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

Refugees: Tightening the Screw 123
leader of the Conservative opposition, proposed that all new asylum seekers
should be detained in ‘secure reception centres’. The Home Office response,
according to the Guardian of April 19 2000, was that this would cost ‘an
extra £850 million’ a year. Nevertheless in June the government announced
its intention to increase the number of detention spaces available from 900
to 4,000 so as to be able to detain all those whose applications for asylum
had been turned down.
The detention centres are run by private security firms. Before the election,
according to quotes from the 26 June 1998 issue of Private Eye, Jack Straw
told the 1996 Prison Officers’ Association conference that:
I find it morally unacceptable for the private sector to undertake the incarceration of
those whom the state has decided need to be imprisoned ... almost all people believe
that this is one area where a free market does not exist.
Once in government, he told the 1998 Prison Officers’ Association
conference that:
As a responsible government we have committed ourselves to providing best value
and to achieve high performance, efficiency and effectiveness. Current cost
comparison research indicates that privately managed prisons are between eight and
15 percent less costly than their counterparts in the public sector. The difference is
accounted for almost entirely by lower staff ratios, lower staff costs, including pension
arrangements and salaries; and greater availability of staff with fewer holidays.
Official figures reported in Amnesty International’s Cell Culture were that in
1995 the average cost of holding a person in an immigration detention
centre was ‘about £560 per week’, compared to about £450 in prisons. In
1997, after a mass protest destroyed some of the buildings, the cost per
person per week of detention at Campsfield rose to over £700. But the
detention centres continue to be run by Group 4 and Wackenhut. Group 4
lost the contract for Harmondsworth detention centre in 1999 to another
private company, Burns Ltd, which according to the Home Office press
release (which nevertheless felt obliged to praise Group 4 for its excellent
work) put in a lower bid. Ominously, under Labour’s new Act, the staff of
private contractors are to be given more powers.
CAMPSFIELD IMMIGRATION DETENTION CENTRE
Campsfield ‘House’, as governments like to call it, has been open since 1993,
and is still the largest of the detention centres. The great majority of its
detainees are asylum seekers. Until 1997, around 50 of them were women.
It has the aspect of a concentration camp. Its 20-foot high metal fences have
mesh whose holes are slightly too small for fingers. There are 42 video
cameras on the fence and inside. Periodically, as a result of protests inside
and outside and attempted escapes, the fortifications are added to. Additional