Without prejudice: Corporate hostility

Summerhill and Blunkett's bullies

Nick Cohen / Observer 23apr00

American students are refusing to eat their dinners. Abstinence isn't inspired by worries about their figures or, indeed, the repressive effects of alcohol on the appetite. The boycott is the first recorded sanction against mass corporate imprisonment.

If protest was going to happen anywhere, it had to be in the United States. Two million people are behind bars (a 300 per cent increase since 1980) and the young are suffering in all manner of novel ways. Nearly one third of black men aged between 20 and 30 are under the control of the criminal justice system. California spends more on locking up its citizens than on educating them in universities. Three-strikes-and-you're-out laws (imitated by Britain) and mandatory sentences (ditto) have filled two-thirds of places, in a prison system whose scale is without precedent in the history of democracy, with drug users.

Meals are weapons because Sodexho Alliance, a French conglomerate, is both the largest supplier of food to US campuses and the largest investor in the Corrections Corporation of America.

At Albany University in New York State, demonstrators against the booming global-incarceration market occupied the administrator's offices on 4 April and inflicted the cruel and unusual punishment on security guards of blasting them with a CD of 'Purple Rain' by that Artist Formerly Known as Prince. (The tortured cops cracked when 'When Doves Cry' came on and robotically mouthed the lyric.) Offers of free pizzas and vegan pies persuaded students to abandon the giant Sodexho dining rooms at Earlham College in Indiana.

The Prison Moratorium Project, which is organizing the boycotts from New York, portrays penal capitalists as the beneficiaries of a new slave trade, characterized 'by greed, inhumanity and incompetence'. Those who find the propaganda a bit over-egged might consider that the values behind jails as revenue centers is the same as the business principle that animated slavery - the production of profit from the deprivation of liberty.

To keep the dividends heading upwards, CCA - whose slogan is 'If You Build It, They Will Come' - lets hopelessly trained non-union warders loose. South Carolina cancelled a contract with CCA after 18 boys were packed into a one-man cell and told to use paper cups if they wanted to go to the loo. The American Civil Liberties Union is suing CCA on behalf of a woman who alleges that guards repeatedly sexually assaulted her while she was being moved across the country. In Lockdown America (Verso, £20), a grim account of the growth of coercion in the land of the free, Christian Parenti described what happened when CCA opened an Ohio jail in 1997 and made petty offenders become the room-mates of psychos. 'The prison became a chaotic gladiator's pit where non-violent burglars and crack addicts were haphazardly thrust into cells with seasoned rapists, habitual killers and other high security predators.' There were 44 assaults, 16 stabbings, two murders and the escape of six 'very angry young men' in 15 months. One CCA worker described her colleagues as 'like the people who got beat up in high school. This was their way of getting back at the world'.

All very shocking, you might agree, a Quentin Tarantino remake of Porridge , but nothing, surely, to do with us.

But the Washington consensus cares nothing for borders and does not confine its depredations to economic policy. For nearly a decade the Old Conservatives and New Labour have displayed a colonial cultural cringe before all things American. If the United States has private prisons, then so must we. (CCA was given the contract to run Blakenhurst Prison in Worcestershire. When an inquest found that Alton Manning, a black inmate, had been unlawfully killed when he was dragged through the jail in a necklock by a gang of guards, its employees were not punished and indulgent Ministers gave the corporation the another contract to run a prison in Salford.) If Sodexho can grow rich on public money in the US, then it must be allowed to prosper in Britain. (For an undisclosed fee, it is distributing the pitiful handful of vouchers asylum seekers must live off and telling supermarkets that the Home Office's order to pocket refugees' change is an unmissable 'revenue-making opportunity'.)

Politicians who are fanatical about naming and shaming, in short, can't find it in themselves to shun a single pariah corporation. Others, however, are more robust. If you look at the demonstrations in Seattle and the City, or the world-wide support for the London environmentalists sued by McDonald's, or the backlash against Monsanto, you see a cheering shift from political correctness to a genuinely radical concern with the operations of multi-nationals.

Opposition springs in part from the acknowledgement that 'political correctness' was barely political at all. The advertising department at Virgin Cola will happily show a gay wedding, just as Nike will put up PC posters of Tiger Woods declaring that 'there are still courses in the US where I am not allowed to play because of the color of my skin' and of apparent feminists protesting that 'high heels are a conspiracy against women'. (The pumps Woods and the liberated sportswomen were promoting were made, according to the American National Labour Committee, by Chinese sub-contractors whose women workers earned $0.16 an hour in factories where discipline was maintained with corporal punishment.) It is not, as Naomi Klein remarks in No Logo (Flamingo, £14.99), the Das Kapital of the growing anti-corporate movement, that the battles for greater sexual and racial equality weren't worth fighting, but that they remained paltry and pyrrhic as long as no attempt was made to connect them to the wider struggles against corporations that downsize in the West and sweat in the East (while all the time shouting their Bennetonesque love of multiculturalism, the better to sell in the global marketplace). 'The need for greater diversity,' she writes, 'the rallying cry of my university years, is now not only accepted by the culture industries, it is the mantra of global capital... Identity politics as they were practiced in the Nineties, weren't a threat, but a goldmine.'

Businesses and politicians don't know how to respond to the changing mood. Harriet Harman and her fellow Stepford Wives complain noisily about the ban on breast-feeding in Parliament without understanding that those who might have supported them once now remember their cutting of the benefits of single mothers and emit a sneering laugh. Sodexho whines that it is just one investor among many in private prisons and that it does all kinds of fluffy things, such as giving homesick students the meals their moms cook.

The critics ignore the PR. Kate Rhee, the director of the Prison Moratorium Project, wants to see numbers slashed in bulging state cells. She concentrates on private jails instead because 'anything that is anti-corporate gets people going these days'.

Trend spotting is a journalistic vice. The majority of students in America aren't interested in confronting anyone, and the US is a hotbed of revolution when set against the bovine British universities. Yet there are straws in the wind pointing to a new seriousness of purpose. Perhaps the pseudo-egalitarianism of Harman and her sort and anti-racist cant of the hip and concerned corporations won't wash for ever.

• As Professor Ian Cunningham said on the Letters Page last week, David Blunkett compounded 'the lies already put out by his press office' when he accused me of lying about his scandalous treatment of Summerhill School. (A brave courtier should tell him that charges of mendacity can't be leveled with conviction by this Government.)

The outstanding question is why did he bother? The private school has just 60 pupils - 40 of them foreign. Yet it has been hounded by Chris Woodhead's inspectors for years, been forced to defend its name before the Independent Schools Tribunal and, when it won, had the fact of its victory denied by supposedly neutral public servants and their supposedly Right Honourable Secretary of State. Conservatives in all parties hate Summerhill for allowing pupils to decide what lessons they attend. But it was scarcely worth a decade-long assault.

Ian Stronach, Professor of Education at Manchester Metropolitan University, has studied a case which has shocked civil servants of the old school and concluded that the operation was to protect Woodhead.

The Chief Inspector of Schoolgirls purports to follow a 'stakeholder approach' 'that takes into full account the interests of pupils, parents, governors and teachers'. All of the above support child-centered learning. The inspectors swore they weren't attacking the philosophy of the school's founder, A.S. Neil, but then put that philosophy in the dock.

Unfortunately for them, Summerhill fought back. Its lawyers smoked out a secret hit list of schools in Blunkett's Education Department. The judge described it as 'astonishing'. More revelations were prevented by Ministers throwing in the towel, stopping the proceedings and pretending they had forced Summerhill to come to terms.

The case was about to be turned on its head and become a public inspection of the inspectors. If the judge had found their actions had been legally insecure, Stronach argues, then the floodgates would have opened. All schools which thought they had been Summerhilled by biased inspectors could have gone to law.

Given he is the first blind Cabinet Minister, Blunkett ought to be as loved as Mo Mowlam. His relentless authoritarianism has ensured instead that he is seen as a soured man with a bullying streak.

nick cohen@observer.co.uk