Sexual Harassment, Psychological Abuse, Self-Harm, Mental Health, & Privatisation Contracts
Farah Damji edits a magazine for female prisoners called The View.
She granted me an interview yesterday.
We spoke about the state of the prison system, specifically for women.
The conversation lasted an hour and twenty minutes.
The issues she raises are not getting out into the public eye.
If the public were to discuss these matters, billions of pounds worth of outsourcing contracts with the Ministry of Justice would be jeopardized.
Because the public would realise that billions of pounds spent on providing services for prisoners from education, rehabilitation to mental health is being tragically wasted.
We are talking about large scale corruption and incompetence.
But most people are simply not interested in ‘Prison Reform’.
There is enormous waste in the Ministry of Justice, where contracts are tendered to private and third sector organisations with little or no scrutiny and are causing actual harm.
This should be a scandal on the scale of the infected blood and the sexual abuse inquiries.
This is a recent article Farah has written on Medium.
The mainstream media’s coverage of Farah in the press is simply hysterical. She is demonized and made to look mad, bad and dangerous. But she has never committed a violent offence.
There are false reports of a Personality Disorder diagnosis — she suffers from C-PTSD (Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), a condition which is exacerbated in prison.
At Farah’s trial in Southwark Crown Court last week the Judge, HHJ Gledhill QC, made it clear he found it offensive that Farah knows her rights.
She is a woman who demands that her rights and those of all women in the criminal justice system are observed.
Somehow, this is pathologised and made dangerous by the very agencies meant to ensure that they observe the rights of the most vulnerable women in society.
Farah has written extensively about G4S and privatisation, including in a prison newsletter she started called The View, and is worried that if she is incarcerated again, she will be suicided by the state and become another death in custody statistic.
At the bottom of Farah’s recent medium post, some the View Magazine’s supporters are named. Amongst them are Baromess Uddin, Courtenay Griffith QC and Peter Woolfe the restorative justice campaigner.
Farah has identified that amongst The View’s supporters are, New Economics Foundation and Big Society Capital which are conduits for the sanitisation of privatisation.
They support hedge funds and private for profit companies board the criminal justice gravy train.
Though Farah has identified the sinister effect of privatisation on the well being of prisoners, it is these very purveyors of performance related social impact bonds that have also helped support her newsletter.
This type of philanthrocapitalism preys on the most vulnerable in society and gamifies and monetises their suffering.
As Lenin once said, The Capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with.
Or in this case, the prison owners will lease you the laptop on which you describe the torture & drug dependency their shareholders impose upon you.
Which they then turns into a performance-related financial derivatives market.
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