Activists in the UK are mobilizing against the Cameron government’s proposed diversion of foreign aid to build a new prison in Jamaica, and open a transatlantic export trade in inmates.
A public meeting to discuss opposition to the plan will be held Thursday, November 5, from 7:00 – 8:30 PM (SOAS Russell Square campus, room 583, London WC1H 0XG: map here). On Friday, November 6, there will be a 10 AM demo in front of the Jamaican High Commission (1 Prince Consort Road, London SW7 2BZ: map here), to kick off a London day of action against the prison-industrial complex.
This is all part of a November 2-8 week of actions across the UK, aimed particularly at Cameron’s plan to build a new super-prison in North Wales that would be the second largest in Europe.
Prisoner transfers — forced deportations of convicts — are a point where paranoias over crime and paranoias over migration meet. With Europe and North America more and more dominated by prisons and barbed-wire border fences, this intersection is ominous. Luke de Noronha writes movingly about some of his experiences with Jamaicans deported so far:
Many of the deported persons I have met lived in the UK for over ten years, built lives for themselves, started families, picked up regional British accents, and began to call the UK home. When they are forcibly returned, many land with a few tenuous family links at best, some with none at all. Some have to be housed in homeless shelters …
As one young man told me, he has only taken two flights in his life. The first, a flight to England to join his mother, aged 15. The second, and perhaps his final: a flight to Jamaica, in which he was restrained in handcuffs on a chartered plane from the UK, in November 2014. With tens of other black men, handcuffed to their seats, escorted by security agents, he was flown, against his will, to a country in which he had no support or resources. If this image does not feel uncomfortable, then we really are in a place where historical amnesia rules. A place where wrenching somebody from their home is a matter of justice for the “British tax-payer,” where bodies and lives are forcibly transported to honour racially inscribed citizenship policies, and where, ultimately, deportations are celebrated while reparations are ridiculed.
You can read more here — or, of course, on this blog.
Storming of the Courthouse During the Morant Bay Rebellion, by Barrington Watson (1931 -). In 1865, British authorities in Jamaica slaughtered rebels protesting how criminal law preserved the conditions of slavery three decades after its ostensible end. Jamaica commemorated the 150th anniversary of the Rebellion last month.
