Helen talked about our soon-to-be-published research on joint enterprise prosecutions. It was a sobering talk. Whatever the intentions of police officers and prosecutors, it is clear, for instance, that the effect of joint enterprise prosecutions is highly discriminatory, particularly against young black men.
Comment
Comment
4 February 2022
It often divides prisoners into ‘the worthy’ and ‘the unworthy’, the dangerous and the vulnerable, in ever stranger ways of calculating and managing risk. The argument is happening in the absence of any actual research and so it plays out in a rather abstract manner.
Speech
1 February 2022
I’m Helen Mills. I work for the Centre from Crime and Justice Studies. The Centre is a charity which promotes better understanding of criminal justice as well as practical proposals for addressing injustices.
The Centre has had a long standing interest in joint enterprise.
My contribution today is based research we are currently doing about joint enterprise prosecutions and convictions.
Comment
21 January 2022
Indeed I vividly recall writing to Mark, now editor of the essential Prisons Handbook, while he was serving his last lengthy prison sentence, commenting on his achievement in recording, in such searingly memorable detail, his life story. I received an appreciative letter in reply.
Comment
, 
20 January 2022
Together with Maria Garcia De Frutos, Midwifery Lecturer, City University of London, we began to look for answers to that question.
Our research began with the death of a baby in a prison cell in Surrey.
Comment
10 December 2021
The IPP sentence was abolished in 2012, after parliament recognised it was cruel and unjust. Yet thousands who received the the IPP sentence remain trapped in an Orwellian nightmare of imprisonment or threat of imprisonment, because the sentence was not abolished retrospectively.
Comment
7 December 2021
Such was my initial reaction to reading some of the writings of the American academic Ruth Wilson Gilmore, the noted prison abolitionist and prison scholar, whose timely insight on racial injustices in US policing is well-captured in a quote from one of her podcasts, that as Black Lives Matter said so poignantly: "When Black lives matter, everybody lives better."
Comment
26 November 2021
The words of Donna Mooney, whose brother Tommy took his own life in 2015, having served six years of what was meant to be a four-year "Imprisonment for Public Protection" (IPP) sentence.
It is doubtful that the IPP sentence offers anything further, in terms of public protection, than prison sentences with a clear end-date. But it excels in causing pain and distress to those imprisoned under its unforgiving terms, their families and friends.
Comment
12 November 2021
This was one of the questions we explored in the latest edition of Last month in criminal justice, our new monthly review of criminal justice developments. We discussed, in particular, Penelope Jackson's recent conviction for murder of her husband, David.
"The fundamental difficulty Penelope Jackson's team had was the lack of evidence of coercive control, and the lack of evidence that she had lost control", Dr Hannah Quirk from King's College London argued.
Comment
11 November 2021
Until 2016, there were three ways in which a prosecution might claim that multiple people were criminally liable for a single offence:
Comment
10 November 2021
This was particularly so with Yusuf (not his real name) as at the point of transfer he had been admitted as an in-patient to a mental health unit at a nearby hospital.
Comment
29 October 2021
Inside, hundreds of people, mostly women, many new to the subject, met to discuss women's imprisonment, in an event co-organised, earlier this week, by Woman's Place UK and the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, and chaired by the barrister Allison Bailey.