Speech
12 November 2022

Some say that campaigns to stop men being imprisoned in women’s prisons are a distraction from the main challenges of prison reform.

  • Suicide, self-harm and violence
  • Overcrowding and appalling living conditions
  • The traumatic separation of children from their mothers
  • The failure of prisons to rehabilitate

Given these big challenges, some argue, the imprisonment of a few men in women’s prisons is a minor issue. Irrelevant even.

Comment
21 October 2022

Its detailed analysis and criticisms are extensive: nearly £100 million of public funds have been wasted on the failure to deliver a new case management system. Remedial work on the current creaking system will incur extra costs. The implications of ‘real-time’ monitoring data access for police remain to be explored.

A striking finding is the weakness of the evidence base for the planned expansion of EM.

Comment
18 October 2022

Study after study shows that fairness is at the top of most people’s priorities for society.

We all know what unfairness looks like. But to date we have struggled as a society to come together around a positive vision of fairness as an organising principle for society and the economy. This is a missed opportunity, because, as More in Common argued in Britain’s Choice in 2020:

Comment
16 October 2022

The words of Lord Garnier, the former government minister, speaking yesterday in a House of Lords debate on the dreadful Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence.

Comment
14 October 2022

She spoke alongside a prominent trade unionist and sympathetic Labour MP, at a time when the prison-centric bureaucratic leviathan, known by its acronym NOMS (National Offender Management Service), was threatening to subsume the probation service and erase its identity; much as today, when a similar structure known as HMPPS (His Majesty's Prison and Probation Service) appears to be replicating some of the more unwelcome centralism of former times in its absorption of the probation service.

Comment
10 October 2022

New findings out today from the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester have highlighted long term trends in court appearances for young adults. Young adults in court: shrinking numbers and increasing disparities, as the title suggests, shows young adults have become far less likely to appear in court over the previous decade.

Comment
7 October 2022

You can read the strategy here.

“In Britain today,” the strategy notes, “some face an abundance of law. Others face an absence of order”. The injustices of this situation breed a “fatalism about the possibilities for justice and fairness”, the strategy continues, with a “complacent and cynical policy consensus” feeding this fatalism, as well as being an expression of it.

Comment
5 October 2022

It was abolished in 2012 but only prospectively: the 8,000 sentences imposed to that point remained.

In 2019 I co-authored with Dr Christina Straub the report A Helping Hand, published by Prison Reform Trust, which drew on collaborative work with families affected by the IPP sentence to make recommendations for change. We argued that:

Speech
30 September 2022

In Britain today, some face an abundance of law.

Comment
16 September 2022

Reading it took me back to one of my supervisory encounters when working as a probation officer.

Comment
6 September 2022

In this piece I preview some of our main conclusions and recommendations.

Background

Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP), a sentence introduced in 2005, consists of two parts: a period of imprisonment, described as a tariff, imposed as a punishment for an offence; and an indefinite period, during which the prisoner may apply for supervised release.

Comment
31 August 2022

‘Joint enterprise’ is not a legal term, but it is sometimes used to describe a set of legal rules that allows for more than one person to be convicted for the same offence.