Why fight the Wrexham Mega-Prison & the Prison Industrial Complex?

A new prison has been on the cards for north Wales for quite some time. Prisoners from Welsh speaking areas are incarcerated in England where the language and culture is different, families have to spend large sums of money and travel for hours to visit loved ones in prison. Why then as someone who has and has had relatives and freinds incarcerated in English prisons, do I oppose this Mega-Prison being built in north Wales?

Aside from the issues that plauge mega-prisons in terms of their awful conditions, as a prison abolitionist I don’t belive that prisons solve any social problems or make our communities any safer . The prison propulation is on the rise, between June 1993 and June 2012 the prison population in England and Wales increased by 41,800 prisoners to over 86,000 and the numbers are still rising.

WISE Up for Bradley Manning - Three weeks in Wales

WISE Up for Bradley Manning is a loose network of groups and individuals in Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England (WISE) taking action for Bradley Manning, the young US military intel. analyst with Welsh roots who has been held for almost two years without trial accused of blowing the whistle on war crimes and revealing other truths the US would have preferred to keep buried. Bradley Manning has been tortured and denied his constitutional rights. President Obama, Commander-in-Chief of the military, has already said he broke the law and has therefore irrevocably prejudiced the upcoming court martial as well as breaking – not for the first time – his election promise to protect whistleblowers.

We call for all charges against Bradley Manning to be dropped and for his immediate release. Blowing the whistle on war crimes is not a crime!

20 years of war and child suffering in Iraq remembered

The first bombing raid of the Gulf War was launched on Iraq 20 years ago, on January 15 1991, the birthday of peacemaker Martin Luther King Jr. The attack was cynically timed to coincide with US prime-time TV news. To mark this anniversary, vigils have been held in the US, in the UK and around the world. In Wrexham, an information stall was held in the town centre, highlighting the effect of the war on Iraq's children.

By January 1991, Iraqis had already been suffering months of punishing sanctions. In the 8 months from August 1990, these were estimated to have killed 47,000 children under the age of 5 [UNICEF]. Millions more babies and children were malnourished and not receiving the medical care they needed because food and medical supplies were not allowed into Iraq even though these items were expressly excluded from the sanctions. The results were nothing short of catastrophic for the Iraqi people.

On New Year's Day 1991, two weeks before the bombing began, four anti-war activists entered Griffiss Air Force Base in New York and disabled a B52 bomber, putting it out of action for the duration of the Gulf War. Remanded in custody pending trial and watching the war unfold on the jail TV set, one of them wrote:

From the outset, the military conflict has been presented as a Nintendo Game, free of serious consequence. Forty-four thousand bombing missions flown with no casualties shown, very cynical, very slick, very marketable. As death and destruction is reduced to blips on a video screen, dialogue is reduced to a discussion of technique: "how we will win?" rather than "why are we there?" The conflict is stripped of history, politics, economics with pivotal issues ignored and forgotten....Who armed Saddam Hussein? Who supported him, in the eight year war with Iran? Who created Kuwait and why? Does anyone remember the Shah? [Ciaron O'Reilly, 1991]

Fighting back in north Wales

No one active in the radical movement in Wales will now be unaware of the scale of the cuts proposed and being implemented by the ConDem coalition government, which they maintain are unavoidable due to the recession.

The cuts are already affecting public services from hospitals and schools to benefit and tax offices, public amenities from playgrounds to libraries.

Wales as always will be particularly hit as a very large number of people are employed in the public sector, and also rely on its services.