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Press releasesREF: PR/21/07 DATE: 5th April 2007 To: ALL POLITICAL PRESS RELEASE Open Prisons Once Again Become Dumping Ground and Place Public at RiskThe Prison Service and Immigration and Nationality Department (IND) are working together to manage detainees’ held in Prisons solely on Immigration warrants. It is hoped that all detainees will be held in the detention estate pending final decisions on deportation/removal. Unfortunately, there is currently no space in the detention estate. As a result the Prison Service and IND have agreed that detainees can be transferred to the Open Prison Estate. The POA are concerned that the public will be placed at risk and confidence in the Prison Service will be seriously undermined considering the substantial bad press that has surrounded open prisons in recent months. Colin Moses, National Chairman of the POA said: “Open Prisons are not a warehouse to house detainees’ in order to manage the Prison population and the crisis in the Home Office in dealing with foreign nationals. The Prisons Minister, Gerry Sutcliffe recently told MP’s that absconds from open prisons could not be stopped. Other MP’s have ridiculed the open prisons because of the failures and in May 2006, National resources were deployed to remove foreign nationals from Ford Open Prison to prevent further embarrassment to the Government. Once again it appears that the Prison Service are supporting and operating policies on the hoof. We were advised, only this week, that Court cells may have to be used to house prisoners as the prison population continues to rise and operation safeguard is almost full to capacity.” When asked what was the answer to these problems? Mr Moses said “There is no quick fix to this long term problem, but, it is about time that the Home Secretary sat down with this Union to discuss ways to maximise the use of existing Prison accommodation whilst ensuring public confidence in the Prison Estate is maintained instead of allowing knee jerk policies to be implemented without adequate consultation with the Union whose members are currently being treated as second class citizens."
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