A PRISONER'S STORY
We recently receive this testimony from a serving prisoner that we thought we'd share with you. His story is nothing really out of the ordinary. In fact, it is sadly all too common for this type of victimisation to happen, whether one accepts the obvious racist overtones or not. People in positions of power have a wont to abuse those in their charge and their immediate superiors are often complicit in turning a blind eye to their behaviour. That it is a prisoner being abused should make no difference.
A is a so-called 'foreign national prisoner' (FNP), one of the 15% or so of the 900 prisoners held in the Serco run private prison HMP Lowdham Grange, a NOMS-rated Level 4 (top) prison and by reputation one of the better Category B closed training nicks. Awaiting voluntary repatriation to finish his sentence in his home country, A has been adjudication-free fore more than 2 years and had worked in the textile workshop at Lowdham Grange for over a year. His work was always done to a high standard and he shared his job allocations with a fellow prisoners. They split the pay for their jobs 50-50 as they varied greatly in price and that helped even out any problems with difference in work quality (which also attracted differential pay rates). This was accepted practice throughout the workshops and had never been challenged.
A's problems started in March 2010 when he had done the customary half of an allocated job. A Prison Custody Officer (PCO, the private prison equivalent of a Prison Officer) then gave him the other half and told A to get on with it. He refused, it was the worst paid job and, after all, it was accepted practice to split it between two prisoners. The PCO said A could not have another job until he had completed the second half.
Weeks went by with A turning up for work, 8.30 - 12.00 and 13.15 - 17.00, sitting doing nothing and therefore earning nothing, except two IEP warnings. At his next IEP Review he was able to explain his case to the Operational Manager (private prison equivalent of a Governor grade) and that he thought he was being bullied and victimised by the PCO. A was told his case would be investigated and a follow-up review would take place. The same day A requested a transfer to another workshop.
Come the next review in June it was obvious to A that nothing had been checked. He claims that this was due to a new Operational Manager, known to be unsympathetic to prisoners, having taken over his case. A reiterated the bullying accusation and that he continued to refuse to do the job in question. As a result, A was then dropped from the Enhanced to Standard IEP level. According to the most recent Independent Monitoring Board report on Lowdham Grange 80% of prisoners were on Enhanced and 14.3% on Standard.
He continued to attend the workshop and refuse the job, thereby avoiding a further IEP warning. After all, he wanted to work but refused to buckle down in the face of victimisation on principle. At the following review in July A joined the 5.7% of his fellow Lowdham Grange prisoners on Basic IEP status. Shortly after, and 2½ months after his first transfer request, a place in another unit came up. That prisoners regularly move between different workshops added strongly to A's belief that the intention always had been to put him on Basic before moving him.
So, the end result for A was 3½ months without any pay. And as far as the unfinished job goes, it still sits there in the textile shop untouched and nobody else has received a warning or Review for it not having been completed. [02/09/10]
CHINA EXPORTS PRISON LABOUR
The Guardian has reprinted an interesting article by Brahma Chellaney, first published on the project-syndicate.org website, entitled 'Convicts For Export'. We have known for a long time that the backbone of Chinese state industry are the country's prisons, where inmates are exploited in a whole host of industries: the mining of coal and metal ores; in cement and brick works; vehicle manufacture and repair; agriculture; processing tea; making plastic, clothing and tools, much of which is exported and flings its ways into High Street pound shops. Even Adidas footballs. You name it, the Chinese use prison labour to make it.
Then there is the harvesting of organs from thousands of prisoners executed each year, the exact figure remains a state secret. Now we can add to that the moving of prisoners abroad to provide forced labour on infrastructure projects such as the building of dams and ports that China are carrying out in countries like Sri Lanka, Burma, the Maldives, Ghana and Sudan. Inters tingly, many of these schemes are being run by private Chinese companies whose standard operating practice is to source as much of their workforce from China as possible, and that much of that are prisoners released on 'parole', would indicate that this use of 'slave labour' is official Chinese central government policy. [29/07/10]
PRISONERS IN GULF OIL CLEAN-UP PART 2
In the past couple of years federal and state prison labour programs in the U.S. have been suffering large-scale lay-offs because of budget restraints and the general down-turn in the market. However, in one particular area of the country prison labour has been booming in recent months, with huge numbers of prisoners being secretly bussed in to work on the BP Gulf oil spill clean-up operation.
In 2008, 11% of the federal prison population was employed in the Federal Prison Industries (FPI) program, which trades under the name UNICOR making everything from clothing and mattresses to office furniture and body armour and electronics components for the U.S. military. That figure of 23,152 prisoners has fallen by 30% to just 16,115 in the past 2 years. Inmates in the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP), which operates at a more local level, have also suffered lay-offs.
Wages for prisoners have often been an issue of contention. For example, prisoners have no choice as to which job they take and wage levels are as low, if not lower, than their UK equivalents. So, Federal prisoners can expect to get $1.15 an hour at most or, to put it another way, for every $1 in UNICOR turnover, prisoners earn just 4 cents, of which 2 cents goes towards "satisfying their financial obligations" i.e. paying towards their keep.
The smaller over-all numbers of prisoners on the PIECP program have fared even worse. This scheme has recently been the subject of a critical report showing that not only do inmates not receive the pay they are due and both programs have problems with health and safety compliance. Prisoner of course have no say in the negotiations over the wages they will be paid or the level of health and safety enforcement on the job, and any protests about their working conditions normally swiftly leads to loss of privileges and 'earned good time' or a spell in solitary.
The one boom area in prison labour however has been the Gulf clean-up operation. According to The Nation, within days of the Deepwater Horizon explosion "cleanup workers could be seen on Louisiana beaches wearing scarlet pants and white t-shirts with the words 'Inmate Labor' printed in large red block letters." Locals, many of whom having already been put out of a job because of the spill, started to complain at community meetings. As a result the 'Inmate Labor' uniforms quickly disappeared, replaced by BP shirts, jeans and rubber boots. Another thing that made this particular group of worker stand out was that they were almost exclusively African-American men, something that the NAACP commented on, but hardly surprising given the racist nature of the U.S. criminal justice system.
The Nation article reveals some other eyebrow-raising facts about what is happening in the 'the inmate state':
"Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration of any other state in the country. Seventy percent of its 39,000 inmates are African-American men. The Louisiana Department of Corrections (DOC) only has beds for half that many prisoners, so 20,000 inmates live in parish jails, privately run contract facilities and for-profit work release centers. Prisons and parish jails provide free daily labor to the state and private companies like BP, while also operating their own factories and farms, where inmates earn between zero and forty cents an hour. Obedient inmates, or "trustees," become eligible for work release in the last three years of their sentences. This means they can be a part of a market-rate, daily labor force that works for private companies outside the prison gates. The advantage for trustees is that they get to keep a portion of their earnings, redeemable upon release. The advantage for private companies is that trustees are covered under Work Opportunity Tax Credit, a holdover from Bush's Welfare to Work legislation that rewards private-sector employers for hiring risky "target groups." Businesses earn a tax credit of $2,400 for every work release inmate they hire. On top of that, they can earn back up to 40 percent of the wages they pay annually to "target group workers.""
Other prisoners are being used on an ad hoc unpaid basis, so it quickly becomes clear why BP and a lot of the small clean-up companies that have sprung up overnight are so eager to use prisoners. And it may also explain why BP and almost all of the prison authorities questioned refused to confirm to The Nation the numbers of prisoners involved or talk about issues such as health monitoring for the inmates being used in the clean-up. Many of the prisoners involved have also been moved temporarily into local parishes to get over the stipulation that those employed in the clean-up must be locals (i.e. parish residents). As a result shipping containers converted in to prison dormitories with bunk bed and barred windows, have appeared on waste ground along the coast, further enraging the many locals who are not being taken on for the work.
Of course, it is also highly unlikely that there will be any follow-up checks on the prisoners involved, many of whom have been working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week in "protective chin-to-boot coveralls (made out of high-density polyethylene and manufactured by Dupont), taped to steel-toed boots covered in yellow plastic" and with no respirators, "shoveling oil-soaked sand into black trash bags". "They work twenty minutes on, forty minutes off, as per Occupational Safety and Health Administration safety rules" in the "blazing sun and the oppressive heat that builds up inside their impermeable suits". According to The Nation, "[t]hese are long hours for performing what may arguably be the most toxic job in America. Although the dangers of mixed oil and dispersant exposure are largely unknown, the chemicals in crude oil can damage every system in the body, as well as cell structures and DNA. [26/07/10]
KEN CLARKE: "I'LL MAKE THEN WORK"
Ken Clarke has revealed in an interview in the Sun that he plans to make "a good percentage of prisoners...do something more sensible in prison. Make them work, give them training - a template to make better people of them. The aim is to give these guys the idea that work is a normal part of life. If they wish to get out of going in and out of prison, they'd better get used to working. It will hopefully form part of our rehabilitation revolution to be published in the autumn."
This appears to be a version of the proposals put forward by celebrity ex-prisoner Jonathan Aitkin in the 'Locked Up Potential' report for the Centre for Social Justice. There the idea was to double the number of Contract Service workshop places during what was then the next (i.e. this) parliament if the Tories got in. Iain Duncan Smith however got the pensions brief and justice fell to Clarke.
According to the Sun, that would mean that "Prisoners would get the minimum wage for their work - but it would be paid to them over a period of time AFTER their release. Up to half of their earnings would go towards helping victims."
Clarke also explained: "We hope businesses will come in and invest. There is a certain amount you can do with supplying the Prison Service itself, with food and other things you can make. But it has to be lead by private industry. I'm not going to be paying them all the minimum wage out of my budget. If you don't work, you would face privilege reduction. Someone who is prepared to work an eight-hour day might attract other privileges."
Unfortunately, the Prison Service largely supplies itself anyway, with everything from prisoners' y-fronts and meals to prison furniture and cell bars, so what he means by this is a bit of a mystery. Also, prisoners who currently refuse to work face reduced or even no privileges anyway - definitely no IEP pay and almost certainly additional punishments to boot. Work is definitely not voluntary as the Sun appears to think.
We all know that the Sun invariably never knows what it is talking about when it comes to prisons and prisoners, but now it seems that Ken Clarke is a little short on facts. And quiet how he means to afford to build and equip new prison workshops when the prisons' budget is being heavily cut, let alone find space for them in an already overcrowded prison system where prisoners are sleeping in converted cupboards, is anyone's guess. [16/07/10]
[Coming soon: The Emperor's Old Clothes. An article on the Conservatives' change of heart on the 'Prison Works' issue.]
