America's gulag goes on strike.

Ye may have noticed over the New Year a prison riot in England, with prisoners staging an uprising over searches for contraband booze. What wasn’t reported as much was that in the USA a much bigger and more important protest by prisoners – a one day strike, which crossed racial lines as Black and White [...]

Clegg: Lies, then gets in trouble for telling the truth!

More evidence, as if it was needed, that Nick Clegg is a giant walking sack of shit with a ministerial car: yesterday at Prime Minister’s questions he said the government was going to close Yarl’s Wood, a hellhole private prison for asylum seekers who have done nothing wrong. But, a bit like when the Lib [...]

English youth face torture in private prisons

After a five year battle, campaigners in England have managed to uncover a shocking manual demonstrating that serious physical abuse of vulnerable young people is officially sanctioned in privately run detention centres for young people. Secure Training Centres (STCs) are units designed to house young (17 and under) offenders who have been sentenced to custody [...]

Kids in jail: another Lib Dem sellout

The ConDem government has announced what should be good news: the practice of detaining children at Dungavel is to end. Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre is a prison for asylum seekers who are to be deported. Parents with children have been held there, in some cases for more than a year. However, the fact that in [...]

International Women's Day – Cornton Vale Prison Protest

On 8 March, International Women’s Day comes around once more. As the Scottish Socialist Voice explained in a previous IWD special (scroll down to centre pages): For over 150 years, women and men across the world have demonstrated on International Women’s Day. On that day in 1857 in New York, hundreds of women workers in [...]

Yarl's Wood update: 3 weeks in to the Hunger Strike, government lying

Just a quick update to the issue we previously reported about the abuse of women detainees in Yarl’s Wood immigration detention centre. The women have now been on hunger strike for three weeks, demanding their freedom and better conditions in Yarl’s Wood. However, Meg Hillier, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for ‘Identity’ apparently, has written [...]

Protests in London for Yarl's Wood hunger strikers

While it’s a bit far away for any SSY members who aren’t living in exile down south to make, there’s an important protest in London tomorrow against the brutal treatment of women detained in Yarl’s Wood Imigration Removal Centre. Since February 5th over 50 women in the centre had been on hunger strike in protest [...]