Addiewell riot: 'The prison has rarely been out of the headlines'

Published on Thursday 28 January 2010 08:55

ADDIEWELL prison may have been opened for little more than a year, but it has rarely been out of the headlines – and for all the wrong reasons.

The recent riot, which left two guards requiring hospital treatment, is the latest in a long line of incidents which will do little to bolster public confidence in the private sector's ability to effectively run and manage a jail.

Despite Scotland's prisons bursting at the seams due to an all-time high of 8,000 inmates behind bars, the SNP is unconvinced that private prisons are the answer. So much so that plans to open a third – after Addiewell and Kilmarnock – at Low Moss, near Glasgow, have been scrapped in favour of building a state-run jail.

Whether their objection is based on a rejection of the principle that companies should not make money out of running prisons is not clear.

Former HM Prisons Inspector Clive Fairweather has also been a critic. Today he questions both the quality of staff private prisons employ and also the level of training they receive.

But the key criticism of privately run jails is that they are expected to return a profit for their shareholders, and the claim that in order to do so corners are being cut.

Better design does mean newer prisons can be run by fewer staff. But the Prison Officers Association says too few guards are now being employed, and that as a result the relationship between inmates and staff is poor as contact is more limited. It is argued that this lack of bonding is often what leads to friction and violence.

But then the very same problems that are hitting Addiewell also plagued Kilmarnock prison when it first opened in 1999. It was rocked by a series of scandals and allegations that staff had no control over the inmates – to the point that many turned a blind eye to drug taking.

Low staffing levels were blamed for an unusually high suicide rate which saw six prisoners take their own lives over a five-year period. Things got so out of hand that the prison's own director, Nick Cameron, was on one occasional attacked by an inmate as he toured the facility.

Things may not have degenerated to that level at Addiewell, but the fact that two serious riots and a number of serious assaults have taken place in the first 12 months, and that drugs have been seized on more than 200 occasions, suggests that the regime is not quite right.

The onus is on Kalyx, the private company which manages HMP Addiewell, and paymasters the Scottish Prison Service, to sort it out before things totally spiral out of control.