THE LOONY LEFT

Prison staff have been told not to refer to prisoners as ‘cons’ by the Her Majesty’s Inspector of Prisons, Anne Owers. This is because the convicts, in a focus groups study at Leeds jail, had complained that the term was disrespectful.

Mrs Owers [one of the Parekh commissioners] also complained that:

‘We heard too many staff referring to prisoners as “bodies” or “cons”.’

Brian Caton, the General Secretary of the Prison Officers Association, said:

‘Unless there is discipline in prisons we are not going to tackle the underlying problems of respect. This is political correctness gone berserk. The vast majority of prisoners call prison officers “screws” and we don’t make anything of it. It is just the way it is.

Just because we call them cons does not mean we are any less professional in how we deal with them.

Not only do prisoners now want us to call them by their first names, but treat them as if their misdemeanours are everyone else’s, and they are not.’

The Tory MP, Phillip Davies, said:

‘HMIP, instead of pursuing a politically correct agenda, should be concentrating on the things which actually matter to ordinary decent people.

People would like to see tougher sentences and a tough regime, rather than this sort of namby-pamby approach.’

In her report, Mrs Owers also complained that prisoners in the segregation unit had to get up at 7.30am every day.

Last year Mrs Owers complained about the wearing of Cross of St George tie pins by prison officers, in a section of a report dealing with racism [see English Rights Campaign entry dated the 13 October 2005].