Wrong Colour

A Statement from Roe 4 Republican Prisoners, Maghaberry accuses prison management of inflicting hardship on both prisoners and their families. 
A two-year-old child was denied access to his father because the jail claimed that the colour of the child’s footwear was unacceptable.

This comes just two weeks after the Stormont Justice Department issued an apology to the family of the five-year-old child of another Republican Prisoner after the jail had forced him to remove his T- shirt during a visit because of its colour.

Other visitors, who had travelled from Dublin, were also stopped today by the heavily criticised and ineffective passive drug dog. These dogs have consistently been used to disrupt the visits of Republican Prisoners despite the fact that NIPS have conceded that there is no issue with drugs on the Republican Wing and objective bodies have encouraged them to exercise discretion in cases involving our visitors. They insultingly claim that they offer closed visits in such circumstances as a means of deflecting criticism, yet these are a degrading draconian arrangement involving a Perspex screen dividing prisoners and visitors.

These incidents follow in a long line of attacks on families by NIPS as a means of harassing Republican Prisoners and it is clear that NIPS believe it can continue this trend with impunity.