Prisons & Probation – Latest News:
- Sat, 14 Feb 2026 18:45:00 +0000: Animol review – gritty young offenders drama challenges conventional machismo - Prisons and probation | The Guardian
Institutional menace and an idealistic take on redemption sit side-by-side in Top Boy actor Ashley Walters’ empathic and occasionally over-earnest film
The lawless brutality of a young offender institution is the setting for this British movie written by Marching Powder’s Nick Love and directed by Ashley Walters. It’s a place where terrified newbies realise they can survive only by abandoning their innocence and decency, and submitting to the gang authority of a psycho top G, naturally involving a horrible loyalty test.
This is a place where drugs arrive by drone, where facially tattooed men meet each other’s gaze with a cool opaque challenge in the canteen, and where the cues and balls on the recreation area’s pool table have only one purpose: to give someone a three-month stay in the hospital wing while underpaid guards in lanyards and ill-fitting v-neck jumpers look the other way.
Continue reading... - Tue, 10 Feb 2026 14:23:11 +0000: Wrongfully jailed men call for change to England and Wales compensation law - Prisons and probation | The Guardian
Justin Plummer, Oliver Campbell and Peter Sullivan tell parliamentary inquiry they do not yet qualify for compensation despite being exonerated
Three men who have never been compensated for spending between 11 and 38 years in prison for crimes they did not commit, have joined calls for a change in the law in England and Wales.
Even after being cleared, people who spend years behind bars owing to a wrongful conviction have to prove their innocence “beyond reasonable doubt” to qualify for compensation.
Continue reading... - Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:01:06 +0000: Serco accused of ‘petty and vindictive’ removal of artwork from court cells - Prisons and probation | The Guardian
Government contractor stripped custody suites in England and Wales of motivational murals, report says
A government contractor has been accused of being “petty and vindictive” after tearing down brightly coloured artworks carrying motivational messages that were intended to improve the conditions for people held in court cells.
The decision by Serco to remove the artworks, commissioned to cheer up court custody areas that are often underground and “bleak”, is revealed in the annual report of the Lay Observers, independent members of the public who monitor court custody and escort conditions. The report draws on 759 visits to court custody suites across England and Wales, representing almost 2,000 hours of monitoring.
Continue reading... - Fri, 06 Feb 2026 18:25:39 +0000: The Guardian view on a new prison drama: Waiting for the Out speaks quietly but powerfully | Editorial - Prisons and probation | The Guardian
This BBC series hasn’t made the same the splash as Adolescence. But its reflections on men in prison are valuable
Dennis Kelly, the author of the BBC’s six-part drama Waiting for the Out – now on iPlayer, with its final episode to be broadcast on Saturday – told an interviewer that fear is the secret hidden inside his latest series. The drama, about a man who takes a job teaching philosophy to a group of men in a prison, is based on Andy West’s memoir The Life Inside, which describes his real-life experiences teaching in prisons. Visiting jails for his research, Kelly picked up echoes of the debilitating shame that marred his own youth and early adulthood.
In his thirties, Kelly tackled his alcohol addiction, and began to write and recover. He is now the author of highly regarded TV series including Utopia and Pulling, and won a Tony award for his script for the smash-hit musical version of Roald Dahl’s Matilda.
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Continue reading... - Thu, 05 Feb 2026 17:41:48 +0000: Violence is part and parcel of how prisons function | Letter - Prisons and probation | The Guardian
Jessica Pandian of Inquest says homicides within prisons are not individual acts but reveal how violence operates at an institutional level
Alex South’s article (Death on the inside: as a prison officer, I saw how the system perpetuates violence, 13 January) limits the scope of prison violence to individual acts by focusing on prisoner-on-prisoner homicides. But violence is part and parcel of how prisons function.
Hundreds of people die in prison each year, the majority by suicide, medical neglect or drugs. Even if we focus on homicides, they reveal how violence operates at an institutional level. Last year, the inquest of Sundeep Ghuman exposed how it was multiple failures by the prison, not just the actions of his cellmate, that led to his unlawful killing. The jury concluded that by forcing Sundeep to share a cell with a known racist, the prison contributed to his death. The inquest also found that placing three men in a nine-square-metre cell designed for two increased tensions.
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