Tag Archives: Society

Suicide prevention expert pulls out of prisons talk over ‘censorship’

February 23, 2015MusingsAlan Travis, Article, Law, Main section, News, Prisons and probation, Society, Suicide rates, The Guardian, UK criminal justice, UK newsdiana Stone

Sadly not surprising to hear this.

This article titled “Suicide prevention expert pulls out of prisons talk over ‘censorship'” was written by Alan Travis, home affairs editor, for The Guardian on Monday 23rd February 2015 14.40 UTC

The government’s leading expert on suicide prevention has pulled out of a Ministry of Justice presentation on the rising number of suicides in prisons after being told, he says, not to make any link with falling staff numbers.

Prof Louis Appleby, who oversees the implementation of the national cross-government strategy for suicide prevention, was due to speak at the justice ministry’s “independent ministerial board” on prison suicides on Monday.

Several members of the independent board voiced their concern after Appleby, who is the national clinical director of health and justice, made public his decision on Twitter.

Deborah Coles, the co-director of Inquest, which works with families of those who die in custody, reacted by saying it was outrageous that the MoJ was trying to “gag” Appleby from making a link between a rise in prison suicides and staffing cuts.

The shadow justice secretary, Sadiq Khan, also protested: “If these reports are true, this is censorship – plain and simple,” he said.

“Ministers can’t tell a leading expert what he can and can’t say just because the truth is unpalatable. We need an honest assessment of what is driving the surge in suicides and violence in jails under this government.

“The truth is Chris Grayling refuses to acknowledge there is a prisons crisis, and will do anything he can to avoid hearing the truth about just how terrible an impact his policies have had on our jails.”

Whitehall sources suggest Appleby’s decision may have been based on a misunderstanding or misinterpretation.

They stress that the independent ministerial board, which is chaired by a Labour peer, Lord Toby Harris, and has in its membership Frances Crook of the Howard League for Penal Reform and Juliet Lyon of the Prison Reform Trust, has repeatedly discussed a possible link between suicides and prison staffing levels.

The board’s secretariat is provided by a seconded member of the justice ministry’s national offender management service and is understood to have requested Appleby keep his presentation focused on the wider aspects of the issue over which he has been an expert for more than 20 years.

Have pulled out of presentation on rising prison suicide at MoJ tomorrow after being told not to refer to falling staff nos. #HowGovtWorks

— louis appleby (@ProfLAppleby) February 22, 2015

The number of suicides in prisons in England and Wales has risen to its highest level for seven years with 84 self-inflicted deaths recorded in 2014 – a rise of 45% over the last four years.

Prison service staffing numbers have fallen from 45,080 in March 2010 to 32,280 in December 2014, a fall of 13,800 or 28%. After spending £56m on redundancy costs the justice ministry wrote to 2,000 former prison officers last summer asking them to join a prison service reserve on fixed-term contracts of up to nine months to help fill specific shortages.

The justice secretary, Chris Grayling, has repeatedly voiced concern at the rising suicide rates in prison and has set up the independent ministerial group to look into the causes. He has also announced his intention to make the question of mental health in prisons a priority.

But he has also insisted that there is no direct link between staffing levels and the rising suicide rate. In December he told MPs there there were sometimes “upward ticks in the suicide rate for which there is no obvious explanation”.

The justice ministry has tried to establish common factors among the self-inflicted deaths. Grayling says the work has not shown any difference in the suicide rates between prisons where there have been staff reductions and those where there have been none. He has suggested that the rising suicide rate among young men in general compared with a generation ago may be one factor in a complex picture.

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “The whole rationale behind the ministerial board is to help us to deal more effectively with the risk of deaths in custody. It is absolutely wrong to suggest there is any sort of censorship.

“No discussions are off limits, and claiming otherwise simply detracts from the efforts to understand the complexities that lie behind this difficult and sensitive issue.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

David Clapson’s awful death was the result of grotesque government policies

September 9, 2014MusingsArticle, Benefits, Comment, Conservatives, Economic policy, Frances Ryan, Opinion, Politics, Poverty, Social exclusion, Society, UK newsdiana Stone

Re-blogging this because its important. This kind of thing can happen to anybody at anytime…

This article titled “David Clapson’s awful death was the result of grotesque government policies” was written by Frances Ryan, for theguardian.com on Tuesday 9th September 2014 08.24 UTC

The coroner said that when David Clapson died he had no food in his stomach. Clapson’s benefits had been stopped as a result of missing one meeting at the jobcentre. He was diabetic, and without the £71.70 a week from his jobseeker’s allowance he couldn’t afford to eat or put credit on his electricity card to keep the fridge where he kept his insulin working. Three weeks later Clapson died from diabetic ketoacidosis, caused by a severe lack of insulin. A pile of CVs was found next to his body.

I’ll resist calling Clapson’s death a tragedy. Tragedy suggests a one-off incident, a rarity that couldn’t be prevented. What was done to Clapson – and it was done, not something that simply happened – is a particularly horrific example of what has, almost silently, turned into a widespread crisis. More than a million people in this country have had their benefits stopped over the past year. Sanctions against chronically ill and disabled people have risen by 580% in a year. This is a system out of control.

A petition for an inquiry into benefit sanctions, started by Clapson’s sister, Gill Thompson, is now on the verge of its 200,000th signature. This Thursday there will be a day of action against benefit sanctions across the country. If inspiration is required, you need look no further than the latest Department for Work and Pensions pilot scheme launched last week. The unemployed are set to have their benefits stopped if they don’t sign in at a jobcentre in the morning and spend the whole day there, every day. Breach the rules once and you’ll lose four weeks’ worth of benefits; twice and you won’t be able to feed your kids for three months.

Yes, some reasons for sanctions are almost laughable: going to a job interview rather than a meeting at the jobcentre that it clashes with; not completing an assessment because you had a heart attack during it. But let’s not convince ourselves the rest are credible – punishment sensibly bestowed on the scrounging unemployed. A government that deems it a success to stop the money someone needs to eat is a government of the grotesque.

Sanctions are a product of an attitude towards benefit claimants that says they are not people struggling to find work but suspects: lazy, stupid and in need of a DWP-kick to get them out of bed. The lazy are going hungry. Eight in 10 Trussell Trust food banks report that benefit sanctions are causing more people to need emergency food parcels. This, I suppose, is what Conservatives call motivation.

It doesn’t matter that sanctions are disproportionately hitting the most vulnerable. Nor that the DWP’s own commissioned report says that they are being imposed in such a way that vulnerable people often don’t understand what is happening to them, and are left uninformed of the hardship payments to which they are entitled. Six out of 10 employment and support allowance (ESA) claimants who have had their benefits stopped have a mental-health condition or learning difficulty. Are these the chosen victims of austerity now? By definition of being in receipt of ESA, many will struggle to do things such as be punctual for meetings or complete work placements with strangers in environments they don’t know. It is setting people up to fail and then punishing them for it.

Sanctions are not an anomaly. Rather, they are emblematic of the wider Tory record on welfare: one of incompetence and, at best, indifference. The work programme fails to find work for 95% of disabled people, but enforced, unpaid labour or loss of benefits is the DWP’s answer. More than a quarter of a million people are still waiting for PIP, the benefit needed to help cover the extra costs of disability. Seven hundred thousand people have been left waiting for an ESA assessment. Locking people out of their rightful benefits is becoming a theme for this government. The consequences are human; the response from the government is inhumane.

Clapson had only left his last job to care for his elderly mum, and before that had worked for 29 years. On the day he died he had £3.44 to his name and six tea bags, a tin of soup and an out-of-date can of sardines in his kitchen cupboards. Benefit sanctions are aimed at ending the “something for nothing” culture, as the DWP’s press release brags. I vote for ending the demonisation of the unemployed, disabled and poor.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

Tens of thousands march in London against coalition’s austerity measures

June 22, 2014MusingsArticle, Austerity, Business, Conservatives, Culture, David Cameron, Economics, Ken Loach, Kevin Rawlinson, Liberal Democrats, Liberal-Conservative coalition, London, News, NHS, Politics, Public sector cuts, Public services policy, Russell Brand, Society, UK newsdiana Stone

A bit of bother as the BBC have only reported this a day late after complaints

Post by Kevin Armes.

Kevin Armes‎A letter a day to No 10 – Keith Ordinary Guy.

Works at Self-employed writer

· 32 followers

· 1 hr ·

I just called the BBC on 02087438000 and spoke to a nice chap who said he’d been inundated with calls about the Austerity Demo yesterday. He seemed generally interested to know why he was getting so many calls on a normally quiet Sunday morning so I explained the reason was that the BBC had failed to report anywhere, on TV or their websites, that 50,000 people started this march outside the BBC’s London office. He gave me the number for Audience Services 03700100222 who answe…

Like Like · Comment · Share · 812917

This article titled “Tens of thousands march in London against coalition’s austerity measures” was written by Kevin Rawlinson and agencies, for theguardian.com on Saturday 21st June 2014 19.45 UTC

Tens of thousands of people marched through central London on Saturday afternoon in protest at austerity measures introduced by the coalition government. The demonstrators gathered before the Houses of Parliament, where they were addressed by speakers, including comedians Russell Brand and Mark Steel.

An estimated 50,000 people marched from the BBC’s New Broadcasting House in central London to Westminster.

“The people of this building [the House of Commons] generally speaking do not represent us, they represent their friends in big business. It’s time for us to take back our power,” said Brand.

“This will be a peaceful, effortless, joyful revolution and I’m very grateful to be involved in the People’s Assembly.”

“Power isn’t there, it is here, within us,” he added. “The revolution that’s required isn’t a revolution of radical ideas, but the implementation of ideas we already have.”

A spokesman for the People’s Assembly, which organised the march, said the turnout was “testament to the level of anger there is at the moment”.

He said that Saturday’s action was “just the start”, with a second march planned for October in conjunction with the Trades Union Congress, as well as strike action expected next month.

People’s Assembly spokesman Clare Solomon said: “It is essential for the welfare of millions of people that we stop austerity and halt this coalition government dead in its tracks before it does lasting damage to people’s lives and our public services.”

Sam Fairburn, the group’s national secretary, added: “Cuts are killing people and destroying cherished public services which have served generations.”

Activists from the Stop The War Coalition and CND also joined the demonstration.

The crowds heard speeches at Parliament Square from People’s Assembly supporters, including Caroline Lucas MP and journalist Owen Jones. Addressing the marchers, Jones said: “Who is really responsible for the mess this country is in? Is it the Polish fruit pickers or the Nigerian nurses? Or is it the bankers who plunged it into economic disaster – or the tax avoiders? It is selective anger.”

He added: “The Conservatives are using the crisis to push policies they have always supported. For example, the sell-off of the NHS. They have built a country in which most people who are in poverty are also in work.”

The People’s Assembly was set up with an open letter to the Guardian in February 2013. Signatories to letter included Tony Benn, who died in March this year, journalist John Pilger and filmmaker Ken Loach.

In the letter, they wrote: “This is a call to all those millions of people in Britain who face an impoverished and uncertain year as their wages, jobs, conditions and welfare provision come under renewed attack by the government.

“The assembly will provide a national forum for anti-austerity views which, while increasingly popular, are barely represented in parliament.”

The Metropolitan police refused to provide an estimate. A police spokesman said the force had received no reports of arrests.

A spokesman for the prime minister declined to comment.

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.