So far places have been allocated at Belmarsh, Bullingdon, Wandsworth, Winchester, Holme House, Highdown, Lincoln and Liverpool. The plan is that asylum seekers will generally be held in separate wings from the general prison population. However they will be subject to the same prison rules and face prison officers who are trained to contain convicted criminals. Perhaps Jack Straw should have listened to the experiences of inmates at the notorious Delta and Echo wings of Rochester prison before ordering more asylum seekers to be held within the normal prison regime. Those who have spent time there, sometimes over a year, speak of treatment that is worse than for convicted criminals in the same prison.
Cells are four by four metres, toilet included, with two inmates per cell.
Echo wing houses 115 inmates while Delta houses about 65. Such is Rochester's reputation for brutality that staff in other detention centres use the threat of transfer to Rochester as a way of controlling 'difficult' inmates. Pierre, an asylum seeker from Cameroon, spent five months inside Rochester, often being locked in his cell for days on end. He has since been transferred to Haslar. After this I was no longer asked to work in the kitchen.' 'At Rochester', Pierre told us, 'we were locked up for eighteen hours a day.