Letter re Article in the Mail on Sunday

Dear Ms Levin,

Re: Article in Mail on Sunday Review, 16 May 2010

I was astounded and deeply disturbed at several comments that you made in your article for the Mail on Sunday.

As Vice Chair of the 'watchdog' body, charged with satisfying yourselves "as to the state of the prison premises, the administration of the prison and the treatment of the prisoners", it is a pre-requisite that you have a grasp of the prison rules.

As these legal requirements are at the heart of ensuring that prisoners are not treated indecently, I fail to see how you can fulfil your statutory function when you are so clearly - and now publicly - bereft of understanding their provisions.

How can you possibly ensure that prisoners are being treated within the Rules when you don't know the Rules? This is all the more worrying given that the prisoners you are meant to be safeguarding reside in a prison with a shocking history of staff abuse and brutality.

You quote the Human Rights Act as being responsible for several aspects of prison life that you find objectionable. It is unfortunate that each of your claims is completely wrong.

You claimed that, "Due to the misguided Human Rights Act, prisoners have a right to take whatever unlawful drugs they choose."

This is a complete misunderstanding of the court's judgement and one which is common amongst prison staff. A British court found that forcing prisoners to go cold turkey without offering the palliative care that is always offered to patients in the community caused these prisoners unnecessary suffering. It did not, in any way, give prisoners any right to take illegal drugs. That you have persuaded yourself of the truth of this canard, so popular with the Daily Mail, is revealing.

Part of your duties include supervising the proper treatment of prisoners held in the Segregation Unit (punishment block). At any one moment, there will be prisoners being held there as a punishment for taking illegal drugs. Are your inspections of the Seg so cursory that you fail to notice this? Did you never wonder why, if prisoners are entitled to take illegal drugs, they were then being punished for doing so? This is extremely worrying, as the Seg was the rotten centre of the brutality previously inflicted by prison staff. As your inspections of the Seg are seemingly so shallow, how are we to be reassured that this brutality has ended? As a 'watchdog', you appear to be deaf and blind as well as toothless.

You also assert that, "as a result of the Human Rights Act, prisoners can no longer be searched internally". Prison staff have never had the power to conduct internal searches. This has no connection with the Human Rights Act and even the most cursory reading of that Act would inform you of this. It has only ever been the case, under common law, that in life threatening emergencies then a Doctor may conduct an internal search, if necessary with the assistance of prison staff. As one of the people charged by the Secretary of State to ensure that prisoners are not ill treated, that you are ignorant of the circumstances when a prisoner may be physically restrained by staff and have their orifices probed by force is quite shocking. In a prison with a history of staff brutality, it should be obvious that you should pay particular attention to any use of force by staff.

You then go on to claim that, "human rights means they have the right to decide if they want to lie in bed and do nothing all day". On the contrary, the Human Rights Act specifically exempts prisoners from the prohibition on slavery and the Prison Rules allow that we can be forced to work for 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, with no pay.

That most prisoners are left locked in their cells every day has nothing whatever to do with the Human Rights Act. It has everything to do with the inability of the Prison Service to supply sufficient opportunities to work. It has been thus for at least two generations and that you are unaware of this basic penological fact is something that I find quite unsettling.

In unquestioningly accepting the Prison Service propaganda on mobile phones, I can't help but wonder what else you are willing to accept on faith when told to you by prison staff. As a 'watchdog', displaying such a trait is deeply disturbing.

You repeat the lie that mobile phones are inextricably linked to drug smuggling and witness intimidation. That a tiny minority of prisoners abuse phones in this way does not detract from the truth - that overwhelmingly, prisoners use mobile phones for the simple purpose of maintaining family relationships. You should be aware that supplying a handful of payphone landlines for the use of several hundred prisoners, coupled with charging men 7 times the usual payphone rate, makes the use of illicit mobile phones almost obvious. That you are all too willing to accept the propaganda issued by prison staff on this issue inevitably raises questions as to your willingness or ability to fulfil your official remit.

That you then claim that prisoners can simply hand these phones to staff and avoid punishment is absurd. Any prisoner caught with a phone is subject to disciplinary charges, if not criminal ones. Again, that as one of the people charged with monitoring the process of punishment and discipline, your ignorance of this reality is alarming.

Your complete ignorance of the Human Rights Act and the Prison Rules aside, what I found to be most disturbing in your article was your attitude to prisoners and their circumstance.

On a Christmas Day, you felt you had the right to pass a moral judgement on a prisoner who was missing his children. You were not troubled by a scintilla of compassion, not a single moment of understanding or humanity. If not for the prisoner, then for his children.

This attitude reached it's apogee with your comment that, "They complain endlessly about the treatment they receive when they have only themselves to blame."
I cannot over-emphasise my disgust with this statement. Prisoners are responsible for their crime, and only their crime. That society chooses to place them in prison is societies choice and its responsibility.

Once in prison, the treatment meted out to prisoners is in the hands of prison staff. Prisoners are rendered, as you recognise, largely impotent. In Wormwood Scrubs, this treatment has included staff meting out mock executions, bloody beatings and rape.

You are Vice Chair of the body charged with ensuring that prisoners are not ill-treated and yet you not only berate prisoners for complaining about their treatment, you blame prisoners themselves for that treatment.

Having read your comments, what prisoner could have sufficient confidence to approach you with any complaint? Equally importantly, any prison staff reading your comments will feel confident in their ability to mislead you, knowing that your supervision of the punishment block is perfunctory and that your knowledge of the Rules is merely illusory.

As a 'watchdog', you have revealed yourself to be judgemental, ill informed and incompetent. As a 'watchdog' in a prison with a history of staff brutality, I can only suggest these qualities mean that you are positively dangerous.

You have revealed an ignorance of the Prison Rules and the Human Rights Act, and in doing so portrayed an incorrect version of prison life. At best, this is reckless, and cannot but undermine your position. I can only suggest that you resign.

As a matter of courtesy I inform you that copies of this letter will be lodged with the Secretary of State, at whose pleasure you continue in office; with the Chair of the IMB at Wormwood Scrubs;and published on my Blog, prisonerben.blogspot.com. It will also be offered to Inside Time for publication.

Yours sincerely,
Ben Gunn

The Idiot Box

Well, I can begin to try to relax. It is over. I knew that the second part of the Scrubs documentary would get my goat and it didn't disappoint.

As with part one, the things I saw were probably not the things that struck you. The devil was often in the gaps, the spaces where I was pleading for some context to be inserted.

Rather than de-construct the whole hour, I will just highlight a few particular events and suggest that you ask yourselves the odd question. Note that the female Block Senior Officer, so keen to hug a con on camera last week, always refers to prisoners by their surname. The Director General told staff nearly a decade ago to dignify us with the occasional “Mr” as part of the Decency Agenda - "how would you like a member of your family to be treated in prison?" Such a small thing for outsiders, but a daily reminder of contempt to us. And the power of the Prison Officer’s Association to ignore the orders of their bosses.

As was the case in episode one, the lack of explanatory context lethally undermined deepening your understanding. For instance, the man who was said to be smashing up his cell, who had torn the hatch from his door and was charged by the riot squad. You have to be an insider to know that nearly the only cells with a hatch in the door are Hospital cells. As most prisoners in prison hospitals are mentally ill, I have to wonder if setting the riot squad on someone that fragile was a sensible, let alone decent, thing to do? There was not a moment’s negotiation, no attempt to resolve the conflict. And the claim that he was "smashing up everything" in his cell went unchallenged; except by the camera, which revealed one bed, one chair and one steel toilet/sink. All intact. Did you notice this disjuncture between commentary and actuality..? Or were you lulled into a leap of faith, to become a collaborator with the Director on the assumption that you were not being misled?

And how did this man rip off his door hatch? It hangs outside the door, getting any grip on it is highly improbable. I don't doubt that he managed it; I just wonder how long it took, and what level of staff supervision allowed him the time to work it free from its mounting?

Have you ever got in someone’s' face so much that they fear you are going to take a swing at them? Have you ever provoked someone that much? Did you have five - count 'em, five - mates standing with you when you played that hard man?

As the screws did in the Block, hassling the black guy who only seemed to want to fetch his breakfast. This is a specialist skill, honed by Block screws who are mob-handed, like to feel brave, and enjoy taking down a con.

You surround him. You hassle him. You draw a circle of control around his behaviour that is so restrictive that he cannot fail to breach it. "Don't raise your voice"; "put your arms by your side"; "you will walk at my pace"... The con didn't seem in the least aggressive, he only wanted to walk to get his grub. But he was also not in the slightest intimidated - which to bullying screws, counts as a crime of aggression.

And the camera catches everything. There were even two CCTV fixed to the wall which covered the event. But, alas for posterity, the moment when he was dropped and 'restrained' by the screws is forever lost to cinematography. In prison documentaries, what is absent often speaks louder than what is clearly placed in front of you. The screw said he felt “intimidated”. What, with all of his training and five mates to back him up? He felt that the con was about to kick off.
Which means he didn't. If the con had swung, we'd still be watching the filmed re-runs. So because a screw intimidates a con and the con wouldn't bow his head, he was dropped by the screws.

Welcome, one and all, to the sly and devious world of modern prison service brutality. You surround a con as tightly as possible (get five large men to do it to you. Right in your face. Go on. Uncomfortable, isn't it?) And that stresses the con. It is calculated to. As soon as the con gets stressed, he gets agitated. Then the screws drop him - "I felt he was about to go for me." It can be done so cleverly that it can be shown to the nation - and nobody notices.

I've never had the urge to make a documentary. Now, I'd beg for that opportunity.