact: Stop The Prison Action Group c/o Robert Hardwick, Tel: 01283 820513. Fax: 01283 821356.

n One of the three consortia shortlisted by the Prison Service to bid for the Marchington contract is the American firm, Correctional Services Corporation (formerly Esmor, see PPRI #3, 14 and 21 ) and British construction company Kier. This is  Correctional Services Corp’s first foray into the UK. It formed a British subsidiary in February 1998.

 

Suicide facts

    Seventeen prisoners have committed suicide in privately run prisons in the UK since the first opened in April 1992. There have been eight suicides at Premier Prison Services-run HMP Doncaster; three at UK Detention Services-run HMP Blakenhurst; three at Group 4 -run HMP Wolds; one at Group 4's HMP Buckley Hall; and two at Securicor-run HMP Parc. Suicides in Commercially Managed Prisons: Factsheet 32. Available from: Howard League for Penal Reform, 708 Holloway Road, London, N19 3NL, England.Tel: ++ 44 171 281 7722; Fax: ++ 171 281 5506.

 

 

DEBATE

 

Are private prisons here to stay? Is the debate about public versus private ownership really over? Are issues of principle irrelevant? Is public accountability the only remaining issue? Or have the moral, legal and ethical questions been glossed over?

One of the most recent books dealing with prison privatisation is Private Prisons and Public Accountability by Dr Richard W. Harding, published by Open University Press, Buckingham, England, 1997. Dr Harding is director of the University of Western Australia’s Crime Research Centre and an adviser to the Government of Western Australia on its private prison strategy.

In his book, Dr Harding describes prison privatisation developments in the US, UK and Australia and argues that, as private prisons are here to stay, they could offer a great deal to criminal justice systems if strict accountability and regulatory controls are put in place.

But other academics disagree, arguing that it is important not to lose sight of the principled objections to private prisons or expansionist penal policies that privatisation fuels.

In the interests of broadening public debate, and with the  authors’ and publishers’ consent, PPRI is publishing  two recent critiques of Dr Harding’s book. Dr Harding has agreed to write his response in a forthcoming issue of PPRI.

 

1. Professor Mick Ryan, University of Greenwich, London, England.

A senior British academic has commented on the cover of this book that it is the only text he has come across which successfully combines a “reasoned discussion” of the principles involved in prison privatization with “authoritative data” on the actual performance of private prisons so far. In my view this is wilfully misleading, because Harding is not much interested in teasing out the principles involved in prison privatization. There are two reasons for this. 

First, Harding seems to adopt the position that the undeniably important distinction between the allocation and delivery of punishment settles (or as some would argue, fudges) the key issues of principle involved in prison privatization. Second, and arguably more tellingly, he believes that issues of principle are all very well, but what really matters in the long run is the quality of life that we offer to prisoners. This is the real litmus test for what is acceptable (or otherwise) when it comes to the ownership and operation of the prison system. 

Given this position, what Harding does in this book - indeed, what he does in just about all his other writing on this subject that I have come across in the English‑speaking world where he is a key player in this important debate - is not to engage in a reasoned discussion of principles. By ‘reasoned’ here I would insist on some notion of sufficiency and depth. As I have suggested above, he is impatient with these principles, treats the debate about them cursorily, as if by now it is well and truly settled. 

What he does instead - and his wonderfully pithy (not to say acerbic) style makes this very effective - is to twist the tails of those American and European academics (for example, Christie 1993; Dilulio 1991; Ryan and Ward 1989; Sparks 1994) who, as he sees it, self‑indulgently argue over prison privatization from positions of moral and/or political principle with little concern for the welfare of prisoners. He is clearly astonished at one point, that such people can attempt to reduce an issue like prison privatization, one which has such ‘profound’ practical, human consequences, to mere moral or political “abstractions” (p.24). 

In my view this line of attack on the critics of privatization is intellectually unsustainable and suggests a naive pragmatism which does the main body of Harding's work less than justice. Surely, most of the important questions we ask about the organization of the penal system and the well-being of prisoners involve issues of moral principle? These abstract, sometimes political or ideological, questions cannot be impatiently brushed aside or relegated.

Furthermore,  those who ask such questions do not ask them without being aware of their practical consequences. Rather, it is that such practical consequences are not sufficient to justify this or that policy since these can, in their turn, undermine other important principles leading to other possibly even more undesirable practical outcomes, for example, a substantial increase in the overall prison population. The truth of the matter is that Harding suggests an easy reductionism from first principles which most of his protagonists, though I admit not all, do not display.

Given Harding's impatience with issues of principle and the complex way they translate into practice it is not surprising that the bulk of his text is about how private prisons are currently operating, how they are impacting on the public sector, and in particular, the mechanisms  which have been employed in the UK, Australasia and America to make private prison operators accountable. There is some very carefully gathered and astutely analysed material here - Harding is anything but an uncritical apologist for the private sector - and no one can doubt that the issue of accountability is of central importance, though again I am somewhat ambivalent about Harding's approach.

What I mean by this is that modernists have approached this issue as if all we need to do is simply identify a chain of command culminating in a unified, sovereign authority which is somehow accountable on our behalf. Our language is thus limited to concepts like Ministerial Responsibility and the Sovereignty of the People in Parliament, the language of nineteenth century political discourse, no less. But surely this is hardly adequate in the post modern world where power is dispersed through an archipelago of agencies, quangos and other semi-autonomous bodies? In my view modernist language has been an inadequate analytical tool for years now, it obfuscates rather than illuminates, and Harding rightly gives short shrift to those who attack the introduction of private prisons primarily on the basis that they undermine some formal notion of public accountability. (He skilfully uses a very apposite quotation by one of his old adversaries Professor David Brown to reinforce this criticism on p.31.)

        In other words, we do need to conceptualize accountability in other ways. Furthermore, while I have no objection to including notions of performance and efficiency to facilitate public/private sector comparisons as the New Right would wish, I remain a critic of those like Harding who embrace the gobbledygook of the new managerialism for this purpose, the apotheosis of this being Charles Logan's by now notorious comparison of three American public and private prisons employing 585 (or was it 855?) pairwise variables, an improbable exercise which I have drawn attention to in an earlier issue of this journal (Ryan 1997). In my view, most human organizations, especially prisons - or universities for that matter - are simply not amenable to such pseudo-scientific analysis. The fact that I, and others, also believe that concentrating on the debate around privatization along these lines deflects (or hides) the consideration of more important normative questions (p.23) is, of course, just the sort of self-indulgent “purist” posturing that so angers Harding. But this is where we came in. 

Should this review seem unsympathetic, it is to Harding's  credit that he upholds the academic tradition which we enjoy in free societies of open debate by arguing publicly with critics of privatization, an academic convention, or should I say, virtue, which is not shared by a number of other American and British academics who either support private prisons or who duck and weave around the issue as if it is of no great consequence.

n References: Nils Christie, Crime Control as Industry, Routledge, London, 1993; J Dilulio, No Escape, Basic Books, New York, 1991; M Ryan, Review of R D King and K McDermott, The State of Our Prisons, in British Journal of Criminology, 37/2:299-301; Ryan and Ward, Privatization and the Penal System, Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1989; R Sparks, Can Prisons be Legitimate?, in R King and M McGuire, eds, Prisons in Context, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994.

This review first appeared in the British Journal of Criminology, Volume 38, No.2 Spring 1998, published on behalf of the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency by the Oxford University Press.

 

2. Dr Tony Ward, De Montfort University, Leicester, England.

Let me start with a confession. I am, in Richard Harding's terms, a moral fundamentalist. Indeed. I am jointly responsible for what he calls (p. 24) the “reductio ad absurdum” of “moral or ideological fundamentalism” (Ryan and Ward 1989a:71). We fundamentalists have strong moral objections (which Harding no doubt shares) to the unjustified infliction of suffering on human beings and, consequently, to expansionist penal policies. Since the main purpose of prison privatization is to facilitate such expansion, we find the companies that engage in it objectionable for the same reason that cigarette manufacturers are objectionable: they make their profits from a harmful product. What makes us “ideological fundamentalists”, in Harding's eyes, is that we regard opposition to the profiteers as merely a subordinate aspect of the struggle against the product. We are not the kind of readers that Harding hopes to win over to his brand of moral pragmatism: his belief that as private prisons are here to stay, we should make the most of them as a means of promoting relatively humane penal methods. 

It will come as no surprise then, that on the whole I find Harding's case unpersuasive. He acknowledges, but does not refute, the argument that prison privatization is inherently expansionist. The nearest he comes to an answer is to point out that, so far, it is expansionist penal policies that have driven privatisation, and not the other way round. Though true, this ignores both the objection to profiting from an immoral activity, and the question of what influence the private sector could bring to bear were there ever a prospect of expansionist policies being reversed. 

Harding concentrates his fire on the main bad argument against private prisons: the claim that in some mysterious way prison officers paid directly out of public, funds directly represent the ‘community’ in a way that those employed by contractors paid by the state do not. The serious issue behind this muddled thinking is that of accountability, but as Harding rightly argues, there is no reason in principle why private prisons should be any less accountable than public ones. He points out that in practice the danger which confronts any mechanism of accountability is that of the “capture” of regulatory officials by the institutions they have to monitor. In these respects Harding's argument differs little from that of the arch‑fundamentalists Ryan and Ward (1989b:75‑77), but it is worked out in much greater detail and supported by a close examination of administrative practices in Britain, the USA, Australia and New Zealand. 

While there is much of interest in the detail of Harding's discussion, his refutation of a mistaken argument against private prisons does not amount to a positive case in their favour. The one thing that might persuade even a moral fundamentalist to think again would be convincing evidence that private prisons have an inherent tendency to reduce the “depth” of imprisonment (Downes, 1988), the intensity of deprivation and degradation which prisoners endure. Studies to date have not, however, shown that private prisons have any clear‑cut advantages over public ones, or vice versa. Harding attempts to break this stalemate by arguing that evaluation studies have been asking the wrong question: what we should ask is not whether private prisons are superior to public ones but whether their presence tends to improve the prison system as a whole. There may seem to be a ‘heads I win, tales you lose’ quality to this argument (if public prisons turn out to do better than private ones, that just proves that competition is good for them!), but Harding's point that private agencies may produce beneficial effects through ‘cross‑fertilization’ with public ones is valid.

For example, some of the charities working in the English juvenile justice system have certainly exerted a beneficial influence through their contacts with statutory agencies. But in the case of private prisons, changing the question doesn't make the answer any more conclusive. The main example of ‘cross‑fertilization’ is in the reduction of staff numbers which, as Harding concedes, could equally well be described as “industrial blackmail” (p. 138). The few remaining examples (e.g. certain improvements in reception procedures) are vulnerable to the same argument that Harding applies to the negative features of private prisons (e.g. the periods of crisis that several of them have gone through in their early phases): that these things happen in the public sector too.

Any innovation has to start somewhere, and a few examples of good practice that have started in private prisons do not show that private prisons are inherently more innovative than public ones. One word in Harding's concluding sentence gives away how inconclusive his evidence actually is: “The evidence is clear that private prisons could act as a catalyst for change across the whole prison system” (p. 165, my  emphasis).          I hope I have made it equally clear that this book could be worth reading 

n References: David Downes, Contrasts in Tolerance, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988; Mick Ryan and Tony Ward, Privatization and Penal Politics in R. Matthews  (ed.) Privatizing Criminal Justice, Sage, London, (1989a); Mick Ryan  and Tony Ward, Privatization and the Penal System, Open University Press, Milton Keynes, (1989b).

This review will appear in a forthcoming issue of Theoretical Criminology, published by Sage Publications, London.