Monday, April 28, 2008
All Cuffed Up
Further solutions to the prisons crisis are apparent in this Widdecombesque episode, in which a private security firm had a seven-months-pregnant woman who was suffering "serious complications" shackled to a guard twenty-four hours a day in case she used her crutches to overpower the staff and tunnel her way to freedom. The security firm, as one would expect of an organisation "which has been fined in the past for having prisoners escape on its watch", is called Reliance. "We did have a case in March where a pregnant female prisoner was mistakenly handcuffed (sic) when a risk assessment showed that was unnecessary," a spokesbeing said. "The cuffs were removed, and an apology was made." It is not clear whether the apology was made to the prisoner or to the Scottish Prison Service, which pays Reliance's fees. A spokesbeing for the Scottish Prison Service was "unable to say" how long the woman had been chained up; as is traditional when the private sector is brought in to make public utilities more efficient, all the important bits are somebody else's problem.
