Prisons & Probation – Latest News:
- Thu, 20 Feb 2025 05:00:28 +0000: My life as a prison officer: ‘It wasn’t just the smell that hit you. It was the noise’ - Prisons and probation | The Guardian
I saw first hand how prisons are having to use segregation units for acutely mentally ill inmates who should not be in prison at all
As a former prison officer, I have opened thousands of cell doors. For almost a decade, I unlocked cells in residential blocks, healthcare units, first night centres, close supervision centres and segregation units. The twist and click of a key in the lock came to feel like background noise to me. But there are some occasions I remember more vividly than others. Sometimes the person inside wasn’t so keen on coming out.
One of those challenging incidents took place a few years ago, while I was on shift in a segregation unit in a busy London jail. Prisoners are sent to the seg for a variety of reasons – fights, assaults on staff, possession of contraband – but normally for no longer than a week or two. The seg was made up of 18 single cells spread over two storeys. I was in a team of six, all of us in full riot gear. We were moving a mentally ill prisoner who had destroyed his cell and then flooded it with sewage because he believed we were planning to implant a chip in his brain. His story is not an isolated one. In 2024, the chief inspector of prisons published a report showing that prisons are having to wait an average of 85 days to send acutely mentally unwell prisoners to secure hospitals.
Continue reading... - Wed, 19 Feb 2025 13:38:22 +0000: Knife crime strategy needs to focus on stopping supply as well as possession, says policing minister – as it happened - Prisons and probation | The Guardian
Diana Johnson defends Labour’s knife crime plan amid crisis in prison capacity in England and Wales. This live blog is closed
Kiran Stacey is a political correspondent based in Westminster
Leftwing activists in Britain are less likely to work with their political opponents than other groups and more likely to think those holding different views have been misled, a study has found.
Continue reading... - Tue, 18 Feb 2025 18:25:12 +0000: The Guardian view on the Gauke review: prison isn’t working | Editorial - Prisons and probation | The Guardian
A performative ‘tough on crime’ approach by politicians has been both ineffective and ruinously expensive
It was as shadow home secretary in the early 1990s that Tony Blair came up with “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” – a characteristically New Labour formulation intended to finesse a perceived vulnerability on law and order issues. Yet in subsequent decades, governments of all stripes have focused overwhelmingly on the first clause, and treated the second as an optional extra.
The disastrous result is a criminal justice system on the brink of collapse, as the former Conservative justice secretary, David Gauke, has outlined in his interim report on the sentencing system in England and Wales. Cumulative Westminster pressure for longer prison terms has led to a doubling of the incarcerated population in 30 years. More draconian sentencing and greater recall of released offenders who break parole have left the prison estate bursting at the seams and necessitated ad hoc early release schemes. Labour’s plans to deliver 14,000 extra prison places by 2031 – at a cost of £10bn – will not be enough to keep pace with rising numbers.
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Continue reading... - Tue, 18 Feb 2025 00:01:50 +0000: Prison system crisis due to overreliance on long sentences, says Gauke review - Prisons and probation | The Guardian
Successive governments’ ‘penal populism’ has driven England and Wales justice system to brink of collapse, report finds
Successive governments’ overreliance on prison sentences and desire to seem “tough on crime” have driven the justice system in England and Wales to the brink of collapse, an official review has found.
A form of “penal populism” where longer incarceration is seen as the only effective means of punishment has contributed to the crisis in the prison system, according to the interim findings of a review led by former justice secretary David Gauke.
Continue reading... - Mon, 17 Feb 2025 17:04:21 +0000: Raw deal for those who are wrongfully convicted | Letter - Prisons and probation | The Guardian
Glyn Maddocks and Dr Jon Robins call for the government to repeal the 2014 change to the law on compensation and raise the £1m threshold for payouts
Your article on Andrew Malkinson’s initial compensation payout for wrongful conviction (12 February) reveals the horror of the situation for applicants to the government’s mean-spirited and legally illiterate compensation scheme. The change to the law in 2014, which means those wrongfully convicted must overturn their conviction and prove they are innocent “beyond all reasonable doubt”, has seen payouts collapse. Between 1999 and 2007, 307 applicants received a share of a total £81m in compensation. Between 2016 and 2024, there were 591 applicants, and the Ministry of Justice awarded 39 claimants a share of just £2.4m.
Few people could comprehend the toll of being convicted for a crime they did not commit, yet successive governments have seen victims of miscarriages of justice as a target for spending cuts. The allegations of mismanagement at the Criminal Cases Review Commission and an increasingly conservative court of appeal mean it is near impossible to overturn a wrongful conviction. The government could repeal the 2014 change to law on compensation and raise the £1m threshold for payouts.
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Glyn Maddocks and Dr Jon Robins
Directors, Future Justice Project