Winson Green (Birmingham) Prison to be privatised!



"I'm escaping This prison's not what it used to be!"

Winson Green Prison, known by the Home Office as HM Prison Birmingham, is to be privatised. G4S are to get their hands on it. I do hope they won't let any prisoners escape. The only reason this is being done is to cut costs. Cut too much and the inmates get ratty. One wonders what was promised to Kenneth Clarke when the tender went in. I think all Brummies should keep a watchful eye on events as this "goes forward". The Prison Officer's Association has a mandate from its members to take industrial action if any prisons are contracted out to the private sector. A recipe for mayhem?

Eric Illsley's positive porridge time!

The wife of disgraced Labour MP Eric Illsley says he's doing fine in jail. He's keeping his head down. She says, "The first few phone calls were slightly emotional obviously because it was a shock but he's keeping his head down and getting on with it. He seems chirpier now than the first few days. He'll cope. He's not always been an MP. Eric didn't come from the playing fields of Eton, he comes from the playing fields of Kendray (in Barnsley)... so he's quite resilient, he'll handle it well." Hold on a minute, dear! So you think public schoolboys are not up to a period in the slammer? Most of those who ever do find themselves on the wrong side of the law fit in perfectly well. It's the pretentious middle classes that don't fair so well.

Recent old Etonian lags have done quite well. Lord Brocket got knifed in jail, which gave him a rise in the pecking order on kudos. Jonathan Aitken has reformed himself from being a perjuror. Old Etonian Simon Mann found himself in a frightful jail in Equatorial Guinea after trying to get rid of the dictator. He is now working as an adviser to President Obiang  -  six years after trying to overthrow him. No doubt he told the despot it was all a terrible mistake.

Mrs Illsley may think the playing fields of Kendray will have given her husband a sense of coping but I think she's just trying to get her ten pence worth of class bitterness in. Eric will do far better if he comes out with his head held high, realising that he did wrong (which she tells us he does realise) and put his time and skills to good use.

Also Mrs Illsley should remember what Roger Cooper said almost 20 years ago when he was released from Ervin jail in Tehran. When questioned by eager tabloid journalists about his time at the hands of his Persian prison guards, he said, "Anyone who has been to a British public school can do five years in an Iranian jail."

Eating porridge is only the start!

Female guard strangled in prison chapel

I've never understood why the American authorities call their prisons correctional centers when very little correction seems to take place. Washington State is the latest to find out they have made a grave error - a dereliction of duty in fact. Female guard Jayme Biendl has been strangled in the chapel by an inmate trying to escape. The guard had been telling people that she felt unsafe as the sole person guarding this part of the prison.

Equal opportunities? Political correctness? No, it's just the stupid way things are done these days. Any fool could have told the authorities that this was not a good idea. A life has been taken. No doubt they will seek to fry the culprit in a grisly manner, yet totally misunderstanding that it was they who had a duty in the first place. It seems Pontius Pilate may have had a hand in drafting the regulations.

The whole thing stinks!