Why single sex prisons matter: it could be you banged up

[Beowulfa]

This week sees the start of a public inquiry into the Post Office IT scandal which saw hundreds of innocent staff bankrupted, imprisoned and driven to suicide by systemic IT failings that the Post Office refused to recognise.

A woman was interviewed on the radio earlier describing the horror and disbelief of ending up in prison. I thought it was a useful reminder that nice, ordinary middle class people in respectable jobs can be found guilty and imprisoned. Of course nobody thinks it could ever happen to them.

No wonder the government were so quick to privatise the post office.

Seriously, looking at the all encompassing nature of hate crime legislation in Scotland, there's a feasible probability that someone will be imprisoned for stating a biological fact.

I have no difficulty in believing that women from any class might find themselves in prison.

Do you have a link OP? Someone linked a podcast in a previous thread that I'd been meaning to listen to but can't find.

''The scandal has been described as "the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history".

Between 2000 and 2014, more than 700 Post Office branch managers were wrongly accused of theft, fraud and false accounting due to a flaw in the Horizon accounting IT system.''
www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60375978

Thank you, I think this is the podcast recommended to me

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000jf7j

The website of the official enquiry is here: www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/

Private Eye pursued the issue relentlessly and have produced a free special report: www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/justice-lost-in-the-post

That report is interesting, because it illustrates the way an organisation can end up wilfully crushing the truth and countless innocent people to meet its objectives. A few echoes of attitudes you see in other groups we talk about often.

I hope to see similar reports on them in the future. Stuff like this please:

The Post Office’s approach, said Fraser, boiled down to “bare assertions and denials that ignore what has actually occurred… [and] amounts to the 21st century equivalent of maintaining that the earth is flat”. He even ruled that the civil settlement should not stop subpostmasters pursuing the Post Office for malicious prosecution. As for the IT company, the trial had presented such “grave concerns regarding the veracity of evidence given by Fujitsu employees to other courts in previous proceedings” that Fraser decided to send a file to the director of public prosecutions.

And there's a name and shame of politicians who failed to do their job - something we're still seeing a lot of:

Government ministers who failed to properly examine the unfurling public scandal while holding the postal services brief. Under the coalition came the uninspiring trio of Ed Davey (2010-2012), Norman Lamb (for seven months) and Jo Swinson (2012-2015). They were followed by a succession of shortlived Tory junior ministers with other fish to fry and careers that would not have been helped by addressing the subpostmasters’ grievances: George Freeman, Baroness (Lucy) Neville-Rolfe, Margot James, Andrew Griffiths and Kelly Tolhurst.

Quite. I donated to KPSS last week.

[quote Beowulfa]The website of the official enquiry is here: www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/

Private Eye pursued the issue relentlessly and have produced a free special report: www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/justice-lost-in-the-post[/quote]
Computer Weekly were investigating this from 2008 (or earlier) and uncovered the glitches in the system (the ones they said couldn’t happen). It was about this time they were going after the MOD with the chinook computer faults which caused crashes (which also apparently couldn’t happen and were put down to pilot error).

Amazing when things that ‘can’t happen’ isn’t it?

That report is terrifying

@Linguini

No wonder the government were so quick to privatise the post office.

The government has not privatised the post office. It remains wholly owned by the government. Civil Servants are implicated in this scandal, which is why they resisted the government's desire for a proper public inquiry.

One thing I don't understand is how many people could have been prosecuted when they hadn't found any of the 'missing' money. No one asked how likely is it that 700 criminal masterminds were clever enough to hide hundreds of thousands of pounds but at the same time stupid enough to be caught.

@Thelnebriati

One thing I don't understand is how many people could have been prosecuted when they hadn't found any of the 'missing' money. No one asked how likely is it that 700 criminal masterminds were clever enough to hide hundreds of thousands of pounds but at the same time stupid enough to be caught.

In general the amounts were tens of thousands rather than hundreds. But the problem is that, since the law changed in 1999, there is a presumption that a computer is working properly and that any evidence it produces is reliable. It was therefore up to the accused to prove that Horizon wasn't working rather than Post Office having to prove that it was. If the computer said there was £60,000 missing, the courts assumed that was correct. At least one judge displayed a total lack of understanding of complex computer systems, expressing the view that any problems would be obvious to the operator. Given that they couldn't prove Horizon wasn't working, many subpostmasters were persuaded to plead guilty to false accounting even though they had done nothing wrong, in the hope of avoiding going to jail.

I can recommend the book The Great Post Office Scandal by Nick Wallis - a journalist who has been following the case for years. It is very readable and sets out what we know about what happened in detail. Also, 10% of the proceeds from the book are being donated by the publisher and author to the Horizon Scandal Fund to help those affected by this scandal.

Thanks OP for highlighting that single sex prisons protects all women as any of us could be innocent, but falsely labelled guilty and imprisoned. However, even if guilty of the worst crimes, I still don't think women should face being raped alongside a sentence. It's basically awarding rapists with imprisoned women's bodies and telling the tortured women that they are there to serve their time and serve male-who say-they-are-female's needs too.