Unforeseen and unintended, the Thatcher government has made a significant contribution to the great Lexicon of left-wing swear words. Already including such terms as armchair socialist, reactionary and fascist — which have long been handy substitutes for reasoned argument — the Lexicon has now been enriched with the word “privatisation”. In this sense privatisation means more than just the substitution of private for state control of an industry. Contemptuously, it means the snatching-back of commonly owned concerns which have been operating to everyone's benefit and presenting them single-mindedly for personal profit instead of to satisfy communal needs. (The late Earl Stockton, in one of his last speeches, won the headlines by referring to this as "selling off the family silver" but he was always too much of a gentleman to use swear words of whatever sort.)
But, as the Tories never tire of telling us. we now live under a radical, fearlessly reforming government. Nothing is safe from their appetite to privatise. After British Telecom, British Gas and the like they are now asking why private investment should not also take over concerns where state control is set hard in tradition, apparently everlasting. ‘Now they're going to privatise the bloody prisons" was how one left-wing supporter of the Labour Party put it, as the morose and bitter climax of his diatribe against the Thatcher government and all its deeds.
He was referring to a recent Home Office Green Paper — Private sector involvement in the Remand System — which has floated the idea of privately built and operated remand prisons and he was not alone in his shocked opposition. Frances Crook, Director of the Howard League, has protested:
Prisons are a public trust. It is extraordinary that this zany notion is being taken seriously.
David Wilson, a prison governor, told the annual conference of the Prison Goverrnors' Association that
It is immoral that the market place should be extended to the area of public responsibility.
And the National Association of Probation Officers agreed:
It is morally wrong for firms and individuals to make money out of imprisonment.
There was no such moral outrage when other industries were privatised, so it is fair to ask why the reaction should be so different when it comes to the prison system. It is because they are part of the state coercive machinery, because the deprivation of a human being's liberty is so sensitive a matter that it cannot be left to a private industry? If so, it must be asked how this matter has been dealt with by the state prisons and with what effect on the conditions of the people whose liberty had been taken from them.
But first it has to be conceded that the history of privately run prisons is not a happy one. When the death penalty applied to something over 200 offences, there was no need for prisons apart from small, temporary holding places. These were to be found in all manner of buildings, from cellars to gatehouses. Nominally they were in the charge of the local magistrates but they passed their responsibility to private contractors. The basis of the contractors' profit was the fees they were allowed to charge the prisoners. There was an admission fee and another on discharge; a fee for putting someone in irons and then for taking the irons off again. Food was not doled out but sold to the prisoners and the gaolers added to their income by running brothels and drinking dens inside the prisons. Like any Thatcherite minister, they kept a firm hand on the costs of running their enterprise, even if cutting back on their overheads meant diseases such as typhus ran riot. With the ending of transportation the first state prisons began to be built and during the nineteenth century there was a glut of prison building, much of the results of which are still in use today. Some of the worst aspects of the design of those prisons was a reaction to what had gone on so scandalously in the old local, private lock-ups. The chaos of freely mixing inmates with their boozing and whoring and rackets, was replaced with solitary confinement and the exhausting, unproductive degradations of the crank and the treadmill. This was called progress, a reform which would work wonders for the prisoners' morals.
The showpiece of this theory was at Pentonville, where prisoners were not only forbidden to talk but even to face other people. Apart from their punishment, the only activity allowed them was to meditate on their crimes and to try to purge their guilt by embracing Christianity. Not surprisingly, the result was not to reform the prisoners but to unhinge them mentally. The present regime at Pentonville is not at all like that now but it has some notoriety among prisoners as a crowded, depressing, verminous place and is by no means an example of how to run a prison. In fact it would be very difficult for anyone — apart perhaps from the Home Secretary and his minions — to defend the British prison system while there is no lack of experienced and knowledgeable critics. Last August the chairman of the Prison Reform Trust said
The prison system in this country has become a national disgrace. It totters from crisis to crisis, endemically overcrowded and subject to the increasing likelihood of violent disorder or industrial unrest.
The 1986 Report of the Chief Inspector of Prisons noted that “The overall quality of life for many prisoners deteriorated in 1986" anct went on to elaborate:
The physical conditions in which many prisoners had to live continued, to border on the intolerable. For remand prisoners m particular, whose number increased sharply during the year, conditions were particularly poor.
A great many inmates of local prisons spend 23 hours a day locked in their cells without running water and with a chamber pot as their only readily available means of sanitation. There are 48 prisons which have no access to sanitation at night. It sounds like — and is — an urgent problem but it is not reflected in the Home Office plans, which expect only a partial remedy by the year 1999. when there should still be 26 prisons without the basic amenity of night sanitation. Inmates in many of the local prisons are restricted to one bath or shower and change of clothing a week. It is not surprising that in one of them the Chief Inspector found that sanitation was "by far the worst feature of the prison". In another, the kitchen was in such a “deplorable state" that "acceptable standards of safety and hygiene could no longer be maintained". And in another prison the reception unit was such that it was impossible to operate it as the secure, humane decent and confidential place that it should be
Of course prisoners don't have to accept these conditions. There is, quite plainly laid down in the Prison Rules, a method by which they can complain and get their grievances put to rights. They can see the prison governor about it, or the Board of Visitors; they can get their MP to put the complaint to the Home Secretary; they can send a petition to the Home Office direct. But one of the first thing a prisoner learns, as the gate clangs shut behind them, is that these rights often exist in theory only. A review of the procedure for dealing with prisoners' complaints by a former Chief Inspector of Prisons, published in March 1988. pointed out that although the procedure for ventilating and dealing with grievances should be fair, effective and widely known, in reality "... the procedures currently in use in England and Wales do not satisfy these criteria, and that changes in the system are required ". The principles of so-called natural justice, which the Divisional Court stated in 1979 should be the basis of prison disciplinary hearings, are usually ignored — which is not surprising when the power to investigate prisoners' complaints is restricted to the governor and the Home Secretary, who are the prison system incarnate.
In almost all cases, prisons are neurotically sealed off against the outside world, with their own rules of contact and survival and anyone expecting to be protected by the elusive concepts of justice will be in for a rude enlightenment. The same can be said for anyone who expects to receive proper medical treatment, for in many cases this will consist of swigging aspirin water prescribed by a prison officer who has undergone the sketchiest of medical instruction or the most cursory and careless "examination" by a doctor. The repressions and frustrations of prison life, which itself discourages any therapeutic release of feelings, are responsible for a lot of suicides among prisoners (not to mention some distortion in the personal lives of the prison officers). About the most notorious place for suicides is Risley Remand Centre, in Lancashire, which has won for itself the unenviable name of Grisly Risley. According to the Home Office, between 1980 and 1986 an average of 19 prisoners a year killed themselves — or, to be more accurate, were adjudged by an inquest to have done so. During that period the prison population averaged just over 44.000, which gives a suicide rate of over 43 for each 100,000 compared to a figure of 7.63 for the population at large.
For the prisoner trying to survive among all this the last, fail-safe, mechanism is the Home Secretary, who is supposed to be able to step in and ensure that prisons are run in a humane and efficient way and that what the law describes as prisoners' rights are respected. But this again is something which has little existence in reality for if an MP puts a complaint to the Home Office the reply which eventually emerges usually consists of little more than a recital of the all too well known facts of the person's offences. sentence and so on. Whatever procedural abuses there have been, however sluggishly a complaint has been processed. no matter how blatant the official obstruction. the Home Office can be relied on to act as the most obdurate of stonewalls, in place principally to protect the prison system and certainly not to criticise it nor to make it more open and accessible.
This is a sorry catalogue of human misery and it is doubtful if any of the opponents of privatisation would find anything in it to approve. Indeed many of them are deeply committed to exposing and denouncing the present set-up. Could it be, then, that their hostile response to the proposals to introduce an element of private investment into the prisons is yet another knee-jerk reaction? The government's proposals at present seem to be limited to the remand section, with no plans to privatise eerie, high-security places like Albany. As the Green Paper pointed out. there has been something of a trial run of private prisons in this country for some 20 years, under Labour governments as well as under the Tories, at the Harmondsworth Detention Centre, where people arrested under the immigration laws are held and which is contracted out to a private security firm. In all those 20 years Harmondsworth has known no problems comparable to those of Risley or Holloway or Wandsworth. The tenders which private companies will put together in their bid for a slice of the penal cake stipulate the provision of single cell accommodation, each with its own internal sanitation. The government will pay for each prisoner held but guidelines will be designed to prevent extra profit being made by overcrowding the private prisons in the same way as routinely happens with the state ones. There would be an in-built sanction against any breach of the specified standards in the termination of the contract, which would in any case have a limited term. Finally, if the inmates in a private prison had the kinds of problems which they are all too familiar with now, it could hardly be more difficult to complain to some managing director than it is now to get at the Home Secretary. It might also be that MPs will be more vigilant, more penetrative and questioning about private prisons than they are now allowed to be about the Prison Department at the Home Office.
Perhaps the opponents of privatisation are worried about the size and the origins of the companies who are bidding for the contracts. The most prominent of these is Contract Prisons, made up of property developers Rosehaugh in partnership with Racal Chubb (who already supply those prison locks which rattle and slam all day long) and a firm called Pricor which was early on the scene of running private prisons in Tennessee. Big rivals to Contract Prisons are the combines made up of the building contractors Mowlem and McAlpine linked with the American Corrections' Corporation (in which Kentucky Fried Chicken have a stake — perhaps a foretaste of a change in prison diets) and another which links the construction firm Tarmac with the private security company Group 4 and the Midland, whose claim to be the listening bank would be fully tested if it came to hearing prisoners' complaints.
Naturally, these companies are interested in making profit and will go into the prison business only if there is a clear prospect of this happening. Although the present, state-run system does not operate in exactly that way it is wrong to assume that therefore it is disconnected with the matters of capital investment, the production of profit and class monopoly of the means of life. Prisons are part of a large, powerful and costly system which exists to discipline us into an acceptance of class society, its property rights and all they mean in terms of privilege for one class and deprivation for the other. That this is an all-pervading social reality can be seen from the fact that the overwhelming majority of offences — the acts which can land us behind bars — are against property and that many of those which involve violence against people have as their object the theft of property. In 1987 of the 3,892,200 offences recorded by the police only 166,200 were of violence against the person; 32,600 were of robbery in which there may have been violence; while 3,674,100 were against property pure and simple. To combat this assault on their superior social position the capitalist class pay out a lot in taxes to maintain a police force, a judiciary and a penal system. This is by way of an investment the dividend of which, they hope, will be paid indirectly through a more stable, manageable, profitable society of class privilege and exploitation. The argument that direct and open private investment in building and running prisons is immoral because they are institutions of human punishment and confinement is very much a last resort. Such investments are part and parcel of capitalism's economy. Worker exploitation is itself a form of slavery. of confinement and stress. Capitalism sinks huge resources into armaments; to protect profits it will stockpile food or deter production of it while millions are starving to death. It pollutes and destroys the essentials of our environment, if profitable production demands it. It justifes all manner of assaults on our conditions and our lives in the sacred name of economy — of cheap production and bigger profits. What sort of hypocrisy is it which accepts the social system responsible for all this yet strains at the gnat of private prisons?
Not that the case against private prisons, even by the reformists' standards, has been made out for there is no conclusive evidence that they would lead to a worsening of prisoners' conditions. The debate between the two methods of running prisons is an irrelevance. If instead we adopt the more viable and logical standards of considering human interests, the debate becomes about a society which does not have the dominant ethos of locking away its human problems and then arguing about whose hand should turn the key.
Ivan
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