The Final Call

Dangerous prison pipeline exploits Britain’s Black community

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Locked up and lost rights

(FinalCall.com) - Recent news of the clash between Prime Minister David Cameron and the European Court of Human Rights over voting rights for inmates has once again focused attention on the penal system. Mr. Cameron plans to oppose the court ruling that the UK cannot simply ban voting rights for all inmates, but the debate about voting and rights has circled back to an area of concern for Black Brits: The continued over incarceration of  Black people in the U.K. and the increased use of prisoners to provide products and services for major corporations.

     NEWS ANALYSIS    

A U.K. prison pipeline which disproportionately targets Black males is very real and it is time to sound the alarm loud and clear, according to several reports, data and community activists.  Prison Reform Trust, a U.K.-based charity notes some alarming facts on its website: In June 2009 just under 27 percent of the prison population, 22,292 prisoners, was from a minority ethnic group. This is the same proportion as in the previous year (2008), but represents an increase on that recorded for 2005 (25 percent). This compares to one in 11 of the general population.

• Out of the British national prison population, 10 percent are Black and four percent are Asian. For Black Britons this is significantly higher than the two percent of the general population they represent.

• Black people constituted 15 percent of those who were stopped by the police in 2008-09; other ethnic minority groups were also over-represented.

• Overall Black prisoners account for the largest number of minority ethnic prisoners (54 percent). Between 1999 and 2002 the total prison population grew by just over 12 percent but the number of Black prisoners increased by 51 percent.

Blacks in the U.K. unwittingly find themselves victims of many written and unwritten laws in society which contribute to this problem, charge some activists. The prison rates are unprecedented when it comes to Black Brits, said Student Minister Hilary Muhammad, of the Nation of Islam.

Like her United States ally, the privatization of prisons is becoming big business in the U.K. as is using prisoners for labor, paying them very little but benefiting corporations, he continued.

“Virgin Atlantic, the packaging of the headphones they supply to their passengers on their planes are packaged in a prison here in the United Kingdom and there are a myriad of companies that we’ve been researching that are farming out work to these prisons,” said Mr. Muhammad.

According to prisonlabour.org.uk in their investigation of U.K. prisons and company contracts in the early 2000s, several popular companies have been linked to utilizing prison labor including, Virgin Atlantic, Monarch Airlines, publishing powerhouse Macmillan, Speedy Hire, Travis Perkins and others.

Inmates work a variety of jobs including laundry, printing, and assembly work. Whether these same companies in turn and hire these inmates once their sentence is completed and they are released having paid their debt to society, remains to be seen.

Mr. Muhammad said additional research is leading to information he had not previously known. “I’m sure the masses out there are not aware of how the prisons are being used to support many of these major corporations,” he said.

“It’s for them to know that when they get on a Virgin Atlantic flight and unpack the headphones, that these were packed in a prison where their child might be serving time,” added Mr. Muhammad.

When ex-offenders are released into the same conditions that caused them to commit crimes that landed them in prison, lack of employment, subpar educational opportunities and cuts to much needed social services, the vicious cycle of mass incarceration often continues.

Last year, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg in a speech was quoted as saying, “Young Black men are more likely to end up in prison than at a top university.” According to a 2010 article in The Guardian, 21 Oxbridge colleges took no Black students the previous year.

“A bleak portrait of racial and social exclusion at Oxford and Cambridge has been shown in official data which shows that more than 20 Oxbridge colleges made no offers to Black candidates for undergraduate courses last year and one Oxford college has not admitted a single black student in five years,” said the article.

Are these educational, economic and social roadblocks a deliberate attempt to keep Blacks in the UK as second-class citizens that will continue ushering them into prisons?

One of the harsh realities introducing so many of Britain’s Black youth into the prison industrial complex is the systematic criminalization they face on a daily basis, including the controversial “stop and search.”

Blacks are more than seven times likely to be stopped and searched by police than Whites but up to 30 times more likely due to a Public Order Act that allows people to be stopped and searched without reasonable suspicion reported The Guardian earlier this year.

Fifty-six percent of young Black men in Britain are unemployed, a 70 percent increase in three years, which is also a huge concern, note analysts. 

“Black communities are becoming characterised by routine racial disadvantage, particularly economic exclusion and rampant racism in private sector recruitment and employment practices,” opined noted civil rights leader Lee Jasper on his blog. 

“There are whole neighborhoods where both economic racism and relative poverty converge on the young to destroy opportunity and enforce failure. Where a profound sense of injustice pervades the atmosphere: this is as a result of the injustices of stop and search and suspicious deaths of black men in police custody,” wrote Mr. Jasper.

“With rocketing rates of unemployment and racial profiling in policing leading to escalating criminalisation of our communities, people are extremely angry. The numbers of black people on remand or in jail continues to increase sharply as a result of disproportionate arrest and sentencing rates following the August 2011 disturbances,” said the long-time activist. 

There is a real concern that with the current economic, social and political climate, numbers of Black boys and men being whisked away to prison will likely increase. Mr. Muhammad said more efforts to help parents understand what is really happening is critical.

“I think the problem that I’m finding with parents is the society in which we live has criminalized our young people so they have cut off all avenues for the most part of our young people acquiring a decent education that will equip them to gainful employment and live a normal life as well as a normal life can be lived in this country,” said Mr. Muhammad.

Many of the parents are unfortunately falling victim to what Mr. Muhammad called “unwritten laws and schemes” concocted by those in authority that mandate that Black youth must be suppressed and oppressed he told The Final Call.  Many employment opportunities have been offered instead to immigrants from Eastern Europe, said Mr. Muhammad.

“Many Black parents are not seeing the hidden hand behind this cajoling of our young people into these penal institutions. They are somewhat now starting to believe that their children are useless, their children are criminal and their children are in some way, shape or form to blame for the lack of opportunity that is being offered by government,” said the student minister.

Black parents must not blame their children, but understand the institutions that structure and craft the condition many find themselves and their children in, he added.

“That’s where the danger is. Is when parents don’t recognize the game and recognize who is structuring the game that we are unwilling participants in and of,” said Mr. Muhammad.