We published the original Prison Island report in August 2018. We then released an updated second edition in January 2019.

Download the report here:

• Low Resolution – Prison Island 2021 (877kb)
• High Resolution – Prison Island 2021 (4.5mb)

Grassroots groups are welcome to request printed copies of the report for free by emailing contact@corporatewatch.org

Order a copy of the report

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Each copy includes the original Prison Island report published in 2018.

The post New Publication: Prison Island Winter 2021 Update appeared first on Corporate Watch.

The government has announced plans to build a new mega prison in Chorley, Lancashire. It will be huge, locking up more than 1715 people. It is part of a wave of prison expansion which has been reported on by Corporate Watch since 2017. See our Prison Island report for more info.

The site is owned by the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) and sits next to two existing prisons, HMP Garth and HMP Wymott. It is close to Chorley, Leyland, Preston, and Southport and only a train ride away from Manchester. It will no doubt imprison people from communities across the North West.

The government is currently running a consultation and intends to apply for planning permission later this year. It anticipates a planning decision by early 2022 and hopes to start construction in 2022 or 2023 before opening it in 2025. This timeline can’t be certain however – every single prison project the MOJ has begun has experienced massive delays due to organised resistance, tensions in the planning system, financing issues and sheer poor project management by the programme’s managers.

18,000 new prison places

The prison is part of the government’s ‘New Prisons Programme‘, formally branded the ‘Prison Estates Transformation Programme’ (PETP). It is spending £4 billion to create 18,000 additional prison places by the mid 2020s. Ten thousand of these places are due to be created in six new prisons and eight thousand will come from expanding existing prisons. Scroll down to see the status of these various mega-prison projects across England.

In documents about the project, Alex Chalk MP, Prisons and Probation Minister, said that prison numbers change over time, which is why it must have ‘robust plans in place to make sure we will always have enough places available’. However, it is clearly tied to the growth of other areas of the prison industrial complex, such as policing:

“The increasing numbers of police, in line with the Prime Minister’s commitment to recruit 20,000 additional officers, is also likely to contribute to a higher prison population, and we therefore believe that creating 18,000 additional prison places will help to mitigate pressure on prison places in England and Wales in the coming years.”

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

A local prison economy

The Ministry of Justice is skilled in its location choices. After massive community resistance in places like Port Talbot, it’s clear the MOJ are now choosing sites adjacent to existing prisons. These locations have existing local prison economies; communities are already used to their presence and many people are employed by them. Chorley is no exception with HMP Garth and HMP Wymott next door to the proposed prison site. Are these local prisons good examples of what we may expect from a new mega-prison next door?

Prisoner deaths, violence and suffering

HMP Garth is a category B mens prison holding over 800 people. Its latest inspection reported that illicit drugs were easily available and that one in four prisoners said they had developed a drug problem while at the prison. In the six months preceding the inspection, there had been 119 violent incidents, with force used by officers more than 143 times. There was a massive 450 incidents of self-harm in the same period and 1406 complaints.

Disturbingly 29 people lost their lives in HMP Garth between 1995 and 2019, including 10 suicides. The average age between them is just 51 years old. Gross neglect has been reported on a number of occasions. Andrew Jones took his own life after being illegally held in isolated custody without essential medication, access to showers, exercise, or telephone calls. An inquest showed the prison broke the rules at least 600 times. The jury found that “a failing by senior management to ensure understanding of, proper use of, and monitoring of” the segregation rules was the “greatest contribution” to Andrew’s death.

Another prisoner Imre Paul Thomas died aged 47 after taking lethal doses of the painkiller tramadol. A total of nine medical appointments were cancelled by the prison before he overdosed on drugs. Grant Alam died at 28 years old after being electrocuted in his cell. Tales of neglect continue – from missed opportunities for treatment, delays in calling ambulances and poorly trained officers with inadequate first aid or mental health training, to not regularly checking people who were suicidal. HMP Garth’s history is wrought with so many preventable deaths. Yet the Ministry of Justice want to build a prison double its size next door, and increase the demand on local healthcare services when people are already dying through institutional neglect and poor management.

HMP Wymott is also a category C men’s prison. It imprisons 1100 men, including a special wing for elderly prisoners. 68 people died in the prison between 1995 and 2019. The deaths include not only some of the many elderly prisoners suffering from cancer and chronic illness, but younger people taking their lives. Once again, many have died unnecessarily due to failing to access treatment they needed. Ryan McGrath died in 2016 aged 46 from a heart attack. The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman investigated and said the healthcare was not equal to that in the community. His ongoing complaints of chest pains were ignored.

The prison was hit with a serious outbreak of Covid-19 at the start of the pandemic. The wife of one HMP Wymott inmate said “None of the prison officers at Wymott have ever worn masks or PPE, which I found quite alarming.”

Creating the conditions to exploit prisoner labour

Many existing prisons do not have facilities for extensive workshops to exploit prisoner labour. This is one of the reasons that the government is building the mega-prisons. In the consultation notes about the prison, the MOJ explicitly talks about building workshops inside:

“Workshops will help prisoners to gain new skills and qualifications. This will help them to gain work after release. Having work can help stop people re-offending. The workshops will include both heavy and light industry. For instance, prisoners can learn how to weld or how to make clothes. The exact industries will be decided closer to the prison opening.”

At HMP Garth, prisoners refurbish power tools for the company Speedy Hire. They also assemble lighting and smoke detectors and have plastics and textile workshops. None of these skills offer external accreditation and are basically ways to make money for the companies involved. Most work is monotonous and offers no real job training for life after prison.

HMP Berwyn. Image from https://www.meee.global/what-we-do/prisons.php

Prisoners at HMP Berwyn, the most recent prison to open in Wales, are paid next to nothing to work for companies including DHL, Interserve, Ink2Work, Emerald Trading, Census Data, City Windmills and LMB Textiles. Many people could be earning full salaries on the outside to sustain their families, yet prisoners are paid between £7-£25 per week depending on their job role. HMP Berwyn was touted as a ‘prison for the future’ due to its design and approach. However, like all prisons, no amount of cosmetic change can reduce the trauma of being locked up, nor solve the complex social and economic problems of why people are criminalised in the first place. One former prisoner described the jail as ‘the worst he’s ever been in‘.

Mega prisons being built around the country

The state currently has a number of prison construction projects happening around the country:

• Wellingborough: HMP Five Wells in Wellingborough is at the most advanced stage of construction and is due to open in early 2022. It will be run for-profit by G4S who have a ten-year contract until 2032.

• Leicestershire: HMP Glen Parva is still under construction. The prison lies on the outskirts of Leicester. It is due to open in 2023.

• East Yorkshire: A new mega prison next to HMP Full Sutton is in the final planning stages. It received outline planning permission but are still processing ‘reserved matters’ through the planning system.

• Buckinghamshire: The MOJ has announced plans to build a prison on land next to HMP Grendon and HMP Springhill in Buckinghamshire. The announcement came just before Christmas to reduce the likelihood of objection. The prison would lock up 1,440 people and be a category C prison like the new one announced for Chorley.

• One final location is due to be announced, most likely in the South of England.

Click here to see an overview of the companies building the prisons.

Constructing Wellingborough Prison. Picture from: https://www.kier.co.uk/media/5258/wellingborough-prison-1.jpg

Resisting the new prison

Local villagers are outraged and residents in Ulnes Walton are mobilising to fight the government after the proposal was announced.

The Parish Council will be opposing the plan, citing increased traffic, loss of greenfield land, construction noise and the impact on wildlife amongst its objections. Councillor Nicola Watson says: “We don’t want another prison here. The impact it will have on residents will be massive.”

National campaign group Community Action on Prison Expansion is also encouraging people to object to the plans. They say that since the George Floyd Uprising in 2020, interest in the campaign has grown massively, as many people recognise the racism and oppression that the prison system is founded on and seek alternatives to prison and policing. They said:

“We are trying to shrink the state’s capacity to repress. There is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fight these prison expansion projects, and that time is now.”

People can object to the prison by completing this form: https://consult.justice.gov.uk/digital-communications/proposed-new-prison-in-chorley/

People are also encouraged to attend the live webinar sessions with the MOJ and make their views heard. You can also send your views via letter to PO Box 347, Manchester, M21 3ES. The deadline for objections is the 19^th July.

Learn more about prison expansion in our report, Prison Island.

The post Chorley mega-prison plans announced as part of plan for 18,000 new prison places appeared first on Corporate Watch.

The programme was the topic of Corporate Watch’s Prison Island report about prison expansion in England, Wales and Scotland published in 2018. Read our take on the recent announcement and the status of prison projects so far here.

Opposition to prisons is often discussed in a conceptual way – organisers and communities contest their validity, explore alternatives and talk about abolition.

However, they are also very much real physical constructions, with companies profiting from their creation. Architects and engineers pore over designs of cells and wings, businesses create locks, alarm systems and fences. The ‘prison industrial complex’, is a term used to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems. It includes companies like G4S that win contracts to run prisons for profit, but also those profiting from continuous construction.

So, who is building the mega-prisons?

Constructing Wellingborough Prison. Picture from: https://www.kier.co.uk/media/5258/wellingborough-prison-1.jpg

Kier

Kier is a multinational construction company and the principal contractor behind the new mega-prison in Wellingborough, recently called HMP Five Wells. Nearly complete, the prison is set to create cells to imprison more than 1600 people.

Corporate Watch previously published a detailed profile about Kier that covered issues such as worker blacklisting, animal laboratory construction, and their role in building the controversial high-speed railway, HS2.

Kier were awarded £1.4 billion of HS2 projects in 2017 and are part of a group of companies managing the mega-project, which has faced resistance for over a decade. There are decentralised and autonomous camps across the HS2 route.

Lendlease

Lendlease is a global property developer and construction company that are the main contractors building the mega-prison HMP Glen Parva in Leicestershire.

They were awarded a contract after the original winner, Interserve, went under. The cost of building the prison jumped from £170 million to £286 million. After years of delays, Lendlease started building in September 2020.

Corporate Watch profiled LendLease in 2017 highlighting previous prison builds in Australia and the UK, gentrification, worker blacklisting and even Donald Trump.

Bison Precast and Forterra

Bison Precast is manufacturing more than 4900 components for Wellingborough mega-prison. Their scope includes bespoke precast walls, hollowcore flooring, columns, stairs and landings. The order also includes insulated brick-faced sandwich panels to the entry building façade.i

Bison Precast have three factories in the Midlands: Swadlincote and Somercotes, Derbyshire and Hoveringham, Nottingham. A worker was crushed to death at their factory site in Swadlincote after health and safety failings. The Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on the company has resulted in plans to mothball the factory site, leading to 225 job losses.

Tweet from: https://twitter.com/forterrauk?lang=en

Bison are seasoned prison builders, having worked with Kier to build HMP Oakwood, a mega-prison that opened in 2012. It regularly locks up over 2000 people and is run for-profit by G4S. It has been named an increasingly violent prison with many assaults, deaths and high rates of self-harm.

Bison Precast is owned by the Forterra Group, one of the largest manufacturers of building products in the UK. Forterra employ 1800 people and have 18 manufacturing sites. They are trying to build the largest brick factory in Europe at Desford in Leicestershire. You can find a list of Forterra’s shareholders here.

Workers at Forterra’s Newbury site previously went on strike over wages. One worker and GMB member said “It really sticks in our members’ throats when they are being offered low pay rises, only to see directors pick up higher and higher bonuses.”

In 2017, a worker lost his arm and was paralysed from the waist down due to Forterra failing to maintain its machines properly. The company was fined £200,000.

Banagher Precast Concrete

Banagher Precast Concrete is “very proud” to be supplying 3,600 precast cell wall units and heated floor slabs to Kier for Wellingborough prison.

From: https://twitter.com/banagherprecast?lang=en

The company currently operate a 50 acre site with over 70 gantry cranes. With a total of 5 mixers, Banagher has the capacity to produce over 150,000 m³ of concrete per year. They are an Irish company that has expanded into the UK. They have offices in Banagher, Ireland and Norfolk and employ over 270 people.

The also having a trading arm called Banagher Slats that profits from the dairy industry in Ireland by manufacturing slats for animal farm sheds.

FP McCann

FP McCann are the largest precast concrete manufacturer in the UK. They are supplying ground beams, internal cross walls, corridor walls, cell slabs and sandwich panels for HMP Five Wells mega-prison. They write: “Our early involvement in the supply chain ensured that our specialist skills and knowledge were embedded within the project.”

They have twelve manufacturing facilities across the UK, as well as seven quarries and a sandpit in in Ireland. They have depots in Northumberland, Cheshire, Warwickshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Gloucestershire and Glasgow.

A quarry worker who had worked for FP McCann for 19 years was killed in a dumper truck accident. The HSE inspector said the vehicle had “not been maintained in a safe condition and was not fit for use in a hazardous environment”. FP McCann and two other building firms were also fined £36 million for taking part in an illegal price-fixing cartel.

Campaign group, Save our Fens, have been resisting FP McCann’s plans to expand a concrete manufacturing site in Littleport, Ely, Cambridgeshire since 2013. They fear the health risks of increased silica dust and echo the Environment Agency who consider that the proposed development may pose an unacceptable risk of causing detrimental impact to the surface water quality, amongst other environmental concerns.

Image from: https://www.saveourfens.co.uk/

PCE

Kier has appointed PCE Ltd as Wellingborough’s superstructure and façade delivery partner. They will deliver a precast concrete DfMA (Design for Manufacture and Assembly) solution for substructure, superstructure and facade for the seven four-storey Houseblocks, Care And Separation Unit (CASU) and Entry and Visits building.

PCE have pocketed millions in the ‘custodial sector’ e.g. building prisons and police stations. They were part of building North Wales Police Eastern Command Centre, that includes 32 police cells, as well as Blackpool Police Headquarters. They also built Basingstoke Police Centre and were part of building HMP Oakwood.

Photo by Ethan Wilkinson on Unsplash

Unlike many companies, PCE continued to work through the pandemic, happy to put their workers at risk.

Curtins

Curtins has been employed as the structural engineer to design the seven house blocks, the CASU unit and the entrance building at Wellingborough prison. In addition to this they also worked for PCE to produce all the precast concrete fabrication drawings.

Eleonora Rocci is their project manager at Wellingborough, meanwhile Louise Rice is the design engineer for the project.

The Samaritans is PCE’s dedicated charity in 2020. This is ironic given the overwhelming number of people that kill themselves in British prisons. 334 people took their own life inside in 2018-19, many people fear that rate will be higher due to the increasing amounts of bang-up during the pandemic.

Curtins are also experienced in the custodial sector. Previous projects include HMP Oakwood and HMP Jurby, a prison on the Isle of Man where a man died this March. They have also built courts in Caernarfon and Stockport.

Mitchellson

Mitchellson Formwork and Civil Engineering ltd is a structural engineering firm making £8 million from Wellingborough prison. They are carrying out the substructure works on the site which includes the groundbeams and pile caps, underslab drainage, external drainage, cross site services and hard landscaping.

The company was fined £400,000 after a carpenter plunged to his death when a temporary platform collapsed during a £25m project. Two other workers were also seriously injured. The Health and Safety Executive ruled that there was no design for the unsafe temporary platform and no risk assessment.

Assa Abloy

The Assa Abloy Group is a multinational company that designs and makes locks, doors and security systems. They are a major supplier of custodial products to prison authorities both nationally and globally, used in prisons, immigration and detention centres, courts and other ‘correctional’ facilities. Their products include door and cell locks, holding room screens, prison gates, interview chairs, cell benches and handcuffs.

Image shows a detailed design for a prison cell door by Assa Abloy: https://www.assaabloyopeningsolutions.co.uk/en/assa-abloy-product-catalogue/high-security–safety-/sectors/custodial/9d008—prison-cell-door/

They own a number of brands, such as Yale and HID. Assa Abloy sold their Israeli subsidiary, Mul-T-Lock, after pressure from the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement in 2009.

From: https://www.assaabloy.com/en/com/about-us/strategy/brands/

British Gypsum

British Gypsum make ‘interior lining systems’ such as plaster, plasterboard and ceiling solutions. The company made £160k working as a contractor to build HMP Berwyn in Wrexham. This is the most recently built mega-prison which repeatedly makes the headlines for increasing violence. Over a thousand prisoners have been sharing cells throughout the pandemic. More than 60 prison staff and prisoners had contracted the virus between March and June 2020.

Image from: https://www.leaderlive.co.uk/news/18460731.dozens-coronavirus-cases-confirmed-hmp-berwyn-wrexham-figures-show/

They are part of the Saint-Gobain group, the french multinational linked to environmental health scandals across the United States. Celotex, another arm of Saint-Gobain, provided insulation for Grenfell Tower where 72 people lost their lives in 2017.

Crown House Technologies

Crown House Technologies is an engineering firm providing the mechanical works at Wellingborough Prison. They are owned by Laing O’Rourke and were one of eight construction firms subject to scrutiny over their blacklisting practices. In 2013 a worker died, and six others were injured after a preventable explosion of gas cylinders on one of their construction projects.

Crown House Technologies are no strangers to prison construction. They were actively involved in building HMP Shotts in Scotland and HMP Berwyn in Wales.

William Haley Engineering

William Haley Engineering is the programme’s steelwork fabricators. They are a family owned business based in Somerset. The company also helped to build mega-prison HMP Berwyn.

They are part of a company group called The Haley Group that includes FLI Structures and George Jackson Ltd.

Kingspan

Kingspan is a large building materials company based in Ireland that trades in over 70 countries. The specifics of their contract with the prison builds is unclear beyond ‘component assembly’, however, their major product is insulation.

Controversy has hit the company during the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, where it emerged that Philip Health, a technical manager with the insulation boards division until December 2009, said a builder who questioned the safety of the company’s Kooltherm K15 product should “go f**k themselves”.

Quantities of Kingspan’s K15 were used on Grenfell Tower, although much of the insulation on the building was made by Celotex (part of Saint Gobain who own British Gypsum listed above).

Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire. Kingspan and their subsidaries’ insulation made up much of the building where 72 people lost their lives

WMS Underfloor Heating

WMS Underfloor Heating is providing 2,110 underfloor heating mats for Wellingborough prison. The Cooper family-run company is based in Hertfordshire and supplies underfloor heating to a number of construction projects, including the headquarters for Greater Manchester police.

Resisting Prison Construction

Through resisting prison expansion, connections can be made between the violence of the state and the power of corporations, who both build prisons and exploit prisoners within them. By questioning the fundamental feature in society that is the prison system, more radical visions of society can be nurtured in our communities. Arguments for prison can be dismantled and solidarity extended beyond bars. There is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fight these prison expansion projects, and that time is now.

• To get involved in campaigns against prison expansion contact Community Action on Prison Expansion – https://cape-campaign.org/
• To learn more about prison expansion, download Corporate Watch’s Prison Island Report – https://corporatewatch.org/prisonisland/

The post Who is building the mega-prisons? appeared first on Corporate Watch.

We will be giving a short overview and timeline of the Prison Estates Transformation Programme – the Government’s programme to create 10,000 new prison places through a series of new mega-prisons across England. Find all our prison-related research here.

You can also download a copy of our Prison Island report here: https://corporatewatch.org/product/prison-island/

About this Event

When: Wednesday 21st October 2020 7pm – 8.30pm

Register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-to-stop-a-mega-prison-tickets-123519539267

Hear about campaigns against prisons, and find out how to get involved

The Ministry of Justice is building 10,000 new cages in the form of “mega-prisons”. The government is also planning to construct “women’s centres” (aka more prisons), “secure schools” (prisons for children, as young as twelve years old) and more immigration detention centres.

Politicians from across the spectrum continue to show off their new approaches to being “tough on crime:” through increasing police numbers, police powers and prison sentences – none of it reducing crime or violence, and instead filling up prisons, and feeding the ever growing prison industrial complex.

Prisons don’t solve social problems. They only reproduce neglect, abuse and suffering.

Covid-19 continues to cause a global recession, plunging people into deeper poverty. And the government is responding by fast-tracking new prison places to control rather than support those impacted, and gain ever greater control over populations marginalised by race, class and disability. Billions in public money is being spent on this project of misery, and private companies stand to make a huge profit.

Whilst this is bleak, together we can stop it. Communities have already halted mega-prison development in Port Talbot and Wigan, and stopped an immigration removal centre being built near Heathrow. Strong efforts continue to resist prison construction in East Yorkshire and for the total closure of the infamous Morton Hall.

Register to hear from people who have been involved in these successful and ongoing campaigns, learn about how such expansion has been challenged and how we can continue to fight against the rise of mass incarceration.

Accessibility information:
• The event will have BSL interpretation from start to finish
• We will finish promptly at 20.30 and there will be a break
• The event will be hosted on Zoom as a webinar
• Please get in touch if you have any other access requirements: info@cape-campaign.org

The post Event: How to Stop a Mega-Prison appeared first on Corporate Watch.

Summary

• One new prison is planned for the North-West of England

• Two new prisons are planned in the South-East of England

• The announcement includes the already-in-process mega-prison at the site next to HMP Full Sutton in East Yorkshire.

• Two previously announced prisons are also in the midst of construction in Wellingborough and Leicestershire.

• If all the prisons are successfully built, a total of 13,360 new prison places will have been created, massively expanding the prison system.

• The government has been boasting about its plans to create 10,000 new prison places since 2016, however, has only created 206 new places in the last four years.

• Resistance to prison expansion and government bureaucracy have significantly delayed the programme.

The failure of the Prison Estates Transformation Programme (PETP) so far

The state first announced its plans to create 10,000 new prison places since 2016. The original objectives of the PETP were to:

• Build five new prisons by 2019-20 – FAIL

• Build an additional four new prisons by 2020-2021 – FAIL

• Build two new residential blocks in 2017-18 – one block was constructed at HMP Stocken in the East Midlands

In fact only 206 places were created in the last four years. So why has the government failed so badly to meet its targets?

A National Audit Office investigation into the programme reported that construction timelines were impacted by delays in agreeing and receiving funding to build new prisons. This includes the failure to successfully close and sell current prison sites planned for redevelopment.

In addition to the internal financing crises, community resistance effectively halted the proposed mega prison for Port Talbot in North Wales. Likewise, in Wigan, residents stalled the process by raising environmental health concerns.

In August 2019 Boris Johnson reaffirmed the state’s commitment to building the new prisons and the treasury anounced it would provide the Ministry of Justice with up to £2.5bn of funding as part of a ‘plan to crackdown on violent crime’.

Now the programme is being pushed through faster as part of a spending package to ‘boost the economy’ following the impact of the coronavirus. A new government taskforce has been created called ‘Project Speed’ led by the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak to make the construction happen faster.

The Ministry of Justice’s announcement on twitter said:

Source: https://twitter.com/MoJGovUK?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

A racist economy built on cages

The government have been criticised for using caceral punishment as a means of “boosting the nation’s financial well-being”. Waves of prison construction and prison privatisation since the early 1990s have created an economy built on cages, with England, Wales and Scotland having the highest rates of imprisonment in Western Europe.

According to the National Audit Office, in 2018-19, Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Services (HMPPS) spent around £1.69 billion to operate prisons and £184 million on capital spending, comprising of £113 million on maintenance and £71 million on constructing prisons and reorganising the estate.

Despite the phenomenal amounts of money involved, prison conditions continue to deteriorate. As of April 2019, there were 63,200 outstanding maintenance jobs. HMPPS estimated in November 2019 that it could cost £916 million to address its major works backlog.

Image from Fight Toxic Prisons

Meanwhile, the harm experienced by people behind bars continues to escalate. Between 2015 and 2018, there were 378 self-inflicted deaths, and a 73% increase in self-harm incidents as well as a 63% increase in prisoner-on-prisoner assaults. Self-harm rates are now the highest on record.

As documented in our Prison Island report, prison sentences are extremely racialised, classed and gendered. In December 2018, it was recorded that over a quarter of people in prison are people of colour. Research has shown the odds of imprisonment for indictable offence at the Crown Court are 53%, 55%, and 81% higher, respectively, for Black people, Asian people, and those of other ethnic groups, even when factoring in higher not-guilty plea rates.

Where will the new prisons be?

On Sunday 28^th June 2020, the British Government announced plans to build four new prisons. This includes a new mega-prison next to the existing HMP Full Sutton in East Yorkshire. This new category A prison received planning permission in September 2019 despite thousands of objections.

They say work is underway to identify locations for the additional prisons in the North-West and South-East of England.

HMP Full Sutton

Locations being considered could include:

• Greater Manchester: In March 2016, it was announced that the Greater Manchester Combined Authority had been looking for a location for a new prison with the Ministry of Justice (MOJ). A year later came an announcement that HMP Hindley in Wigan would be redeveloped to lock up as many as 1300 people. A strong local campaign, Pies not Prisons, successfully organised against the prison, highlighting issues such as asbestos risks from redevelopment and local austerity in the region. In July 2017, the plans were effectively abandoned with the government stating internal delays as the cause.

• Other potential North-West Locations: A 2017 FOI request revealed a number of other north-west councils had submitted prison location options. These included Chester West and Chester Council in Cheshire and Lancaster City Council, Blackburn with Darwen and Rossendale Borough Councils in Lancashire.

• Rochester, Kent – In March 2017, the government announced plans to redevelop HMP Rochester in Kent into a mega prison. However, no planning application was submitted and in July 2017 further delays were announced, saying that the redevelopment might not even go ahead. The government was unable to close the existing prison at the site due to ‘overcapacity’.

• A Third Location in the South-East TBC – The announcement that two new prisons will be built in the South-East makes this prison location more unpredictable. It was confirmed in response to an FOI request in 2017 that Braintree Council in Essex had put forward a proposal to redevelop the Wethersfield Ministry of Defence site. Swale and Tunbridge Wells Borough Councils in Kent were also invited to share potential sites with the MOJ in 2017. In 2013, a new mega-prison was also on the cards to replace HMP Feltham Young Offenders Institute in West London.

Where are prisons currently being built?

Three new mega-prisons are at different stages of the construction process.

The new prison next to HMP Full Sutton in East Yorkshire

On the 12^th September 2019, plans for a mega-prison next to HMP Full Sutton in East Yorkshire were approved despite 2,700 objections. The prison will have the capacity to imprison 1,440 people.

The plans have been ‘super-sized’ for an additional 423 prisoners, since the first planning application was submitted in 2017. The prison is due to open in 2024. Mace is the British multinational company overseeing delivery of the prison build. Corporate Watch created an extensive profile of the company in 2018, highlighting the deadly working conditions people are exposed to on MACE’s projects in the Middle East as well as its role in the construction of the habitat-destroying HS2 High Speed Railway and developments for Heathrow Airport.

Demonstration against the prison in Full Sutton. Image source https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/crime/plans-yorkshire-mega-jail-approved-despite-fears-village-will-become-prison-fortress-1750131

HMP Wellingborough in Northamptonshire

Construction started at HMP Wellingborough in September 2019, two years after it originally received planning permission. The new prison will lock up to 1680 people at a time and is being built by Kier, another company profiled by Corporate Watch. In August 2019 construction was stopped for six hours by anti-prison campaigners who occupied the site.

Community Action on Prison Expansion said that:

“The construction of a new mega prison will not serve the needs of the Wellingborough community. On the contrary, the project is designed to pad the pockets of private companies like Kier which is contracted to manage construction. And by building 1,600 new spaces to incarcerate people, we know this project will disproportionately harm working-class, BME and disabled people in our already failing prison system.”

Image from Community Action on Prison Expansion

HMP Glen Parva in Leicestershire

The new mega-prison in Leicestershire will also incarcerate over 1,600 people. Despite securing planning permission in 2017, construction work only began in May 2020. The process was slowed by the government scrapping Interserve as a project partner and then starting a rebidding process which was won by LendLease. Read an overview of Lendlease’s controversial construction projects here.

Construction at both prisons has continued throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

New Children’s Prison

The government is also opening a ‘Secure School’ in Kent; a prison where children between the ages of 12-17 are locked up. It will be run by evangelical Christians, Oasis, and imprison more than 70 children as part of a wave of new children’s prisons that Corporate Watch reported on last year. Read a full profile on Oasis here.

The Corporations Involved

The government stated that at least one prison will be operated by the public sector. This means the others will most likely be run by private companies.

In December 2019, the state created the Prison Operator Services Framework. Six companies were shortlisted in the Framework to compete for the contract to operate the new prisons. These companies are:

• G4S Care and Justice Services (UK) Limited

• Interserve Investments Limited

• Mitie Care and Custody Limited

• MTC Works Limited

• Serco Limited

• Sodexo Limited

Every one of these companies is mired in controversy from their operations around the world. When the government awards the contract to run HMP Wellingborough later this week, Corporate Watch will produce a profile of the winner detailing it’s track record and involvement in the global prison industrial complex.

Companies will also bid for facilities management contracts for the new prisons. The privatisation of prison facilities management has resulted in serious problems. The collapse of Carillion revealed how tasks such as cleaning and building repair had been neglected, worsening conditions for prisoners. The government were forced to establish their own company, Gov Facilities Services Limited, to pick up the pieces.

The time for resistance is now

The Black Lives Matter movement has shone a spotlight on the injustice of the world’s police and prisons. Once considered radical demands, calls to defund the police and abolish prisons have reached mainstream debate. The desire to dismantle the system has never been so prominent and so powerful.

Image from https://cape-campaign.org/halt-prison-building-now-defund-the-prison-estates-transformation-program/

Jasmin Ahmed from Community Action on Prison Expansion, a network of local groups that has been resisting prison expansion since 2014 shares that:

“The pandemic has further exposed institutional racism across the board, from the disproportionate impact of the virus on Black and Brown communities including frontline workers, to the disproportionate policing of lockdown impacting Black and Brown youth, to the racialised impact we’re also seeing in education and housing as a result of the crisis.

Spending more of our money on building prisons to lock us away – clearly to be disposed of in the case of a public health crisis – is a disturbing and dangerous process of further negligence of the safety and health of the public, particularly minoritised groups.

To reduce the number of people being victimised by the criminal justice system, and to improve our collective safety and health, we need a commitment to building communities, not cages, starting with housing, healthcare, accessible education, youth services, and community-led domestic and sexual violence support.”

For more information about prison expansion in the UK, read Corporate Watch’s Prison Island report here: https://corporatewatch.org/prisonisland/

To get involved in resistance to prison expansion contact CAPE: https://cape-campaign.org

CAPE are asking people to sign the petition to halt and defund the expansion program here: https://cape-campaign.org/halt-prison-building-now-defund-the-prison-estates-transformation-program/

The post Government announces plans to build four more mega-prisons appeared first on Corporate Watch.

Prisoner releases around the world

In recent days, countries around the world have been rapidly releasing people from prison to ease overcrowding, prevent deaths and mitigate the effects of the coronavirus on prisoner populations.

85,000 prisoners have been released in Iran to confront the outbreak. 30,000 are being released in Indonesia and 11,000 people are due to be released in Colombia. More than 100,000 are set to be released in Turkey.

A prison in Palangkaraya, Central Kalimantan, on Wednesday. (Antara Photo/Makna Zaezar)

In South Asia, 10,000 people have been released in Afghanistan where more than 80 prisoners have tested positive for COVID-19. Several states in India have begun releasing prisoners, including 11,000 in Utter Pradesh and Maharashtra. 3,000 people are due for release in Bangladesh. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s Supreme Court halted the release of more than 20,000 prisoners which local authorities had been set to send home.

The president of Algeria pardoned over 5,000 prisoners. 4,000 prisoners have been released in Ethiopia and 1,400 in Tunisia. Egypt released a limited number of political prisoners, while thousands remain behind bars. 1,486 detainees were released in Bahrain and 470 people were freed from detention centres in Yemen.

In Europe, 600 prisoners that are elderly or have chronic health issues have been released in Albania. 1,000 prisoners are also set to be released in northern Germany, with more states in the country expected to follow suit. 600 people have been released so far in Ireland. Less than 200 people will be released in Northern Ireland and only 50 people in Cyprus. 200 were also released prematurely in Azerbaijan. Releases from prisons in Poland are in the pipeline with legislative changes that could allow 20,000 people to be released under electronic supervision.

Public Health Disaster in the United States

In the United States, 900 people were released from Cuyahoga County Jail in Cleveland, Ohio; a jail plagued with deaths even before the virus. 1,100 ‘low level parole violators’ are set to be released from New York jails with the state being one of the worst hit by the virus. One Senior Doctor at Rikers Island Prison in New York, said the jail is a ‘public health disaster unfolding before our eyes’.

California also plans to release 3,500 people in jail but has not done so yet. This is a small percentage of the 122,000 people locked up in the state. A person in jail in Los Angeles described the situation as “slow torture” as they fear the spread of COVID-19 and don’t even have basic resources such as soap or toilet paper.

In Texas, Governor Greg Abbot blocked the release of prisoners that could not pay bail, meaning those without the financial means are left in prisons to face the pandemic. Estimates from US professionals predict that 100,000 people could die in US prisons during the pandemic.

Photo by @melhuman from Bergen County Jail in the US. Text reads ‘Free us’ in the prison window

Britain’s commitment to keeping people banged up

While thousands get released worldwide, England and Wales is a stark contrast. After public pressure, it is temporarily releasing 35 pregnant women. However, it’s 83,000 prison population will remain behind bars while it looks for new prisons.

It was reported in the Express that Justice Secretary Robert Buckland is considering plans to convert immigration detention centres and other buildings into prisons so that prisoners can follow social distancing guidelines rather than be released.

In the UK, 55 prisoners have tested positive across 21 prisons and three prisoners have already died. Epidemiologists from the University College London warn that 800 people could die in prison in England and Wales without urgent action taken.

Prison Labour exploited for the pandemic

States are now rapidly exploiting their captive labour forces to mobilise production for the pandemic.

In Turkey, prisoners have been producing 1.5million masks every month. Prisoners in Hyperbad, India are producing masks and sanitiser, while female prisoners in Hong Kong are reportedly working night shifts to manufacture masks. The Czech Prison Service announced prisoners will be making face masks too, while prisoners in Bosnia and Herzegovina are working 16 hour days to produce masks for market.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that prison labor will produce 100,000 gallons of hand sanitizer that will ‘smell like flowers’ while prisoners earn on average 65 cents an hour in the state. At Rikers Island, prisoners have been offered six dollars per hour and personal protective equipment to dig mass graves in preparation for the pandemic.

Workers at a surgical mask manufacturing unit in Hyderabad. | Vinay Madapu

Prisoner Riots and Resistance

Prison riots have been triggered all over the world due to coronavirus fears and the living conditions most prisoners are subjected to.

23 prisoners lost their lives in a riot in Bogota, Colombia in a protest against unsanitary conditions. Migrants set fire to mattresses in a Detention Centre in Tabasco, Mexico, leaving one man dead. 84 prisoners escaped in Venezuela in a mass prison break. 26 prisoners were also injured in riots in Chile.

Riots broke out in three prisons in Iran, with allegations that guards had opened fire wounding prisoners. 74 prisoners escaped in a mass prison break and 50 remain on the run.

In early March, riots broke out across prisons in Italy. In one riot, twelve prisoners died and 16 people escaped. Another six died in a riot in Northern Italy in the same wave of rebellion, as prisoners protested conditions and being trapped inside during the pandemic.

Revolt in Italy

Ten prisoners rioted in HMP Addiewell in Scotland. Three prisoners lost their lives in riots in Romania and two died in Jordan. Riots erupted in Lebanon with prisoners demanding release, and many using COVID-19 as a way to fight for longstanding demands for amnesty. Several people escaped prison in Thailand, after dozens of prisoners broke furniture and smashed windows. Nine prisoners escaped from a women’s prison in South Dakota after someone there tested positive for COVID-19.

One person died in India as police opened fire during a prison riot at Bengal’s biggest prison that locks up 2,500 people together. Two prisoners were also killed in a riot in Colombo, Sri Lanka, protesting conditions and the stopping of visits.

Riots have also been reported in Nigeria, Argentina and Sudan.

Prisoners are starting lawsuits all over the world. 180 detainees launched a hunger strike in Pennsylvania and 30 prisoners are on strike in Luxembourg.

These are only the prisoner acts of resistance that have made the news. Many more go undocumented.

Outside organising and agitation

Prisoner solidarity networks all over the world are agitating for the release of prisoners to prevent them dying in prison.

Community Action on Prison Expansion in the UK have been organising an online week of action with action alerts released each day – from emailing Prison Governors to lobbying the Ministry of Justice. There have also been calls to release children from youth prisons. Even the Prison Governors Association have been lobbying the state to release people.

‘Phone Zaps’ are one of the main forms of action, as call-outs go to people worldwide to phone certain institutions on different days to assert pressure and prisoner demands. One example is the campaign from Fight Toxic Prisons to release people in Alabama where prisoners are testing positive for COVID-19. Groups include ‘call scripts’ so people know what to say when calling.

Anarchist radio projects, including the Final Straw Radio and Kite Line are doing their best to amplify prisoner voices during the pandemic.

Groups are also fundraising for prisoner phone credit, as well as bail funds. An Emergency Release Fund that was originally created to raise bail money for trans prisoners is now being used for anyone who qualifies for cash bail in New York. The National Bail Fund Network serves a similar purpose for people in other parts of the United States.

Image from https://www.instagram.com/freethemall2020/

In an interview with It’s Going Down, an organiser from Oakland Incarcerated Workers Organising Committee spoke about strategy at this time:

“Even though the strains, quarantines and pace of the crisis has dictated mainly hyper local and improvised responses from abolitionist groups, their responses have been fairly consistent tactically and in content across the country: maintaining connection with the inside both to support them and to get accurate reportage out; doing material jail support for releases as they get out and pressuring agencies and politicians to do three things:

1. release people
2. increase care and precautions inside and
3. choke the flow of people into these facilities.

And the pressure tactics possible in this moment are phone zaps, media work, demand letters, and now pickets/noise demos with cars!”

It is clear we are living in unprecedented times, with many people feeling what it’s like to have restricted freedom of movement for perhaps the first time in their life. For millions of people worldwide, ‘lockdown’ is not new. For prisoners in the UK, they face even more time in absolute isolation as staff numbers reduce and measures are put in place to keep people separated. Campaigners fear incidences of self harm and suicide will increase.

One prisoner who spoke to Corporate Watch directly said:

“Everyone is locked in constantly. Self harming is getting worse. One girl threatened to take her life. People are going off their heads. Loosing tempers. Nobody is sleeping because everyone is worried about their families. People are running out of phone credit and not knowing what is going on with their family who are sick. Just when I thought prison couldn’t get any worse, it did.”

Prisoners, prisoner families and insiders are welcome to call London Anarchist Black Cross’s COVID-19 line to share updates on what is happening inside.

Campaigners are fighting hard and connecting the virus to long fought battles with the prison system. Gary Solomons from Community Action on Prison Expansion spoke powerfully that:

“The coronavirus pandemic has thrown the inhumane nature of the prison system into sharp relief and makes prison abolition ever more urgent. People inside are made more vulnerable to the virus because they are in prison where medical negligence and abuse have been every day occurrences, long before this crisis hit. Fear that loved ones will die in prison isn’t new either: deaths in prison, every one of them state murder, happen every day and if the British state do not release all prisoners urgently this pandemic will see many, many more.

Prisons can never be safe or humane. We reject suggestions that only those deemed ‘low risk’ should be released: an inherently racialised assessment that buys into the logic of the prison industrial complex. It’s time to free them all.”

Learn more

• Follow Free them All 2020 on instagram and twitter and COVID-19 Prisoner Solidarity on instagram for regular prison news
• Read Prison Island – Corporate Watch’s report on prison expansion in England, Wales and Scotland for an overview of the British prison system
• Get in touch with Community Action on Prison Expansion to help with the campaign

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The post #CoronaCapitalism: Riots, resistance and releases – the Coronavirus and the prison industrial complex appeared first on Corporate Watch.

The government is rebranding its notorious Medway youth prison as a “secure school”. Christian charity Oasis has been brought in to run it, under the new name “Oasis Restore”. They give the place a better look than controversial previous managers G4S.

But rebranded or not, it’s still a prison, a place where children are locked up. That makes Oasis the jailers and leaves them a long way from their stated mission to “build inclusive communities all over the world”.

Campaign groups, charities and youth organisations have all condemned the plans. Jasmine Ahmed from Community Action on Prison Expansion told Corporate Watch they were calling on members of Christian communities to write to the directors of Oasis to “ask them to reject their decision based on the harm and suffering it will cause to children who will find themselves behind the prison walls for many years to come”.

So who are Oasis? In this profile we look at their operations, their leaders and their history. Before the prison, their most high profile venture in the UK was their network of academy schools. Figures from one academy shows Oasis has strayed from their values of inclusion before, by excluding high numbers of children from school.

But before we dive into that, let’s put Oasis’ new venture into context, and look at the brutal reality of Medway and the rest of the UK’s youth prisons.

Read more: Corporate Watch reported last year on the Government’s Secure Schoolⁱ project and their plans for a new wave of children’s prisons. This followed an investigation into who profits from youth prisons across the UKⁱⁱ.

Medway: a legacy of abuse and violence

Under the government’s plans the current Medway youth prison in Kent, now called a Secure Training Centre, is scheduled to close on 31 March 2020.ⁱⁱⁱ It will then be refurbished and re-opened in 2021 as the “Oasis Restore” secure school, under the management of Oasis. It will imprison up to 70 children aged between 12 and 17.^iv

For all the name changes, government  documentation about the project suggests changes to the prison – such as painting, re-carpeting, updated CCTV and the replacement of furniture such as beds – will not be substantial^v. The architecture of the site, the buildings and layout, will remain largely unchanged, while the installation of “secure windows that have integrated ligature free ventilation” is a chilling reminder that children have regularly attempted suicide there.

Oasis will have the power to set a curriculum and decide on recruitment, training and staff pay. The new prison will be inspected twice a year by social care bodies and Ofsted will then inspect the place in its third year. As we shall see, the current inspection regime has not stopped systemic abuse against children in other youth prisons.

And the abuse has been brutal. As reported previously by Corporate Watch, the Medway prison was originally managed by outsourcing and security profiteer G4S.^vi It was then taken back into state control after undercover filming by BBC Panorama exposed shocking abuse by staff towards the children^vii. This included staff members punching a child in the ribs, slapping another child in the face and using a fork to stab a child in the leg, and yet another who made a child cry uncontrollably, among other cruelties.^viii

Conditions have not improved since being in state control. The most recent inspection report published in October 2019 showed the site remained a place of danger for children. It found use of force had “increased significantly”, with “pain inflicting techniques” still used on children. Managers’ refusal to refer a child who had self-harmed to the relevant authorities placed children at “unacceptable risk”. Staff shortages meant children experienced unacceptable levels of time locked in their cells, while those as young as 12 were subject to strip searches.^ix

Children’s prisons: ‘very dangerous places’

Medway is not a one-off. A former Chief Inspector of Prisons describes children in custody as “very vulnerable children in a very dangerous place”.^x Evidence regularly emerges that locking children up causes them severe harm.

Last year a state-appointed Independent Inquiry published a report about sexual abuse in custodial institutions.^xi It found 1,070 reported incidents of alleged sexual abuse between 2009 and 2017. Of these, 578 were described in terms equating to sexual assault or rape.^xii One child in Rainsbrook prison told his mother (and made a written complaint) that a staff member had threatened to rape him if he did not behave and calm down.^xiii

These are just the reported cases. One witness to the inquiry described how they were too afraid to complain about sexual abuse suffered under fear of violence.^xiv

Campaign groups, charities and prisoner support groups are very sceptical that Oasis can tackle such endemic problems. Oasis has made much of the power of its Christian values, with Chalke saying their “Christian ethic” can “produce a different result” in the new prison. There is no evidence or suggestion of sexual abuse in any Oasis facility. But proclaiming a Christian ethic as a remedy for problems that include widespread abuse may cause more concern than reassurance, given the recent history of abuse within a range of Christian institutions.

Child Imprisonment and the Prison Industrial Complex

Youth prisons are part of the broader prison industrial complex that believes social and economic problems can be solved through punishment and imprisonment.

The children being sent to these prisons are disproportionately of colour and from working class backgrounds. Child Welfare Professionals warn that children who now come to court have grown up in the most dysfunctional and chaotic families, where drug and alcohol misuse, physical and emotional abuse and offending is common.^xvii Evidence shows that by March 2017, children from a Black and minority ethnic background made up around 43 percent of the population of children under 18 in custody.^xviii

And the justice system does nothing to help them. Courts are only supposed to put the most ‘dangerous children’ in the dock, for example. But a recent investigation by the Guardian found children brought to court in handcuffs and locked behind bulletproof glass in a secure dock after committing only minor offences or breaches.^xix They also found children in court without legal representation, a parent or a social worker to support them.

Enter Oasis

When asked what a successful secure school looks like to him, Oasis founder and boss, the Reverend Steve Chalke, told Schools Week: “The same thing as a successful school. Young people who become fulfilled through an inner journey to a sense of self-worth, self-love and self-respect who, five or ten years after leaving, are still thriving.”

His charity has never before operated in a custodial environment and Chalke is taking an incredible risk to believe that Oasis can lock children in a cell and get different results to its predecessors.

But Chalke has always thought big. Aged 14, he felt that God wanted him to tell people about Jesus and to start a hostel, hospital and school for the poor.^xx. A young Baptist, he realised he “could not evangelise the world on his own” and so began Oasis in 1985.^xxi Oasis has been engaged in a mission to bring in the ‘Kingdom of God’^xxii ever since and has started projects worldwide.

As Oasis has grown, so has Chalke’s public profile. He was part of the GMTV morning show in the 1990s and a presenter on Songs of Praise. One over-enthusiastic fan called him the “raunchy vicar”.^xxiii

Image from: By Howard Lake from Colchester, UK – Steve Chalke at #iofnc, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18554283

The Oasis Charitable Trust was officially incorporated in the UK 1993. Its subsidiary Oasis Community Partnerships runs ‘hubs’ across the UK. These see a building host projects such as food banks and employment training, often alongside churches and one of Oasis’ schools.

Another subsidiary, Oasis UK Trading Ltd, runs a coffee shop ‘The Hub Coffee House’ in London Waterloo,^xxiv while Oasis Aquila Housing Ltd offers supported accommodation for victims of domestic violence, young people and families facing homelessness. They have three projects in Gateshead and two in London. ^xxv

Exclusions

But by far Chalke and Oasis’ biggest UK operation is their network of school academies. In 2007 they opened their first school and are now managing 52 academies across England as part of the Oasis Multi-Academy trust.^xxvi They also operate Oasis IT Services Ltd for the schools.^xxvii The accounts of the whole Oasis group show the academies make up around 95% of their roughly £200 million budget.

Oasis likes to talk about the “inclusive, integrated and empowering” ethos in its schools but in an Oasis academy near to Medway, the reality does not back up the rhetoric. Freedom of information requests by retired headteacher Peter J Read, who now works as an independent education advisor supporting families in the Kent and Medway area, showed the Oasis Academy in the Isle of Sheppey temporarily excluded 1,025 children in the 2018/19 school year. This was the highest of any school in Kent and Medway. The year before, the school ranked second, with 786 exclusions.

Oasis has also been accused of encouraging parents to remove children from schools to home educate them rather than face exclusion.^xxix

Discipline and Punish

Other examples from Oasis schools suggest they have limited tolerance for children who do not conform with their expectations. Tools such as ‘progress passports‘, for example, have angered parents.^xxx More than three behaviour points result in detention and these can be given for anything from wearing a coat indoors to hiccuping in class.^xxxi. In Oldham at Oasis Academy Limeside it is not only the kids that are punished – parents are fined £1 for every minute they are late collecting their children from the school.^xxxii. The school received a damning Ofsted report last year as Ofsted wrote that “pupils have made exceptionally poor progress for the last three years”.^xxxiii

A disturbing trend in UK schools is the use of isolation. Research by the Department for Education showed that over half of secondary schools use ‘Internal Inclusion Units’.^xxxiv An investigation by Schools Week found that primary schools are using isolation rooms to punish pupils as young as five years old while secondary schools are sometimes putting older pupils into seclusion rooms for more than five days in a row.^xxxv Separated spaces come in different shapes and sizes from booths to cell-like rooms.

A pupil sitting in an isolation booth. Image from: https://www.bbc.com/news/education-46044394

More freedom of information requests by Peter Read in Kent found 39% of the student body had been sent to the Oasis Academy Isle of Sheppey’s ‘Reflection Room‘, which:

“requires pupils to sit in a room and ‘Reflect’ on their behaviour for a whole day, an utterly unrealistic expectation that a day of boredom will improve matters. Astonishingly, 39% of the whole student body has been subject to this humiliating punishment, many on multiple occasions. The reality is that Reflection is utterly destructive, inevitably producing antagonism towards and alienation from the school, is almost certainly unlawful as the child has been forcibly deprived of education without provision for catching up, and indeed could be regarded as child abuse.”^xxxvi

In the same school, a child who had answered a call from a friend asking her to apologise for being late due to bus issues was told to ‘go to reflection’. She called her mum in tears after the punishment. In the Oasis Academy Wintringham, a teenager spent a day in isolation at after wearing trainers in place of his shoes that were wet from the snow.

Parent Jessica Timmis writes on the Ban the Booths campaign website that she found out her 12 year old son had been placed in isolation 20 plus times for wearing white socks. “My son was put in isolation for ten days back to back once and was a veritable mess”. This was after the sudden death of his Father. “I shudder to think what went through his head all those hours he spent staring at the wall not knowing how to process his grief. As a parent I’m furious that my son was put through this and I never want it to happen to any other child.” She now home schools her son and campaigns to end isolation units in schools.

Jasmine Ahmed from CAPE believes that isolation rooms are using the same principles as the prison system:

“Instead of addressing the root causes of challenging behaviour, whether that’s childhood trauma and abuse, or physical or mental health challenges, we respond with exclusion and punishment – the same principles and ideologies which underpin the prison system.”

Graphic from the Ban the Booths Campaign: https://banthebooths.co.uk

Transphobic Bullying

Oasis have also failed to prevent transphobia in their schools. Coron Kraatz from Cleethorpes was admitted to hospital with concussion after being repeatedly stamped on the head by a bully at Oasis Academy Wintringham in Lincolnshire. A trans girl was sent home from Oasis Academy Isle of Sheppey and told to take off her wig and make up after her first brave attempt to be open at the school.

School riots

Oasis Academies have been troubled by riots since conversions to academies began. Fed up pupils demonstrated at Oasis Academy Mayfield in Southampton in 2008 and their dissent later turned into a riot of criminal damage, smashing windows and ripping TVs from walls. Shock redundancies at Oasis Academy MediaCityUK in Manchester in 2011 also triggered strikes from teachers while pupils set off fire alarms and fireworks.

In 2018, police riot vans were sent to Oasis Academy Fir Vale in Sheffield after ‘all hell broke loose’ in a riot involving 150 people following an altercation between students. A video of the scene went viral: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/fir-vale-school-fight-riot-disorder-south-yorkshire-police-a8554471.html

At Oasis Academy Shirley Park in Croydon, 30 kids were also involved in a massive brawl in May 2019.^xxxvii In October 2019, a child at the school threatened another child with a knife^xxxviii. Oasis failed to tell the parent when it happened.

Unqualified Teachers

In September 2019, statistics released showed that Oasis has the highest number of unqualified teachers in North East Lincolnshire. Michael Gove relaxed the laws on teacher qualification in 2012, allowing schools and academies to employ people without qualified teacher status. Research has now shown that poorer pupils are more likely to be taught by unqualified teachers. Chris Keates from the Teachers Union, NASUWT, described the trend as “a crude cost-cutting measure” that had “nothing to do with enhancing teaching and learning”^xxxix.

Oasis worldwide: charity, homophobes and police

The Oasis International Foundation runs Oasis’ missionary and charitable work abroad, from Kyrgyzstan to Zimbabwe.^xl Many of the projects listed on their website appear uncontroversial but, for all its talk of inclusion, Oasis’ work abroad has involved some pretty questionable partnerships.

Now, for example, Oasis and Chalke are keen to stress the importance of LGBT rights. But in Bangalore, India, for example, they have worked in collaboration with Young Life in America since 2001^xli. Young Life is a US Christian group whose homophobic attitudes has led to it being rejected recently by one US college^xlii

Oasis was also a member of the Evangelical Alliance until 2014. This is an organisation that opposes churches endorsing same-sex partnerships as a legitimate form of Christian relationship.^xliii

Another worrying partnership for anti-youth prison campaigners may be Oasis’ apparently uncritical partnerships with law enforcement. The Stop the Traffik initiative sees Oasis collaborate with police forces worldwide against human tracking. They have developed software for police to help trace children and criminals involved in trafficking. The police’s role in the discriminatory criminal justice system described above does not appear to concern them, with the Stop the Traffik website describing law enforcement as playing “a central role in keeping a community safe and preventing crime.”^xliv

Ironically, Stop The Traffik’s slogan is “people shouldn’t be bought and sold”. The government will pay Oasis more than £160,000 a year for each child imprisoned in Medway.^xlv

Children from the Oasis Connaught School in Knowle, Bristol, joined other kids to become ‘Mini Police‘ as part of a new initiative with Avon and Somerset Police^xlvi. The regional police force was made famous when they tasered their own Race Relations Advisor in 2018^xlvii.

Photograph from: https://www.avonandsomerset.police.uk/news/2019/06/local-school-pupils-celebrate-their-involvement-in-mini-police-initiative-at-a-celebration-and-engagement-event-at-police-hq

More generally, Oasis’ missionary work has caused concern among campaigners. Zahra Bei from No More Exclusions has described Oasis’ missionary work as “anxiety-inducing” in the context of it running a youth prison, due to the “long colonial history of Christian missionaries and charities” and the “highly racialised and classed nature of prison populations”.^xlviii

Who’s in charge?

The parent organisation of the Oasis group is the Oasis International Association. It was set up to be an umbrella for Oasis projects around the world.

Oasis appears motivated by the values of capitalism as well as Christianity and the board reflects these two priorities.

Its directors include the kind of people you might expect to serve for a christian charity: religious studies teacher Mark Chater, another teacher Elaine Dunn, support worker Jean Herbert and Adri-Marie van Heerden, who runs a missionary project called The Rhythm of Life in South Africa.

But their fellow directors are people you would expect to find in a more corporate setting. The Chairman of the Oasis board is John Whiter, a city accountant and director of insurance brokers PIIQ Risk Partners Ltd and Ed Broking Group Ltd, both owed by major insurance broker BGC. He is joined by PwC management consultant Antony Cook; biotech and pharmaceutical industry advisor John Slater; ex-Lloyd’s Bank director Paul Turner (still a director at the Commonwork trust at organic farm Bore Place); and Chief Marketing Officer for IBM, Caroline Taylor.

Taylor describes herself as a “passionate advocate for diversity and inclusion and a proud LGBT+ ally”. How does she feel about Oasis’ move to open a prison that will disproportionately lock up children from BME backgrounds?

Image from Bank of America twitter: https://twitter.com/BofA_Business/status/922540261087088641

‘Freedom for the prisoners’

Graham Mungeam, a director of Oasis Charitable Trust and Oasis Community Learning, published a book about the history of Oasis called ‘Faith at Work’ in 2006. It ends with a quote from the Gospel of Luke: “He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s flavour.”^xlix

Fourteen years on, his organisation is set to lock up some of the UK’s most vulnerable children. In response, Jasmine Ahmed from the Community Action on Prison Expansion campaign told Corporate Watch:

“Given Oasis’s self-identification with the values of social inclusion and social justice, we thought they would be allies in opposing a project that has the ability to brutalise and harm children whose behaviour is an outcome of an unjust society, poverty and traumatic childhoods. Instead they are complicit”.

You can read more about Prison Expansion in Corporate Watch’s report, Prison Island: https://corporatewatch.org/product/prison-island/

Sources

The post Oasis: The Evangelical Christians opening a children’s prison appeared first on Corporate Watch.

However, the plans have been cancelled, according to information obtained through a Freedom of Information request. When asked about the progress of the prison’s construction, the Foreign Office said: “The UK has decided not to proceed with the proposed construction project”, citing “challenges associated with design and cost”. It did not mention backlash to the project, which was widely criticised in March 2018 when it was first publicly announced.

The cancellation of the Nigerian project is the second time attempts to build prison and deportation infrastructure in former British colonies have stalled. Jamaica had previously rejected David Cameron’s offer of a new prison. Campaigners are using the news to highlight Boris Johnson’s renewed commitment to create 10,000 new prison places and how these connect to broader racism and inequality in the UK.

To learn more about Prison Expansion and broader carceral colonialism, see Corporate Watch’s Prison Island Report: https://corporatewatch.org/product/prison-island/

To get involved in fighting prison expansion see Community Action on Prison Expansion: https://cape-campaign.org/

Caren Holmes is a master’s student in Postcolonial Studies at SOAS University of London

The post British government funding for Nigerian deportation prison scrapped appeared first on Corporate Watch.

The report doesn’t contain many surprises for anyone familiar with the grim reality of life inside privately-run detention centres. But it makes public for the first time some information on just how companies like G4S rack up substantial detention profits.

For example, it reveals G4S is fined just £10,000 when someone kills themselves in its “care”. And it confirms the money G4S makes from detaining migrants. It has made comfortably over £2 million a year for most of its time running Brook House, with a profit margin typically between 18 to 20%. Or more than 200 times the cost of a detainee’s life.

But the report also shows that the company has made even more money in other detention centres. And these windfall profit rates look set to go even higher under the goverment’s plans for the new Brook House contract, which is due to start in May 2020.

Here we summarise some key points from the report. The NAO report itself is quite clearly written and worth reading for the full detail.

See also: our G4S Company Profile; Chapter 7 of The UK Border Regime for much more on the detention system. And for another example of lax state oversight of privately-run prisons, read our report last year on Carillion staff working without mandatory suicide prevention training.

Brook House contract basics

Brook House is one of two migrant detention centres run by G4S inside the perimeter of Gatwick airport – the other is Tinsley House. It has places for up to 508 detainees, all male.ⁱ It is the UK’s most secure detention centre, run to the same security standards as a Category B prison.

Brook House opened in 2009, and its management was contracted out to G4S from the start. G4S’ contract was initially set for nine years. However, after the Panorama scandal broke in 2017, the government announced it was cancelling the process to re-tender the contract. Instead, it extended G4S’ current deal for another two years.

The Home Office has since said that the current contract is “not fit for purpose”, and it is designing a new type of contract for the centre in future. The new deal is supposed to start in May 2020 and last until 2028. It is currently out for tender, and companies have until October 2019 to put in their bids.

How the contract works

The NAO report explains how G4S gets paid. G4S receives around £13 million per year for running Brook House. The payments involve:

• a basic monthly fee – a bit over £1 million per month;
• minus a deduction for under-occupation;
• minus deductions for “performance failures”.

G4S has overall responsibility for managing, maintaining, and repairing the centre, but can sub-contract parts of the job. For example, catering and cleaning services are sub-contracted to Aramark.

The contract sets minimum staffing levels. Brook House has four wings: each is supposed to have at least one manager and three guards (“detainee custody officers”) on duty at all times.

Minimal deductions

In reality, G4S gets almost all the maximum fee. On average, under-performance deductions have only been about 1.5% of the fee per month. The biggest penalties – £30,000 if someone escapes, or £10,000 if someone dies following “self-harm” – are still tiny amounts relative to G4S’ fees. Also, the Home Office has actually let G4S off almost half of all possible deductions, allowing it to claim “mitigating circumstances”.

The price list: 30 performance measures

The contract sets out 30 performance issues which can lead to a deduction. The NAO report lists all of these. The two biggest deductions are for:

• escapes: £10,000 to £30,000
• “self-harm resulting in death”: £10,000

The other deductions are all in the order of a few hundred pounds per day. The most serious is understaffing, which can be charged at between £134 and £1,790. Other failures such as insufficient cleaning, not reporting problems to the Home Office, health and safety breaches, or inadequate cell standards, may cost anywhere between £18 and £857 a day.

What’s not included

The list of performance measures says something about the Home Office’s priorities. For example, an escape is worth up to £30,000, but “self harm resulting in death” only £10,000.

But maybe even more revealing is what isn’t included in the list. Deaths only cost G4S if they are judged to result from “self harm”. There is no mention at all of deaths from abuse or neglect. Or of non-fatal assaults and abuse. If a detainee manages to bring a “serious substantiated complaint” of assault or racial abuse, G4S can lose just £537 – less than 2% of its daily fee.

The NAO report raises this issue in relation to the Panorama scandal. It says clearly:

Inappropriate use of force or verbal abuse of detainees are not counted as a performance failure under the contract.

The Home Office and G4S counted 84 incidents in the Panorama footage. But it found that “most of these were either already reported or were not required to be reported under the contract”. Only eight incidents were judged to need new contract deductions. G4S’ penalty for these incidents of abuse came to a grand total of £2,768 – about a quarter of one per cent of its monthly fee.

G4S CEO Ashley Almanza

Brook House makes a tidy profit

Brook House and other detention centres make their corporate managers a lot of money. In a July 2018 report, we concluded that profit levels of 20% and up are standard across the industry.

Our analysis looked in detail at the accounts for Dungavel detention centre, as well as information available on G4S centres. The NAO report largely confirms this picture – although it seems that G4S’ profits on Brook House have gone down recently as it has brought in extra staff after the Panorama scandal. According to the report:

G4S told us it made an annual gross profit on the contract of 18% to 20% until 2016, falling to 10% in 2017 and 14% in 2018.

Between 2012 and 2018, G4S’ total gross profit from Brook House was £14.3 million – according to G4S’ own figures, which the NAO hasn’t audited itself. Between 2009 and 2016, the annual profit was between £2.1 and and £2.4 million. This only dropped in 2017 and 2018 when the company brought in extra managers and staff in response to its Panorama exposure.

To clarify, “gross profit” means the money G4S makes from the Brook House contract itself. That is: the fees it gets from the Home Office (its revenue), minus the specific costs of running the centre – e.g., paying for guards, centre managers and maintenance staff, or for detainees’ food or cleaning products.

This is not the final profit G4S books as a company in its accounts. Before that figure, it will also have to account for company-wide “administrative” costs such as running its head office and lobbying for new contracts.

However, even looking at those final or “net” profits, the NAO report confirms that detention is a very profitable business. According to the report, “G4S’s net profit on the contract over 2012 to 2018, following the deduction of a share of regional and group overheads, was 6% to 15%.” That compares to an overall average net profit of 6% on G4S’ whole security division.

In short: G4S makes substantially more money from government contracts to lock up migrants than it does on its other main business lines like providing security guards for banks. (See our previous analysis of this in our G4S company profile.)

.. but other G4S detention centres make even more

And yet Brook House is actually the least profitable of G4S’ detention centres. The company makes even higher profits on running Tinsley House. And it made more still on Cedars, the now closed family detention centre it ran together with Barnardo’s.

According to the NAO report: “at Tinsley House immigration removal centre, G4S’s gross profit ranged between 26% and 43% in the period 2012 to 2016, and net profit between 19% and 28%.” Brook House is less profitable than Tinsley House because it has higher security costs, and also because the higher paid senior managers for the two centres are based there.

As for Cedars, locking up families with children provided G4S with an incredible cash cow. The NAO report informs us that:

Profits on the Cedars pre-departure accommodation, which closed in 2016 due to low use, ranged from 21% to 60% gross or 15% to 55% net between 2012 and 2016.

 

G4S gets to keep any extra money it makes?

One point that’s a bit technical but potentially important. According to the NAO report, there is no requirement for G4S to share any “extra” profit it makes from unexpected savings.

This seems at odds with other information we have previously seen on detention centre contracts, and indeed on government outsourcing contracts in general. They often contain a clause stating that the company has to give back some of its extra gain if it makes over a certain figure.

But, according to the NAO report, the Home Office didn’t bother to include any such clause in the Brook House deal:ⁱⁱ

The Home Office is not entitled to a share of G4S’s profits under the contract. If G4S is able to substantially reduce its operating costs through new technologies or other investment then the Home Office and G4S agree how to share the savings, and G4S’s monthly fee is reduced accordingly. This has happened once with investment in a key vending technology. But this savings mechanism is unrelated to how much profit G4S makes.

The new contract looks set to be even more profitable

As mentioned, the Home Office has admitted that the Brook House contract is “not fit for purpose”. But what can we expect from the new deal it is currently tendering?

Unfortunately, the NAO report doesn’t tell us anything on that. It suggests that the Home Office may include some performance measure related to “inappropriate use of force” in the new contract – but no detail is given.

As for money-making, the tender announcement for the new contract gives a value of £260 million over ten years – or around £26 million per year. This will cover both Brook House and Tinsley House.

The current value of the Brook House and Tinsley House contracts combined is only around £16 million (Tinsley House is smaller and has lower security). So it appears there will be a big jump in the fees the centres’ managers will get after 2020.

In conclusion: scandals come and go, but it looks like detention will carry on being a very profitable business indeed.

The post A life costs £10,000: how G4S’ Brook House detention contract works appeared first on Corporate Watch.