In the news

Our director, Richard Garside, spoke to The Telegraph on the decision to grant anonymity orders to a number of witnesses in the Lucy Letby trial.

Speaking in support of the anonymity orders, Richard highlighted the unprecedented social media speculation about some of the witnesses. He said:

In the world of social media, every single person’s reputation is potentially open to all sorts of allegations made by random keyboard warriors around the world.

I can understand why professionals who just want to get on with their job might think twice about giving evidence because they could have some shadow hanging over them for years.

On 23 August, Richard was interviewed by Mike Graham on Talk TV, over concerns that the UK was in the midst of a crime wave.

In a good-natured discussion, Richard agreed with Mike that there had been some upsetting incidents broadcast on social media. He also said the trend in reported shoplifting incidents was pretty stable over time, with no evidence of a significant surge.

Check out the slightly partisan Talk TV summary of the discussion here, or watch the entire interview below.

In late August, the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, issued a call for the police to “follow every reasonable line of inquiry” in relation to burglary, theft and other property offences.

Richard told BBC News that while the Home Secretary’s call might appear to be a “no brainer”, he was concerned that such an approach could divert police resources away from responding to male violence towards women and girls.

He told the BBC:

We have a tsunami of male sexual violence towards women and girls as it is.

If the police are being told to put even more resources into tackling, say, car and phone crime, that means there's going to be less time and less focus on those really serious violent offences that, quite rightly, the public are concerned about.

You can watch one of the interviews Richard did with BBC News below.

Richard also spoke to Channel 4 News. Check it out their report here.

We also continue to work on the unjust Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence. In early September, our Research Director, Roger Grimshaw, wrote for Inside Time newspaper, on the psychological torture of the sentence.

Highlighting the open-ended nature of the sentence, Roger wrote:

Psychological suffering because of uncertainties and setbacks can also be a breach of international rights if the system of detention treats people unreasonably and arbitrarily, not keeping promises and making unexpected demands. In 2020, a specially-appointed expert at the United Nations reported that an arbitrary system of detention could become a form of ‘psychological torture’ if it led to despair.

A few days later, on 3 September, we contributed to a Guardian story on released IPP prisoners who had been recalled back to prison. Two-thirds of such recalls, data suggests, did not involve a charge for a further offence.

Richard told The Guardian:

I am shocked that ever more IPP prisoners who have successfully secured their release are being sent back to prison for no good reason. This injustice must be devastating for hundreds of IPP prisoners and their families.

While the government claims that it has a plan to solve the IPP scandal, it continues to preside over a processing machine that is churning people in and out of prison with no clear end in sight.

Update

Prisoners’ newspaper Inside Time last week picked up the IPP recall story here.

Kate Hollern MP highlights the scandal of IPP sentences, and our work on IPP, in her latest column in the Lancashire  Telegraph.