Open%20borders%20The%20case%20against%20immigration%20controls%20-%20Teresa%20Hayter

122 Open Borders
Authority, and privately run by a US company, the Wackenhut Corporation,
with a capacity to detain 150 men and women. The numbers detained
increased to more than 800.
The Rochester detention wings are run by the prison service with a regime
identical to that of a prison, with the sole exception that asylum seekers are
not locked up on the same wing as criminals. As in prisons, no phone calls
can be received, even from lawyers. Normally detainees are locked into their
cells from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. and the doors clang shut again at 11.30 and 4.30;
sometimes they are locked in for 22 hours a day. In January 2000 HM
Inspectorate of Prisons published a report on Rochester by its chief inspector
Sir David Ramsbotham, who wrote in the preface that ‘I know that this
dreadful report will not make comfortable reading ... but it is my job to report
what we find and not what people would like us to find.’ He wrote of the
‘disgrace’ of ‘filthy dirty accommodation’ and said ‘Most of all, I must express
my concern at the poor treatment and conditions of the ... asylum seekers,
immigration detainees and other foreign nationals who form almost half the
prison population.’ The cells on D wing looked ‘rather like a cluttered toilet’.
Two unoccupied cells were covered in congealed blood and the blood stains
of an asylum seeker who ‘had deliberately cut himself’. There was no attempt
to explain procedures in languages the detainees could understand, and
some were in segregation for failing to comply with them. And so on.
Campsfield detainees are threatened with transfer to Rochester as a means
of discipline. One of them reported that, at Rochester, he had a belt stolen by
a guard. When he complained, he was accused of having threatened to beat
the guard with it and was put into isolation for five days. Another reported
that he was beaten ‘for a whole day’. One detainee tried to retain his sanity
by spending his days copying out articles from Le Monde.
The Labour government intends to expand the numbers detained. Its
white paper was unspecific about this, saying merely that the use of dedicated
detention centres is ‘preferable’ to the use of prisons, without any
commitment to comply with UNHCR guidelines by ending detention in
prisons. The government plans to open a detention centre at Aldington, near
Folkestone, and another one by creating a detention wing to hold 110
refugees in Lindholm prison near Doncaster. In March 2000 it opened a
‘reception facility’ in a former military barracks at Oakington near
Cambridge, with a capacity for 400 people, run by Group 4. Oakington is to
be used to process on site the applications of asylum seekers, including
families with small children, mainly people who arrived at Dover without
papers or clandestinely in the back of lorries, whose claims are being ‘fast
tracked’, and to deport them directly from there if they are rejected. The camp
is virtually a prison, with its occupants allowed to leave only for specific
purposes and with an escort. The families are to be separated, with men kept
apart from women and children. A week after it was opened, six detainees
climbed the fence and escaped. In June 2000 a new detention centre was
opened at Thurleigh, north of Peterborough. In April 2000 William Hague,