Video nasties
Rudi Vis MP tabled a written Parliamentary Question last year at our suggestion about the practice of making a video when children are restrained or forcibly stripped in prisons.В В The Ministry of Justice undertook to look into it and more than a year later Rudi Vis has received a letter in response.В The Prison Service has now admitted that in 2008 prisons made films of 128 incidents involving the physical restraint of children – with the prize going to Ashfield, the private prison run for profit, that filmed 28 children. Stranger still is Feltham that filmed 12 children being strip searched.В If physical restraint is an urgent response to an immediate threat, how do they have time to go and get a video camera and set it up before the staff pile in?В And are they filming children with no clothes on?В Who has access to these films involving staff using violent intervention on young boys and what happens to them?
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July 18, 2009
Tags: restraint, stripsearching, youth justice Posted in: Inside prisons
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5 Responses
video is taken of planned, not spontaneous, use of ‘control and restraint’ such as cell-removals, ie taking the prisoner from his normal cell to segregation. This could be good, in that it reduces improper use of force – the absence of a video should be suspicious. Videoing strip searches happens at the end of these planned events, when the prisoner arrives in the seg and is stripped. Video is supported by cons as restricting the odds of brutality. Tho they are also used in staff training…
That makes it all fine and dandy then.
hardly! I only meant to fill in the info re the specifics of these type of events, and to point out that what may appear to be wholly objectionable is viewed differently by prisoners. I dont mean to imply that all is beyond reproach.
It is however, precisely the same self-justifying approach which underpins much of the worst excesses of the cjs ie strip searching, restraint, criminalisation and incarceration of juveniles.
i was making a comment on the specific point that filming uses of force may be a good thing, not that use of force should be excused. Only when you have been ‘bent up’ by the screws can you appreciate the presence of the camera, it restrains their excesses.
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