A US firm that ran a Texas prison where inmates were kept in tents that burned to the ground in a 2015 riot are in charge of the Manston migrant detention centre in Kent, where inmates are housed in tents. It is just one of the firms profiting from migrant misery at Manston. 

US outsourcing firm MTC ran several US prisons and migrant detention centres — a number have very grim records. The British government is so keen on outsourcing that it is one of several firms running the largely privatised centre, which has held up to 4,000 asylum-seekers. 

At Manston, migrant families, including children, are detained in tents behind razor wire — it is a detention camp. Manston was supposed to only be a short-term processing centre for migrants, but MPs who visited this week found “families who had been sleeping on mats on the floor for weeks” inside the marquee tents.

MTC has been drafted in to run some of the security at Manston, and is about to run a recruiting fair for guards on November 17 at the nearby Holiday Inn. 

MTC says in its job advertisement that it is “building on the successes of MTC in the US” and its work in the US “criminal justice system.” These successes include running the Willacy tent prison until most of the 2,800 inmates rioted and burned down the facility. 

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said the riot was “most unsurprising” because of poor conditions. Inmates slept in 200 closely placed beds per tent. ACLU’s visitor found inmates “getting thrown into isolation cells for complaining about bad food and poor medical care, being denied both urgent and routine medical care, and being cut off from contact with their families.” 

In 2015 there was another riot at the MTC-run Arizona State Prison — Kingman, which meant 1,200 prisoners had to be shipped out.  Arizona’s governor sacked MTC from Arizona’s prisons. 

Arizona’s official report into MTC’s prisons found “a culture of disorganisation, disengagement and disregard for state policies by MTC” along with “failure by MTC to conduct critical staff training, and withholding these failures from Department of Corrections monitors.” 

More recently, inspectors found MTC wrongly sticking inmates into solitary confinement at the Imperial Regional Detention Facility for migrants in Calexico, California. Inspectors found “serious violations regarding the administrative segregation of detainees” — administrative segregation means solitary confinement. 

The inspectors found 11 migrants had been kept in solitary confinement for more than 60 days and two others for more than 300 days. There had not been documented reviews of the isolation. Medical checks were inadequate. MTC was also not properly informing the authorities about how much solitary confinement it was imposing on inmates. 

These are just some of the many examples of bad MTC jails in the US, but there is no need to look overseas for MTC’s poor record.

In 2016 the British government gave MTC the contract to run Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre, a “secure school” for children and teenagers in Warwickshire. 

In 2021 the contract was ended early after Rainsbrook was “branded inadequate by inspectors.” The Prisons Inspectorate said it “found poor practice was placing children and staff at risk of harm, as well as failing to give vulnerable children — some as young as 14 — adequate care and support.” 

Under MTC there were “inadequate staffing levels” which “placed staff in ‘an impossible position’ and unable to care for children safely, with staff resorting to leaving children unsupervised and locking them in their rooms.” 

Staff were not properly trained and there was a “disconnect” between front-line staff and senior management. MTC also had a prime role in the 2014 privatisation of probation: MTC ran the London Probation Service, the largest region. Despite hundreds of millions in fees and extra bailouts, the privatisation had to be cancelled in 2019 because of poor performance by MTC and other contractors.  

Really, the failures of MTC at Rainsbrook and in probation — its two high-profile entries into the British “justice” market — should have been the end of the firm in this country. Instead, it is being brought into Manston by the back door.   

In 2021, the Home Office awarded MTC a contract to run “migrant quarantine hotels” in the Midlands. Company accounts show that this contract was then amended to let MTC provide security at Manston. 

MTC will be working alongside privatiser Mitie, which is the main contractor at Manston. As regular readers of this column will be aware, Mitie is a favoured government outsourcer. It helps that it has two top Tories as directors.

This year it put Salma Shah, a former special adviser to Sajid Javid, on the board. She joins Tory Baroness Couttie, who is already a Mitie director. Baroness Couttie, also known as Philippa Roe, was the Tory leader of Westminster Council for many years and an active Conservative representative in the House of Lords.  

Mitie did well out of Covid-19 outsourcing, running testing centres on government contracts. Another firm that did well out of Covid is also getting involved in making money from migrants at Manston. Security firm SSGC Ltd is advertising “an exciting opportunity” to work at Manston as a guard on £13 per hour. 

SSGC, run by former military police officer David Stubbs, was quite a small outfit until Covid: its turnover then shot up 14-fold, from £7 million in 2020 to £104m in 2021. 

The annual report says: “The Covid-19 government testing project under which SSGC was retained as security provider for three of the five government appointed tier 1 suppliers has ensured that this years’ results are exceptional.” 

Thanks to these “exceptional results,” due to being a contractor on outsourced government Covid testing centres, SSGC paid £2m in dividends to investors. After profiting from outsourced Covid testing, SSGC is now trying to make a profit out of outsourced migrant detention. 

Manston shows the government is committed to making asylum-seekers’ lives miserable, and also committed to outsourcing the misery. It keeps responsibility for migrant detention at “arm’s length” and shows the government believes everything, including imprisonment, should be a source of profit for its friends.