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News September 21 2001
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| The PRIVATE Sector Locking people up for profit Recent weeks have seen a storm blowing up around private detention centres. Campaigners in Scotland are protesting against the opening of the first Scottish immigration detention centre at Dungavel in Lanarkshire run by Premier Custodial Group. The centre is designed to hold up to 150 detainees, including whole families, and uses buildings previously part of Dungavel Prison. Premier’s US parent company, Wackenhut Corporate Corrections, runs private prisons and immigration detention centres in the US and elsewhere, and has come under fire for physical and sexual abuse of inmates. Wackenhut also hold the contract for transporting asylum seekers in the UK. Serco (see below) also hold shares in Premier. Meanwhile, the Observer uncovered government plans to grant UK Detention Services permission to waive the minimum wage at a new detention centre at Heathrow. Under the plans, the centre would pay inmates as little as 34p an hour for cooking and cleaning. UK Detention Services is a subsidiary of French multinational and general Private Finance Initiative beneficiary Sodexho, who have also made £2.6m from the government for running the much-criticised voucher system for asylum seekers. The Observer article also revealed Sodexho’s well-thought-out, sensitive approach to removing the stigma attached to vouchers – their official name is to be changed from ‘Buy Passes’to ‘Welcome Passes’, which obviously makes all the difference. The plan to waive the minimum wage has come under fire as creating an underclass of foreigner who are excluded from British basic human rights. Sally Price, from charity Refugee Action, condemned the plans as inhumane. 'The only people who stand to benefit from this are Sodexho,' she said. 'This is nothing short of slave labour.' Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker compared it to the Soviet Gulags. The privatisation of detention and of the mechanisms of stigmatising asylum seekers are some of the most disturbing aspects of PFI. In essence, it is a lose-lose situation for asylum seekers and the UK public, as the former end up detained, abused and discriminated, while the latter pay out vast sums of tax money to mainly foreign multinationals without providing a single useful service. Only Wackenhut, Sodexho, Serco and the like stand to gain. In the US, private prison companies have been known to lobby for harsher sentences, thereby increasing the prison population and their profits at the cost of years from the lives of mostly petty drug offenders and a diversion of funds from public services. Is this already happening in the UK too? Sources: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/scotland/newsid_1521000/1521804.stm http://www.observer.co.uk/politics/story/0,6903,545652,00.html Serco and the benefits of PPP – for companies http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/business/newsid_1524000/1524619.stm |