Abuse, Prisons and Power

When my brother arrived on remand in HMP Wormwood Scrubs (London, UK), he asked for his statutory phone call. They refused. He pointed out that he had a legal right to it. In response six prison officers dragged him into a room, stripped him naked, handcuffed him, made him bend over, then beat him for half an hour. He was black and blue, bleeding from his bowels for days afterwards and had scars on his wrists where the handcuffs had been. The other prisoners told him that the officers had a policy of waiting until the bruising came out, then taking you back in and doing it all over again. My brother noticed that at least a third of the other prisoners in there also had scars on their wrists from handcuffs. He also noted that more than 50% of the prisoners in the Scrubs were black when the percentage in the UK population at the time was 3% and the London population 13%, which indicated to my brother that there was bias against that population within the justice system. A friend paid his bail, and my brother was free to go, but was too scared to go to pick up his possessions from the office as the prisoners warned him that the officers may deliberately go for a repeat performance before he left as a method of intimidation.

I told my brother he should put in a complaint about the assault. He said that he couldn’t put in a complaint in case he was found guilty at the trial (which didn’t take place until a year later) and would, in that case, be incarcerated at their mercy with a revenge vendetta against him. He ended up going to prison in another part of the country. While he was in prison, a big ‘scandal’ came to light about officers in Wormwood Scrubs, and it was on the TV news about a firm of lawyers who were trying to prove the abuse of prisoners in that institution. The camera focused in on the headed notepaper of the lawyers and I quickly scribbled down the name. I traced the phone number of the firm and rang them and told them what had happened to my brother. They said it was one of the more extreme stories that they’d heard. I tried to explain that my brother was so painfully honest that he didn’t know when it would be in his best interests to lie (he’s on the highly intelligent autistic spectrum) so I knew that what he had claimed would be true. Then I had to try to get the news through to my brother but that was hard to do when all his incoming and outgoing letters were monitored and he could be persecuted if the officers realised he was going to lay a complaint. So I had to be very coded about it. Because my brother had been so enraged by what he had witnessed of the racist bias in the justice system, while he was in prison, he kept a secret journal of every act of racism he witnessed within the prison system during the four years he was incarcerated. He documented times, dates, names of officers and exact details (including one occasion when prison officers went up to a black prisoner and taunted him repeatedly saying, “They’ve just ruled that we can legally kill you” when police officers were exonerated of killing a black guy held in a police cell). When my brother got out he wrote to Parliament and was asked to give evidence to a Special Parliamentary Committee about Institutional Racism. He turned up and handed them the dossier he’d kept and was able to give them all the details they needed. I admire my brother. In a ward round/case conference in the psychiatric secure unit I was working in at that same time, the Community Psychiatric Nurse said that a particular patient (who was black), had accused seven police officers of coming into his cell and beating him, and now the CPN was helping him put in an official complaint. The CPN admitted that he felt uncomfortable about it as the man in question was actively psychotic and suffering from paranoid delusions and hallucinations, but he felt that it was his responsibility to help him do this, just in case it was true. The Social Worker then pointed out, that a couple of weeks previously the police (in a nearby northern UK town – I prefer not to say where) had beaten up a black guy in a carpark and then completely denied it. Unfortunately for them, the man turned out to be the local ‘Race Relations Officer’. Oops…

During this same period of time, whistle blowing was going on in Ashworth Special Hospital (high security prison for prisoners serving a sentence with a mental health condition near Liverpool). The female psychologist who called time on the abuse there was locked by fellow staff members into a room with a prisoner who hadn’t been violent for thirteen years, and then this prisoner proceeded to beat her up for fifteen minutes and no one answered the alarm (normally eight members of staff respond to an alarm within thirty seconds). One witness had the brake cables cut on their car. One patient told me that another patient on his wing had reported a member of staff for deliberately holding a patient’s hand down onto the hot plate of an oven. The witness was moved, not the member of staff. There is no particular point to this blog post. Everyone knows what is going on in our prisons, psychiatric units, care institutions and police force. But authorities routinely turn a blind eye unless they are absolutely forced to listen. And those perpetrating the abuses lie and lie and lie – absolutely brazenly and blatantly, for decades, with no shame and with no fear of being held to account. And when finally the climate changes and historical abuses are brought to book, the accused all bleat that ‘it was a different era back then’ and ‘everyone was doing it’ and ‘it’s unfair to judge the perpetrators' past actions in the light of current bleeding heart attitudes’. But we all know that it was never considered okay, it was merely that a blind eye was turned to it by those with the power to change the culture and put a stop to it. All that has changed is that different sectors of society gradually gain their own power and demand to be treated as equals, with equal rights to resources, privileges, and justice. And gradually, reluctantly, whilst squealing whining protests, some of the institutions are forced to change.