Prison whistleblowers in England and Wales being threatened with dismissal: Inmate suicide figures expose human toll of prison crisis

Tory MP Gavin Williamson attacks ‘arrogant, high-handed’ attitude to those raising concerns about safety and violence

Reprinted from The Guardian, by Sandra Laville and Matthew Taylor

Kim Lennon

Kim Lennon. a prison officer at HMP Lewes, is fighting for her job after speaking to her local newspaper about her concerns over safety. Photograph: Brighton Argus/Solent News

Sandra Laville and Matthew Taylor

Monday 20 October 2014 13.57 EDT

Whistleblowers in the Prison Service in England and Wales are being threatened with dismissal for raising serious concerns about their ability to keep inmates safe and their fears over soaring levels of violence.

The attempts to silence staff have been condemned by a Conservative member of parliament, who was approached in confidence by a number of officers working at a prison in his constituency during the summer with details of how staffing shortages were causing concerns over safety.

Gavin Williamson, MP for South Staffordshire, said the “arrogant, high-handed” attitude to those raising legitimate concerns risked creating another scandal in the public sector on the scale of the Mid Staffordshire affair in the NHS. After the MP was approached an officer was singled out by the prison service and has been served a disciplinary notice that could end with his dismissal.

Williamson told the Guardian: “It’s a totally disgraceful situation and goes against everything that we want to be seeing within the public sector, where whistleblowing needs to be encouraged when the concerns of those working within the system are not being addressed internally.”

Officers are facing dismissal after raising concerns about the high levels of violence within prisons, their fears for their own safety and that of inmates, and predicting that short staffing will lead to more rioting.

In HMP Lewes Kim Lennon is fighting for her job after raising worries in a local newspaper in August about her own safety and that of her colleagues.

Allegations of a crackdown on whistleblowers follow an investigation by the Guardian that revealed a distinct patterns of failings was contributing to more than six suicides of prisoners a month on average. Between January last year and 2 October this year, 134 inmates took their own lives – three on one day in September 2014.
Advertisement

The shadow justice secretary, Sadiq Khan, has urged ministers to launch an urgent inquiry into the rising rate of suicides in prisons.

“Time and again the chief inspector has warned that staff shortages and overcrowding are the underlying causes of violence and deaths. Yet ministers have their fingers in their ears, and carry on denying there’s a prisons crisis,” he said.

The allegations come ahead of the chief inspector of prisons’ annual report – due out on Tuesday – which will give a detailed examination of the state of prisons in England and Wales.

Williamson said he was approached by prison officers from HMP Featherstone in his constituency who brought their concerns about the rising levels of violence, their anger that inmates were not being brought to justice for attacks against staff and how short staffing was affecting safety. He took these points to the prisons’ minister and the Ministry of Justice. But the MP later discovered that an officer from the prison had been singled out and served with a disciplinary notice, saying he had brought the service into disrepute.

“They are taking an arrogant and high-handed attitude towards pursuing prison officers who have raised issues they are concerned about perfectly legitimately either through their MP or through other means,” said Williamson.

“The right for people to whistleblow must always be there. We have seen what happened in Mid Staffs hospital and we don’t want a repeat of that. I fear that that is the route the prison service seems to be going down. If people aren’t able to speak up and say this is wrong, then the public services will be weaker for that.”

Lennon, an officer from HMP Lewes, gave an interview to her local paper about the deteriorating safety within the prison after raising her concerns internally but being ignored – sources close to her case said. She warned that serving officers were concerned that staff shortages within the prison were sparking increased levels of violence, that she feared an attack on officers was imminent, that staff cuts were fuelling the increase in violence and there were not enough staff to look after prisoners properly.

Lennon told the Argus: “We’ve not got enough staff to look after prisoners properly. They are becoming extremely frustrated and frontline officers are in danger. Staff are doing more jobs than ever before and there’s fewer of us.”

After Lennon spoke out a senior officer was attacked at Lewes by three prisoners and required hospital treatment. But Lennon was later sent a letter by the then prison governor, Nigel Foote, informing her she was to be disciplined for “failing to meet the standards of behaviour expected of staff”. She now faces dismissal. A few days later Foote quit his post as governor of the prison with no explanation.

Paul Laxton, former deputy governor at Lewes, said there was a climate of fear within the prison system. “People are chained to their desks because of the workload and they don’t want to put their heads over the parapet.

“They are trying to sack Kim, to make an example of her in order to show others that they have to keep their mouths shut. The senior civil servants will do what [justice secretary] Chris Grayling wants, but there is also a culture at senior civil service level that people should be seen and not heard, you should sing the company song, constructive dissent is not wanted.”

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “It is completely untrue to suggest that any member of staff raising legitimate concerns will face disciplinary actions. Any concerns raised by staff members are taken extremely seriously. The department has a policy which encourages staff to raise concerns to nominated officials or the confidential wrongdoing hotline.”

At some point you gotta ask the hard questions… You gotta look beyond the obvious and ask the hard questions. I found this on Huffington Post Black Voices….

In Washington, D.C.’s public schools, African-American students are almost six times as likely to be suspended or expelled as their white classmates. Students with disabilities are also disciplined at higher rates than their peers.

But a group of local students is hoping to use their artwork to change that.

Students participating in a program with the nonprofit group Critical Exposurecontend that disciplinary practices in the District’s public schools contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline, which pushes minority and vulnerable students out of school and into the penal system.

For the past two years, Critical Exposure has brought students together to document the problems in their school district through more than just data and numbers. The students use photography and multimedia projects to depict the difficulty their peers face in finishing school as a result of tough disciplinary policies. Some of the student photographers have been suspended at some point during their educations, and many have seen friends and peers suspended for minor infractions.

“They see what happens when students get 10 days out of school with suspensions, how students get in trouble with the criminal justice system and juvenile justice system and how it snowballs from there,” said Adam Levner, the executive director and co-founder of Critical Exposure, in a phone interview with The Huffington Post.

Scroll down to see the students’ photos.

Levner said that members of his organization’s 2012-2013 after-school fellowship class identified the school-to-prison pipeline as a problem they wanted to document. The 2013-2014 fellows then chose to continue the project, while other program leaders brought the idea to individual schools as well. (The current class of fellows has not yet decided what it will be documenting.)

Since then, Critical Exposure students have testified at public hearings about the issue and had a series of meetings with D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson. They also successfully worked this year to establish a pilot restorative justice program, which emphasizes discussion and conflict resolution over suspensions and expulsions, at a local high school.

Malik Thompson, 19, was involved with Critical Exposure throughout his high school career. He has experienced firsthand the impact of “school pushout.” Following his older brother’s death several years ago, when Thompson was in the ninth grade, he says he stopped going to his citywide, application-only high school. After several months of truancy, and what he describes as “minimal efforts” from school administrators to draw him back in, Thompson says he received a letter from the school informing him that he was no longer enrolled.

“Basically, I was kicked out,” Thompson told HuffPost.

The next year, Thompson became involved in Critical Exposure after seeing a flyer at his new school. He is now an intern at the Gandhi Institute in Rochester, New York, a nonprofit that helps promote racial justice and nonviolence education. There, he facilitates workshops for young people in schools while leading photography and videography efforts.

Thompson, who ended up finishing his high school career in a home-school program, also advocates for the expansion of restorative justice programs in schools.

Restorative justice, he said, “creates [a culture] where the entire student –- like what happened outside the school and during school — is acknowledged and taken into account.”

Thompson continued, “I think more programs like Critical Exposure should exist where young people have avenues to begin to experience their own power, to work collaboratively together with adult supporters in order to make change in their world.”

“Critical Exposure was essential to me becoming the person I am today,” he added.

Below are photos from Critical Exposure’s students, representing how they see the school-to-prison pipeline in their everyday lives, provided to HuffPost by Critical Exposure. All photo captions were written by individual photographers, but have been edited and condensed for clarity.

• • “Coming in the building feels like turning in my stuff before entering a jail cell.” — Angel L.
  • Untitled
    
    “The teachers can go through the gate without being stopped, and students are stopped and asked to show a pass. Students are treated like they’re prisoners. They already have to be escorted by a teacher to get through.” – Karl L.
  • Ban The Scans
    
    “This photo represents what we have to go through before entering our school everyday. I think it’s uncalled for, and nine times out of 10, if any violence … would occur it would be outside the school. According to DCLY [D.C. Lawyers For Youth] high quality mentoring for every D.C. child between 10-17 years old would cost $63 million, versus … paying $305 million just to incarcerate them.” – Sean “Lucky” W.
  • The Blind Pipeline That Youth Cannot See
    
    “This photo represents how some African American youth are on a path to prison that they can’t see or don’t know when it’s coming. The reason I say that is because most of us are expected to go to prison sometime in life. Statistics say one out of three African American males will go to prison in their life. In elementary school us African American youth are predicted to go to prison or jail based on standardized test scores and suspension rates.” – Sean “Lucky” W.
  • The Jail That Surrounds Us
    
    “This is a picture of the black long gate that surrounds my school, with only three ways to enter and I know that this is a tactic that jails use to keep ‘criminals’ in or out.” – Mike
  • Rights
    
    “The American flag symbolizes the rights we are granted as citizens and the freedom we have to manifest ideas and expand our knowledge. The bars represent restriction and confinement. Two conflicting ideas. We should not feel like our school system is detaining us and preventing us from flourishing.” – Anaise
  • Troubled Past
    
    “My name is Jacqueline Smith I [have] live in Washington D.C. most of my life. Im 20 in the twelfth-grade and excited to graduate in 2013. It took until my last year to figure out how school and education was important. This year has really opened my eyes. Because back then even when I was little I didn’t understand why my mom woke me up early in the morning just to go to school because I never felt like it … In middle school I was suspended a number of times and got expelled from school. But when I was suspended I knew that I was free by staying home watching TV … I changed because I didn’t want to fail.”
  • The Everyday Routine
    
    “Everyday students have to enter through the auditorium doors and place their backpacks on the X-Ray machine. Then they walk through the metal detector to meet their bag on the other side and then must wait for the bags to be searched by a security guard. This makes students feel as if we’re going inside a jail to meet someone, or as if the staff sees us as criminals. Statistics show that 70 percent of students [who are] involved in ‘in-school’ arrests or are referred to law enforcement are black or Latino. If DCPS [D.C. Public Schools] wants to lower these numbers then why do we have the same procedures of entering a jail [instead of] a comforting environment of being welcomed to school?” – Mike
  • Untitled
    
    “This photo is of a young man who is sitting at a desk. The desk is in the school hallway and he is the only one outside. ‘My teacher put me out here.’ In most cases, the student is not at fault. Sometimes teachers do not know how to deal and give appropriate punishments. Restorative Justice should be implemented in our schools because, not only does it help students learn how to deal with their behavioral problems, it trains our teachers to deal with students in a correct manner that doesn’t allow their personal judgement to affect the student.” – Samera
  • The Box
    
    “Every morning for the past three months after walking through the metal detectors, 17-year-old Skinny has to explain to the security guards before being wanded why the machine went off. Skinny has an ankle monitor on, or ‘the box.’ With a curfew of 8 p.m. every night, he feels trapped and isolated from the world. Skinny is on probation and was told he would get the monitor off a month ago. When that did not occur he became disappointed. At times he refused to go to school due to his frustrations. D.C. public schools allow up to three unexcused absences until truancy reports are sent out. I am very concerned about his education and the consequences from the days he has missed.” – Samera

I found this thought provoking and election timely piece over at www.ColorLines.com Even if the votes in California go a different way… and I hope they don’t. America has to begin asking this simple question. How Do You Solve A Problem Like Mass Incarceration?  Connecticut has taken the first steps with this website and the book that inspired this social media campaign. Take a read and let us know what you think.

There appears to be a widening consensus among policymakers if not the general public that mass incarceration in the U.S. is a problem. If so, now what? How do you stall or unwind a penal system thatimprisons and supervises 7 million people—just a million shy of the population of New York City? Where blacks and Latinos make up 30 percent of the U.S. population but nearly 60 percent of the prison population? Many around the country are watching California’s latest initiative. Tomorrow voters will decide onProposition 47, which could reduce sentencing for tens of thousands of nonviolent offenders annually and shift savings to schools, victim services and mental health and drug treatment. If Prop 47 passes it could be asignal to other states similarly experimenting with or hesitant to pursue sentencing reduction that they should forge ahead.

More than 60 percent of California voters favor Prop 47, according to a September poll cited in Governingmagazine, but law enforcement and crime victims groups have lined up against it. Once laws are on the books it’s extremely difficult to change them, a former ‘tough on crime’ legislator told Colorlines. And complicating substantive reforms, too, is fear and bias. Read Lauren Kirchner’s overview of the latest research in Pacific Standard for more.

Automatic Solitary Confinement For Prisoners Held On Virginia’s Death Row

The Justice Imperative: Who Resides In Connecticut’s Prisons?

Keesha was the daughter of heroin addicts. At age 14, she participated in a robbery that resulted in a homicide. Connecticut imprisoned her as an adult. She was sentenced to 50 years. She is now in her early 30s. While serving her time at York Correctional Institute, she earned her GED and was trained as a Certified Nurse’s Assistant. She has shown remorse. Keesha has been a model prisoner. She has facilitated an in-prison Alternative Violence Group. She became a role model and mentor for younger inmates. Her mandatory minimum sentence precludes her from release until at least 85% of her sentence has been served.

See More: Please go to Chapter Seven in “The Justice Imperative”

www.TheJusticeImperative.org

Originally published in Huffington Post, author John Legend

The right to vote is central to any movement for social change.

In the 1960’s, voter registration drives were a central strategy to the civil rights movement and today voting continues to play a pivotal role in our democracy.

As someone who cares deeply about education, I felt compelled to make this video increase voter participation and raise awareness of the need to stop the growing school-to-prison pipeline.

In the last three decades, prison spending has grown exponentially faster than spending on education. In fact, in California alone, we have built 22 prisons and only 1 UC University since 1980.

Today, we incarcerate five times more prisoners than 1980 and prison spending has increased by 1500 percent. The devastating impact of this dramatic growth has not been felt evenly – African Americans are seven times more likely than whites to be incarcerated and Latinos are twice as likely.

America’s incarceration addiction has torn apart communities, disenfranchised millions of people — most for nonviolent offenses — and denied countless individuals an opportunity to gain employment, housing and even some of their most basic human rights. And it hasn’t made us any safer — more that 6 out of 10 prisoners return to prison after release while communities struggle with run down schools and inadequate resources.

Change in our justice system is long overdue. That’s why I’m advocating so strongly for the passage of Proposition 47, a groundbreaking sentencing reform initiative in California that will begin to reverse decades of over-incarceration and reallocate prison spending to schools, prevention and treatment.

Prop. 47 will change six low-level nonviolent drug possession and petty theft crimes from felonies to misdemeanors, and invest the prison cost savings — in the millions of dollars — into K-12 schools, mental health treatment and victim services.

It’s supported by law enforcement, crime victims and teachers, along with a diverse coalition of business leaders, civil rights organizations, community groups, faith leaders, artists and many more.

And it will pass if each and every one of us decides to exercise our basic right to vote.

I urge you to tell your neighbors, co-workers, family members and friends about the critical importance of voting Yes on California’s  Prop. 47.

This election — less than two weeks away — will make history not only in California, but also in the rest of the country.

Now is the time to act. Now is the time to vote Yes on Prop. 47.

Below is an excerpt from a recent survey “Survey-economic-insecurity-rising-inequality-and-doubts-about-the-future-findings-from-the-2014-american-values-survey” from the Public Research Religion Institute.  Click here for the complete survey.

• More than 8-in-10 (84%) black Americans say that black Americans and other minorities do not receive the same treatment as white Americans in the criminal justice system, compared to 6-in-10 (60%) Hispanics and a slim majority (51%) of white Americans.
• More than 6-in-10 (62%) white college-educated Americans do not believe that black Americans and other minorities receive the same treatment as white Americans in the criminal justice system, compared to 45% of white working-class Americans.
• More than 8-in-10 (84%) black Protestants, roughly two-thirds (66%) of religiously unaffiliated Americans, and a slim majority (53%) of Catholics disagree that all Americans in the criminal justice system receive equal treatment regardless of race. White mainline Protestants are divided (48% agree, 46% disagree) on the issue of equal treatment. Only 43% of white evangelical Protestants disagree that all Americans in the criminal justice system receive equal treatment regardless of race; 52% agree.

Bribery’s Other Victim: The Families, by Richard Bistrong. An International Perspective on Bribery and Compliance

The following was originally published on the Richard Bistrong FCPA Real-World Compliance Blog (www.richardbistrong.com) on September 29, 2014, and appears here with his permission.