One British Industry That Isn't Worried About Brexit

Despite scandals and backlash, private prisons are expanding

- Jillian Goodman, Dimitra Kessenides, and Stephen Merelman

When British prison inspectors appeared unannounced at Her Majesty’s Prison Birmingham, a large private facility in central England, they encountered pools of blood and vomit on the floors. Guards locked themselves in offices to sleep during patrol hours, and inmates wandered the corridors visibly high. At one point the chief inspector, Peter Clarke, became so overcome by drug fumes that he had to leave the housing unit. Earlier that week, his team’s cars had been torched in the secure staff parking lot, according to a letter he wrote to the justice secretary last August.

Two weeks after Clarke’s visit, ministers used emergency powers to take control of HMP Birmingham from G4S Plc, the private company that had run it since 2011. Britain holds a greater proportion of its inmates in for-profit prisons than any other country except Australia and does so at twice the rate of the U.S. Almost 20 percent of the 82,000 inmates in England and Wales are housed by three companies: G4S, Serco, and Sodexo. The private sector has an even bigger footprint in Britain’s immigration removal centers and prisoner transport services, and it also runs some of its police cells and probation monitoring. A G4S spokeswoman says the company has “no excuses” for the recent conditions at Birmingham, adding that its four other British prisons perform better.