Ken Clarke recently announced plans to end the right to compensation for prisoners injured in custody. This sends a clear message that prisoners have no right to speak up against violence in prison - even, in fact, that they deserve it. But isn’t that what we call torture? We’ve all heard of Abu Ghraib - the sexual abuse, the hoodings, the murders. We used this as a barometer against which to define our own culture, to underline our moral superiority, to rail against crimes committed far away from us. But it was only their distance which defined for us so clearly what was wrong.
The reality of prison violence is that the most vulnerable are also the most likely to be attacked. From 2003-2008, the Howard League (a charity which campaigns for reform of the prison system) reported a 31% increase in prison violence, with young people - some as young as 12 - the most likely to be affected. Self harm in particular has increased among women, many of whom have been forcibly separated from their children. In fact, imprisonment leaves a shocking 17,000 children a year without a mother; 6,000 of this number are simply ‘forgotten’ - their whereabouts unknown. The Institute for Race Relations’ roll call of black and ethnic minority deaths in custody reads like an indictment of the justice system, written in the blood of some of society’s most vulnerable people: Mohammed Bin Duhri, found hanged in Belmarsh prison; officers suspended after allegedly filing reports saying he was alive when he was already dead. And perhaps most heartbreaking is the case of Adam Rickwood, a 14 year old who hung himself with his shoelaces in a secure prison unit.
These stories are overlooked because they force us to answer uncomfortable questions about a justice system which we thought fair and infallible, making us reconsider previously held notions about those we considered inhuman and deserving of pain. In the forgotten world inside prisons, such assaults are not only common but institutionally condoned, as courts repeatedly refuse to prosecute prison authorities who abuse or neglect prisoners, and families’ calls to reopen inquests are ignored.
