I’ve recently discovered that earlier this year a number of members of staff here at Wakefield were nominated at the Prison Officer and Team of the Year Awards Ceremony. Well, there are actually a fair few officers that I actually think deserve this recognition. But none of the ones who I think truly deserve it received anything at all. What’s worse, in my opinion, some of those who actually won awards don’t deserve anything other than a prison sentence themselves. Continue reading →
Just lately they have been vaccinating people against influenza here. That’s not a particularly unusual thing in the winter, I guess. What I did find unusual was the letter I was sent about it. All of the following quotes are genuine and come directly from this letter.
Last year the kitchens here at Wakefield switched from providing three hot meals a day to providing one hot meal with a cold meal at lunch. As a compromise they put an option on the lunch menu of a pack of instant noodles for those who wanted something warm to make with hot water.
Only recently did I realise that the noodles they are providing are not suitable for the diets the kitchen provide them for.
A while back there were quite a few prisoners here coming down with serious chest infections. Before long anyone who displayed symptoms was told they had to have a mandatory check up and then faced quarantine. However, no one seemed to understand how quarantine is meant to work.
A couple of months ago a prisoner here was granted his parole and yet he wasn’t released until weeks later and everyone who got involved simply said that they had not yet been told to let him go. There was no reasoning, no logic. No explanation whatsoever.
Sometimes I really have to wonder who thinks up the policies here at Wakefield. Just a few weeks ago a notice to prisoners was published to say that, from now on, anyone who wants to order an item from one of the catalogues can only do so if they are not already in possession of a similar item. If they are, they must destroy or otherwise get rid of the item in their possession before ordering a replacement.
A couple of months ago a notice to prisoners appeared on the landings to inform us that the Ministry of Justice has now authorised governors to destroy any property confiscated from a prisoner after a set amount of time.
They say that if the property is not a permitted item (such as a mobile telephone) then it may be destroyed unless the prisoner can provide a valid reason not to do so, and if the property is a permitted item, but is confiscated for another reason (such as it not being listed on the prisoner’s property card) then it may be destroyed unless another prisoner makes a claim for it (and can prove it is theirs) within the fixed time limit. However, there are numerous things wrong with this new policy.
Over the past couple of years a number of police officers and prison staff have been convicted of leaking stories to the press about prisoners. Frankly I can’t believe so many people are pretending they didn’t know this kind of thing went on.
There has been a lot of talk lately about whether or not the Ministry of Justice will go ahead with their plan to ban smoking in all prisons by the end of this year.Continue reading →
High security prisons hold both category A (high risk) prisoners, and category B (the high end of medium risk) prisoners. These ratings do not always reflect the reality of a certain prisoner’s risk, but in order to get downgraded from category A to category B, they go through a review board each year.
Adam Mac 