13/08/2009 – Charities should not run prisons
Two charities (one that is ironically named Catch22) have recently declared that they are bidding to run prisons. This has rightly and predictably caused an outcry amongst other charities who believe that charities should not attempt to “exercise the coercive powers of the state”.
NAVCA’s Chief Executive, Kevin Curley is running an energetic facebook campaign against this development.
As Ros McCarthy says in this week’s Third Sector magazine: “Dispensing punishment and depriving citizens of their liberty is not the job of a charity. Charities could be pushed into forcibly restraining prisoners; putting them into overcrowded or strip cells. Prisons have a long history of breaching human rights. The boundaries between the state and civil society have never been fixed, but running prisons is a step too far”. Certainly I don’t think that one could ever find a way to frame incarceration as a charitable object.
This whole issue brings up wider issues about how the Third Sector has been used by the present Government to sugar the pill of widespread privatizations and to provide cover (“voluntarisation”) for a massive shift of power from the state to the private (and voluntary) sector. Sadly some of the national organizations that purport to represent the sector and should know better (ACEVO in particular) have gone along with this trend without any real thought or discussion about whose interests this is in, where this leaves the sector and whether we should be allowing ourselves to be used in this way.
Posted by Andy Gregg