Wooden staves used in migrant detention centres
· Prisons inspector calls the practice unacceptable
· Home Office insists the weapon is 'rarely drawn'

Alan Travis, home affairs editor
Wednesday October 5, 2005
The Guardian

       Prison officers at two of Britain's biggest immigration detention centres are routinely carrying wooden staves to enforce discipline, despite the fact that their use is banned in low-security prisons across England and Wales. The practice is revealed today by Anne Owers, the chief inspector of prisons, who tells ministers that their use is unacceptable. "Their routine deployment in a centre holding those not convicted of any criminal offence is intimidating," she has told the home secretary, Charles Clarke.

      Wooden staves are being used to intimidate detainees at Dover and Haslar, near Portsmouth, immigration removal centres which hold people refused asylum and illegal entrants who face removal.
A standing Prison Service instruction, PSO 1600 which is known as the "bible" of prison discipline on the use of force, says that wooden staves - which are about 30cm (1ft) long and similar to old-style police truncheons - must not be carried by officers in category D low-security, women's and juvenile prisons in England and Wales. It adds that the "drawing and use of a stave must be regarded as an exceptional measure". But Ms Owers records that one of the five occasions when force was used at Haslar in the six months before her inspection in May had involved a member of staff drawing his stave. "There may be exceptional circumstances that demand the issue of weaponry, but their routine deployment in a centre holding those not convicted of any criminal offence is intimidating and, significantly, not regarded as necessary in private sector removal centres," she said.
The practice was defended yesterday by a Home Office spokesman who said it was a standing instruction to prison officers outside of category D, women's and juvenile prisons to carry a stave or extendible baton at all times. "The risk- assessment at Haslar and Dover removal centres is that this is necessary," he said. "They are very rarely drawn and have been used on only 20 occasions in prisons in the past year. One of those 20 occasions was in Haslar."

     But Prison Service officials are so unhappy with the potential dangers of using wooden staves to control immigration detainees and other prisoners that they are to be banned by next year throughout all prisons in England and Wales and replaced by plastic Cubiton batons based on a Chinese martial arts weapon. "The stave is no longer considered adequate protection, with the potential of splitting or breaking when it actually comes to using it," Jennifer Wood of the Prison Service's security policy group was quoted as saying last December in an internal Home Office newsletter. It is expected that wooden staves will be banned throughout the prison estate from next January. Ms Owers' inspection report into Haslar also says that the buildings are in such a poor state of repair that its continued use as an immigration centre should depend on a major rebuilding programme.
The chief inspector of prisons also records that new vans used by the private escort contractor were "not fit for purpose", with cramped seating and clear windows that allowed onlookers to see inside, which triggered a number of incidents of abuse by passers-by. The windows have since been blanked out.

     Haslar also operates a novel "reward and punishment" system under which detainees put on an "enhanced" level of privileges are not only offered the choice of smoking or non-smoking dormitories but also the opportunity to order goods from the Argos catalogue and take part in bingo sessions paying higher prize money. Half the 100 immigration detainees in Haslar are Muslim.