Crime, damn lies and logistics

A recent advert for the Centre Manager’s job at David Gray House, the island’s bail hostel which is run for government by the Sally Army, not only contradicts lies told by past and present Ministers for Home Affairs but gives away other secrets.
The main lie spouted by the DHA is that, though run by a religious group, DGH services are equally available to those of all or no religious affiliations, and that attending daily acts of worship does not get you a better probation report.
All this came out a few years back when Muslim men were detained in the old Victoria Road jail because, as they would not or could not attend a daily act of Christian worship they were told was compulsory, DGH wouldn’t take them. When the Minister of Home Affairs was challenged over this he had to ask his staff if it was true.
It cannot be established if he was then misled by either the duty probation officer who told the men’s lawyer or the DGH manager (both Broadway Batshit klingons who were, as it happens, quietly trying to set up a rival operation at the time), or if the minister just decided to be ‘economical with the truth’ to his critics.
What is known is that the DGH management then got brown underpants and attendance for residents at the daily worship stopped being compulsory, though as the court reports continued to be given by folk who thought it should be those who did not attend were inevitably marked as ‘uncooperative’ with the program. One other affect was that future adverts for DGH staff stopped short of demanding applicants were Salvationists or at least Christians, and merely asked that they be prepared to work within the ‘Christian ethos’ of the project.
If that ‘Christian ethos’ phrase sounds familiar, that would be because it is a fudge term introduced by a notorious CARE workshop held at Stepford Central (Tynwald Mills) for Christian employers who only want to employ bigots and brown-nosers but are worried they might end up in court. Several known attendees hold key ‘gate-keeping’ positions in Government departments and two are now government ministers, which rather explodes the myth that government don’t go along with this flat-earth nonsense.
So it is interesting that the mid-March advert for a new DGH Centre Manager says “You will need to be a committed and practising Christian who can work with the chaplain to promote the spiritual ethos of the centre.”
As well as being illegal – even in the Isle of Man – that lets several cats out of the bag. By the way, DGH does not actually have a ‘chaplain’ - or any kind of trained/licenced minister of religion - on tap. But explaining why also allows me to explode another myth – that the Salvation Army is an independent Manx charity.
The advert helpfully directs applicants to the Northwest Divisional Headquarters of the Salvation Army, which actually manages the centre and receives the income from the Manx government, although both parties to this shady arrangement would rather you did not know that. All this last came up in the 1980s, when some old biddies left houses to the Manx Salvation Army to be used for housing vulnerable people. Against the wishes of local Salvationists, Northwest DHQ decided to cash in on the property boom, flogged them and banked the proceeds off-island.
At the same time, the local SA also had a £100K legacy, given on the understanding that they would turn their old hall into the island’s first purpose built youth centre - to be managed by a committee of influential Christians as the donor did not trust the government to do it. Problem was, the committee of influential (non-Salvationist) Christians they set up thought there was more loot in flogging the building to a brewery for a nightclub, which flatly goes against the core teetotal culture of Salvationists. They did this by placing ownership of the building into the hands of a Jersey trust, set up by the bank which brokered the deal –or to be more precise by an individual now employed by government to oversee the murky ‘Third Sector’ deals between government and churches which are gradually handing over social services to religious charities.
Because of the rows this sparked between local Salvationists, their English HQ and the bogus management committee which allows the Manx Salvation Army to be passed off as a ‘Manx charity’ some of the £100K legacy and some of the house sale money (but none of the much bigger pay-off from the sale of the old hall) was re-invested locally in the purchase of a local boarding house which became David Gray House. Up until about 2003 the DGH manager was a Salvation Army officer (i.e. a church minister) directly appointed by Northwest DHQ – a separate appointment to the minister who runs the Douglas Salvation Army worship centre. Then, due to cut-backs, Northwest DHQ dropped that arrangement and appointed a single officer with social work qualifications to (on paper) run both projects. In practice he ran the church and oversaw a DGH manager with minimal qualifications or experience in order that the DGH income continued to flow to Liverpool, thus thwarting a bid by a rival local evangelical sect to muscle in on the opportunity. He was also ‘invited’ to chair the QUANGO which set up both Manx homelessness ‘charities’, which, despite the personal fair mindedness of that officer and one or two others, resulted in the current less than satisfactory situation for any government attempt to (on paper) deal with core homelessness and rehabilitation problems.
The core problems, I would have to suggest, are not crime, poverty and social deprivation, but evangelical avarice, government disinterest, and the tendency towards flat-out porkie-telling of both guilty parties.

Slavery in the 21st Century

There’s a particularly sad bit of news in today’s Manx Indie – not yet online though I’ll update if it ever is.
As I’ve blogged before, Jurby Prison has run a number of slave labour projects, passed off as charity work. Anyone vaguely aware of what passes for probation and rehabilitation on the island knows the score.
Prisoners are ‘persuaded’ to ‘volunteer’ for ‘charity’ projects in return for positive reports which enable them to be released early. More accurately, the only way they can be released at the correct time, rather than endure petty-minded bureaucratic delays or even have their sentences extended for ‘lack of cooperation’, is to play ball. The ‘charities’ involved include some of the dodgiest evangelical scams on the island, though with free labour on tap local greens aren’t too picky either.
It resembles the situation whereby remand prisoners (i.e. those arrested but as yet unconvicted) can only get bail by agreeing to live at a fundamentalist Christian bail hostel, and when (up to a year later) they eventually go before a court only those who attended the prayer meetings get glowing reports on their behaviour.
It seems the latest slave labour project involved the local pentecostal minister enlisting lags to build a crib for Ramsey’s abhorent municipal ‘Christmas display’. There’s another sick joke here, by the way, because his predecessor was himself jailed for underage sex offences.
When the ‘volunteers’ were released on time Ramsey’s godbotherer lunatic fringe (AKA Faith in Action/Fellowship of Northern Churches) had a problem: who could they get to do their dirty work without having to actually pay anyone?
Schoolkids from Ramsey Grammar School was the answer.
So, to sum up then….
A small and insignificant bunch of faith-biased lunatics cannot be bothered to produce their own Yuletide propaganda. Having first failed to ‘contract’ one source of unpaid labour (enabled by an incompetent and bigoted government department) because for a change the justice system almost worked, they find their labourers from an even weaker group of victims, with help from an only slightly more competent government department.
Doesn’t this just show how Manx Christians (even with powerful friends in government) have lost all relevance to 21st century community life and indeed all respect in the community? Ever desperate to prove their little illusion is significant or wanted they stoop to cheaper and cheaper tricks, abusing weaker and weaker victims.
Sad, sad, sad.

Strange way to protect us from a police state

The Department of Home Affairs over here is responsible for a steady stream of sick jokes. For one, as those who know it best comment, it seems to employ worse people than it incarcerates. The use of slave labour for ‘charitable projects’, the lack of an independent prison visitor scheme or prisoner complaints system required by law, the high numbers of people who spend more time there before trial than they would afterwards (if eventually fairly convicted) because the only bail facility demands daily prayer meetings….
The list of other sick jokes about the prison service alone just goes on and on.
Now you can read a new one at http://www.manx.net/default.asp?id=18&articleid=9567 .
I passed this to a number of UK prisoners rights and civil liberties groups, and the jaws of most who read it are still hurting from hitting the floor so hard. If you don’t know why, the Wikipedia entry on the Strangeways Prison riot in 1990 is as good a place as any to start.
One other other common rumour amongst old lags about Mr O'Friel's real loyalties also caused some to ask: 'Does Opus Dei have a policy on police surveillance?'
Funnily enough, I did notice something odd a couple of years back, when the Manx version of new legislation on interception of communication was going through.
A curious clause was inserted at the last minute 'on human rights grounds'. Doubly curious, because it was commonly suspected at the time that Manx human rights legislation was being deliberately delayed to allow the police to retain as many unreasonable powers from the dark ages as possible.
In a nutshell, it makes it an offence for Manx police to bug the confessional booth in a Catholic church, or to require a Catholic priest to provide information on anything he hears in an act of confession. There was no similar dispensation for other Christian denominations or other faiths as far as I could tell.
How bizarre. Wonder if Dan Brown would be interested?

DHA dummy blows smoke in our eyes - again

Energy FM, the only Manx radio station staffed by anyone young enough to understand the issues, reports today on plans to ban Mephodrone over here. Sometimes known as ‘plant food’, it’s an iffy legal ecstasy synthesis flogged by mail-order firms via adverts in the kind of mags still read by semi-retired hedonists and alternative types.
I see at http://www.energyfm.net/cms/news_story_79687.html that: “In the House of Keys today, Adrian Earnshaw revealed that 22 people here have been referred to drug services because of Mephedrone.”
This is misleading – not on the part of Energy staff, who have higher standards and simply report what state sponsored layabouts say in the Keys, but by the DHA, who don’t.
It’s misleading because as Earnshaw and his nasty little cohorts know, people don’t get referred to ‘drug services’ because they have problems, but because the police or other powerful busybodies found them with miniscule amounts of substances which would be legal or semi-legal in more civilised countries. In order to avoid prison sentences they must then ‘voluntarily’ submit to being monitored by the state and bored stupid by fundamentalist retards who get public money by passing themselves off as ‘substance abuse counsellors’.
And Energy also have a story (see http://www.energyfm.net/cms/news_story_79752.html ) on a 20 year old who faces jail for £300 worth of bush.
Now, bear in mind that Manx prices are double the UK and that police routinely put a nought on the ‘street value’ of drugs. Then the waste of court, police and the 20 year old’s time becomes more apparent.
He could go to jail for having a Tesco-bagful of what would be a Class C drug in the UK, but isn’t on the Isle of Man because the Chief Minister has no expert drugs & alcohol advice. There, like around 80% of the jail inmates – many yet to actually face a court because they’re not prepared to pray every day (so can’t get bail) – this young man will waste taxpayer money, be prevented from doing a decent day’s work instead of staring at the walls and being lectured on his morals by certifiable cretins, and have difficulty finding another job when he leaves.
I have no particular interest in these substances, be they legal or not, but I’m ashamed to live on an island where the government is so ignorant, and special interests so corrupt and powerful, that we’re going bankrupt and sentencing a generation to poverty and unemployment.
And all because a few godbotherers looking for public handouts can’t bear for others to organise their own lives and pleasures. Even when those lives and pleasures do not bother anyone else.

No Manx justice, just this mess

At long last someone is taking a proper look at our rotten island prison. Sadly, still not the Department of Home Affairs.
Positive Action Group brought over a speaker from the Howard League recently. Predictably he wasn’t impressed at a set-up which involved handing far too much public money over to a bunch of cowboy contractors for a jerry-built slum. He was even less impressed at a justice system which fills 40% of said overpriced slum with folk who haven’t even been to court yet – and that’s only judging from official figures!
You can read about that at http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Paying-a-high-price-for.5700108.jp. And then one of the few local advocates interested in justice had his say at http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=39310.
All in all, not very impressive, and that isn’t even half the story. For example, can anyone explain why the only folk arrested to get bail are those prepared to sit through a daily prayer meeting at the island’s only bail hostel? In short, if you’re of any religious persuasion except an evangelical Christian one, or have no interest in the supernatural, bail is not available. Neither is a balanced probation report when or if you finally get to court.
And it gets worse. At some point a story will appear in the local press, probably under a byline, which suggests our youth justice system has impressed the experts.
It hasn’t, and if you want the untainted original DHA press release (written by a moonlighting Johnston Press hack if their previous stuff is any guide) you can find it at http://www.gov.im/fsc/ViewNews.gov?page=lib/news/dha/probation/workofyouthjusti.xml&menuid=11570.
Cut through the gloss and spin at the beginning and go straight to the bad news tucked away ‘incidentally’ towards the end.
What the inspectors actually said was that our youth justice system is run by a bunch of unco-ordinated amateurs and doesn’t work. In effect, what they were saying is it’s time the island actually got a youth justice system.

Freedom of speech - it's not just for 'proper' writers

There’s a story over on Mediawatchwatch that, when you think about it, suggests a slapdash, partial approach to freedom of speech amongst UK liberals.
In brief, Andy Thackwray, a prisoner in Hull, writes a column called ‘Angry Andy’ for Inside Time, a newspaper by and for prisoners. In his latest he hypothesises that swine flu was the result of a failed plot by Osama Bin Laden to “eradicate every pig in Christendom”. The article also has a cartoon of a bearded, sneezing and turbanned pig.
If you want, you can find the whole thing at http://jailhouselawyersblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/muslim-prisoners-are-revolting.html, a blog run by an ex-prisoner who flagged the whole thing up to the world.
OK, not going to challenge Jonathan Swift for the heavyweight satirist world championship, but a bit of light relief if you’re banged up on a cold, dark night.
Except that next John Roberts, Operations Director and Company Secretary at Inside Time, is contacted by ‘Diversity at Wormwood Scrubs’ (whatever that is) who think the article and cartoon “might be offensive to Muslims”. So, all 50,000 copies of the magazine get withdrawn and reprinted without Angry Andy’s piece and accompanying cartoon (which I’m not sure was by him anyway). This is costing the charity behind Inside Time £15-20,000.
The Jailhouselawyer also reports that Andy has been charged with a Disciplinary Offence, put in the Segregation Unit, and will be transferred out of HMP Hull. For those not familiar with prison affairs, this is a highly unusual punishment, usually reserved for hardcore political prisoners. Try Googling the name ‘John Bowden’ for an example of both the kind of individual and circumstances under which it has been used recently.
Now at this point, if this was a writer in South America or an Arabic country then PEN, Index on Censorship and others would be going ballistic, probably even Amnesty or Human Rights Watch.
When an Oxbridge inbreed like Martin Amis spouts clueless shite about Muslims in a broadsheet does the print run get stopped? Ditto the admittedly more reasoned writing of Salman Rushdie and his supporters once the Satanic Verses saga kicked off.
Is the quality of Angry Andy’s writing any worse than the rhetoric of Geert Wilders, or the cartoon than the infamous Danish ‘turban bomb’? Or is it that we don’t think there’s a principle at stake if the censored writer is ‘only’ a common English convict?
I would argue that, if anything, assuming that no Muslim prisoner will see the joke and all will riot as one in protest is itself racist and offensive. And I can think of at least two Muslim women stand-up comedians in the UK doing stuff at least as ‘offensive’ about their fellow Muslims, not to mention chavs, evangelical Christians and Guardianistas.
I would argue that treating some working class white guy in a UK jail in a way the police and courts would not dare treat an Oxbridge professor who expresses the same view, but in more flowery language in a literary mag, is bang out of order.
I would argue that the principle of freedom of speech has to be defended robustly in this country or not at all. You don’t pick and choose the nice guys and the eloquent cases. You defend the Rushdies, but also right wing pricks like Geert Wilders and the Danish cartoonists…..and lags like Andy Thackwray, serving time for I know not what and I am not about to ask.
Because it makes no difference, and because if decent folk don’t speak up for the Thackwrays of this world as we would for ‘proper writers’ scum like the BNP will pretend to.

Wanted, godbothering prison visitors. Must have own rubber stamp

I was amused by the appeal for new members for the Independent Monitoring Board at the local prison (see http://www.gov.im/lib/news/dha/prison/independentmonit.xml).
I laugh because my experience last year at an interview for the Board of Prison Visitors confirmed to me that it’s a waste of time even trying to find middle ground with the bigots and throwbacks who run this island.
I knew about the disgraceful human rights record, I’d even read the damning 2003 report by the ECPT (European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment) on Manx prison conditions (available at http://www.cpt.coe.int/en/), but I was willing to do my middle of the road bit and give the Prison Visitors a try if that was what it took.
Big mistake!
For a start, the Board were so slack it took about six months to get enough of them together to interview me. As soon as I entered the room I knew it wasn’t worth the wait either. Small town biblebashers one and all - I swear one guy’s knuckles even scraped the ground. Their faces on knowing I was not only an atheist but a member of Liberty and Amnesty International for over 25 years were a picture.
Needless to say they didn’t take me. Funnily enough, I later found out they’d happily allowed the successor to an evangelical pastor who was put away for child sex offences to be a prison chaplain, even though he’d bought his clerical title from a correspondence course in the Evangelical Times. Even funnier, one interviewer, I now realise, must have once helped prevent the police from interviewing East European victims of the pentecostal pest after an assault I witnessed in 1998. The charity that brought his victims over is still running, though they’d be worried if they knew that their trustees, including a senior Manx politician, are now listed on East European police files as possible threats to children, and the kids are routinely debriefed by police after their annual visits to the Isle of Man.
So, would I recommend any right-minded local collaborates with bogus Manx government committees set up to rubber stamp bigotry and human rights abuse?
No, because there are probably more thugs, bigots and crooks around the Department of Home Affairs than in the prison.
Why pretend otherwise? Just treat them like the villains they are, and stay well clear.

No faith in prison reform

A piece in yesterday's Observer about godbotherers in prisons make me wonder if even the 'broadsheet' press bothers with basic fact-checking any more.
In Faith groups spreading the word on the wings one Jamie Doward claims: 'the unspoken truth is that, in an increasingly irreligious society, Jesus continues to walk the wings of Britain's prisons, offering salvation to those who have no other chance of saving themselves.'
He goes on to quote ad nauseum from twattish cults like the Kainos Community and Prison Fellowship Ministries without bothering to verify their claims.
Take Kainos's claim, 'independently verified by academics' , that 'only 13 per cent of the serious offenders who complete its courses go on to reoffend after two years, compared with 35 per cent across the prison service average.'
Actually, the report they're referring to was demanded as part of a 1999 Home Office review to decide if Kainos should be further funded after running out of public money two years into a four year program. It's not available to the public, as Kainos paid for it, but a parliamentary committee considered it, and their 'executive summary' said that a comparison between those who had been through Kainos and 14,000 prisoners serving similar sentences in similar prisons found no significant difference in re-offending rates. By comparison, prisoners on other, more secular, rehabilitation programmes were on average 10% less likely to offend again.
Then he confuses things by saying 'The Prison Fellowship has more than 120 local prison prayer groups and 900 volunteers from all Christian denominations' , but unless I'm mistaken, this refers to their US program where they are one of four beneficiaries of a $22.5 million diversion of public funds towards evangelical chancers and away from proper prison reform work, not the UK. They shouldn't even be working in UK prisons since their 'InnerChange Freedom Initiative' was kicked out of Dartmoor for failing to ‘enhance diversity’ (i.e. they wouldn't work with anyone of other faiths or none) and this at the initial request of the UK's Chaplain General himself.
Funniest of all, Doward refers to Working with the Third Sector to Reduce Reoffending as a 'new document'. It has been available since early last year, and taken such a kicking from everyone from the BHA through to all serious prison reform and prisoners rights groups that there isn't a 'fact' left unchallenged.
OK, he later quotes doubters ranging from the NSS to the Howard League and NAPO, the prison officer union, but would most folk read that far anyway?
This has a Manx angle too. Since about 2003 the Salvation Army have been lobbying Tynwald to hand over prison reform to them in entirety, using an example of a Kainos style program they ran in a Nottinghamshire prison. They already run the bail hostel, where I continue to hear that good court reports depend on prayer meeting attendance - last year, for example, two Muslim remand prisoners seem to have been unable to get any bail before their court case came up because of this. The SA depend for 'drug and alcohol counselling' on the equally ridiculous Stauros cult running out of Broadway Baptists down the road. Housing and resettlement help for ex-prisoners is organised by a 'family liason officer' who also helps run Graih - another pathetic Broadway initiative where hardcore homeless alkies give an excuse for public funding to evangelicals too disorientated to stack Tesco shelves.....and so it goes on.
Considering that, by my calculations, at least as many evangelical pastors have been imprisoned for serious offences on the island in the last decade as have been employed for prison chaplaincy work, you have to wonder if anyone is still awake at the Department for Home Affairs.
The further you look and join the dots, the more you realise the Manx government are simply not serious about tackling social exclusion, but quite content to hide that by employing 'faith groups' to provide token programs with no proper audit procedure at a 10th of the cost of the professionals.