Return of the Civil Dead

With the prison population at an all-time high of over eighty-two thousand, the Ministry of Incarceration and Deportation has instructed its malefactor management human resources to ignore safety regulations so that the crisis of overcrowding in our prisons can be relieved by putting more people in prison. The Government "had been hoping the prison population would fall over the recent school holidays, when fewer courts were sitting", the courts' inconvenient habit of implementing the Government's less incomprehensible laws being one of the major causes of our present difficulties. Unfortunately, the school holidays provided no relief, and the head of the National Malefactor Management Service has declared a "clear operational emergency" at two prisons. A "clear operational emergency", it appears, is something that enables the Government to order prisons to accept more inmates even though they are full. As one would expect, health and safety regulations have been "revised", or "circumvented" in Oldspeak, in order to put off the inevitable tabloid headlines for one more day.