Can justice be a matter of profit and loss?

Edie Lush visits a private prison, and wonders whether there should be limits to the involvement of shareholder-owned businesses in the provision of such sensitive public services

There’s something unnerving about the idea of a private prison. When you drive up to the gates of HMP Dovegate, the first thing you notice is the Serco sign – it has friendly round letters with a little red line under the ‘o’. It’s a little weird to walk into a Category B prison, filled with rapists and murderers, that’s run by the same FTSE 100 company I noticed cleaning my London street this morning.

But once you’re inside Dovegate, it is recognisably prison-like. Many of the cells were empty because inmates were busy in the workshops, including one which produces lights for Cooper Lighting that end up in hotels in Dubai. Director Wyn Jones told me that employment levels are above 90 per cent in the prison. I spoke to one prisoner who was doing a degree in sociology and another who had completed three National Vocational Qualifications. Both these prisoners represent their wings in weekly meetings with prison management. Top of their list this week is the issue of whether ‘older chaps’ with little prison income should pay less for their television rental than the £1 a week paid by those with jobs. Prisoners use an ATM to order from the prison shop and top up their phone call entitlements – eventually they’ll be able to book visits and doctors’ appointments through them as well.

Leaving the main block and entering Dovegate’s Therapeutic Prison (TP), I saw a Buddha and a water fountain which wouldn’t be out of place in a meditational retreat. Prisoners in the TP do group therapy in the morning, work in the afternoon and are allowed to keep budgies as pets to encourage bonding and responsibility. Drug rates in Dovegate are low, and even lower in the TP, because according to Jones, ‘If you use, you’re out’. That’s not to say HMP Dovegate is a picnic; by no means. I saw one prisoner who’d had his ear cut off in a prison fight. On returning from hospital outside, he attempted to smuggle a watch-phone back to prison and had to serve time in the ‘Care and Separation Unit’.

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