HM's Prisons Threaten to Collapse...

[Big Orange]

Oh dear, this is worrying, everything seems to be on the brink and it's not even March yet:

Britain's prisons 'on brink of collapse'

Britain's prisons are "playing Jenga" without national health and safety standards, prison officers warned today.

Prison Officers Association members met in London this week in the wake of continued staff and budget cuts and a deadly wave of violence sweeping the country's prisons.

Delegates from around the country urged union leaders to commit to a national health and safety policy, including specific minimum ratios of staff to inmates for any given activity.

Recent weeks have seen assaults on officers and a series of riots at Moorland, Ford, Swaleside and Littlehey prisons.

Assaults on other inmates have also skyrocketed, with one inmate at Full Sutton - convicted child abuser and murderer Colin Hatch - killed in his cell the day before the conference.

Delegates unequivocally blamed the violence on systematic understaffing.

HMP Birmingham branch chairman Adrian Watts told the assembly his co-workers were being "coerced into rogue practices" to keep staffing costs down.

"We're constantly told we must work smarter.

"I'll tell you what smarter means. It means working dangerously with unacceptable practices.

"The pressure on individual members and managers is immense to capitulate on safety, all in the name of improving performance and cost.

"The national executive committee should - and I believe must - come out and endorse what it believes is a safe ratio of staff to prisoners," he said.

HMP Winson Green prison officer Brian Clarke agreed.

"Strike some agreements so that what is safe in a prison in London is safe in a prison in Lancashire, is safe in a prison in Wales and is safe in a prison in the Midlands.

"It's a national policy of standards. It's a national pay policy. It's a national uniform we wear. It's a national grievance procedure.

"It's a national policy for sick inattendance and it should be a national health and safety policy," he said.

The association's general secretary Steve Gillan said that there was a variety of ratios which leaders would take to their employers.

But minimum ratios were not necessarily "one size fits all."

A situation which took five officers in Birmingham might need 10 in a more secure facility, he said.

BBC

[someone_else]

More or less the same shit here in Italy. Prisons with more than double the theoretical max inmate and little more than half the theoretical optimal number of guards, numbers of "inmate suicides" skyrocketing, and stuff like that.