Thursday, January 16, 2014

No sense of humanity

In a report by the Inspectorate of Prisons after visiting Harmondsworth immigration removal centre, near Heathrow airport,  inspectors condemned "shocking cases where a sense of humanity was lost" at the centre in west London.

The Prison Reform Trust said the centre had "forgotten the basic principles of humanity and decency".

An 84-year-old immigrant detainee suffering from dementia, who was declared unfit for detention, died in handcuffs. The 84-year-old was taken to hospital in handcuffs, where he died while still in restraints, inspectors found. Doctors said the Canadian man was unfit for detention or deportation after diagnosing him with Alzheimer's disease, but he was not released and no referral was made to social services. Medical notes described him as "frail, 84 years old, has Alzheimer's disease ... demented. Unfit for detention or deportation. Requires social care".

Other examples in the report included a stroke victim in a wheelchair, who was handcuffed on a journey to hospital for no obvious reason and a dying man who remained handcuffed while sedated and undergoing an angioplasty procedure in hospital.

Removal centres are used for temporary detention, in situations where people have no legal right to be in the UK but have refused to leave voluntarily. However inspectors said that 11 detainees had been held at the centre for more than a year, including a man who had been held for more than two years despite being willing to return to his own country. There were also nearly 100 hunger-strikers identified in the six months prior to the inspection. Some of the rooms at the 600-capacity detention centre were described as overcrowded, dirty and bleak.

Chief Inspector of Prisons Nick Hardwick said: "These were truly shocking cases, and they weren't isolated, and they reflected a culture where too often the individual human needs of the people who were being held were simply being forgotten.” [SOYMB emphasis]

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