Our latest eBulletin, sent out to subscribers on Friday, 26 July. Sign-up for our free eBulletins here.
Over 20 years ago, in October 2002, the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, said that Labour was ‘at our best when at our boldest’.
His comment came in a speech making the case for transformative change to public services. ‘Do we take modest though important steps of improvement?’, he asked. ‘Or do we make the great push forward for transformation?’.
I’ve been around long enough to remember Blair’s speech, and I thought about it while catching up on the new Labour government’s widely-trailed plans, announced by the Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, to ‘defuse’ the ‘ticking prison “time-bomb”’.
Given the capacity crisis faced by male prisons, the Justice Secretary had to do something, and quickly.
Having invoked the possible ‘collapse of the criminal justice system’ and ‘a total breakdown of law and order’ to justify the measures, what has been announced is modest.
It is also symptomatic of the policy dysfunction at the heart of prison sentencing policy.
Successive governments and parliaments have created a prisons crisis: legislating for ever longer sentences and creating ever more hurdles for released prisoners, making it more likely that they end up back in prison.
In response, government ministers have been left coming up with creative solutions, such as the latest announcement, to ‘fix’ a problem created in Whitehall and Westminster.
Earlier this year, the recently-appointed prisons minister, James Timpson, said that only one third of those currently in prison needed to be there.
As for the nearly 3,000 prisoners serving IPP (Imprisonment for Public Protection) sentences, many of them languishing in prison years beyond the sentence of the court, the Justice Secretary’s announcement does nothing for them.
Prisons, and much of the wider justice system, struggle along in a state of permacrisis. The Labour government sits on a huge majority and is untroubled by a shell shocked and disorganised Conservative opposition.
In place of modest tweaks and managerial fixes, the government should seize the opportunity to pursue bold, transformative change. Indeed, if not now, then when?
Richard Garside
Director
Panel discussion on the King’s Speech
Earlier this week, a brilliant panel of experts – Baroness Claire Fox, Professor Jen Hendry, Dr Rory Kelly and Rob Allen – joined us to chew over the details of the King's speech.
The panel discussed three Bills in particular: the Crime and Policing Bill, the Victims, Courts and Public Protection Bill, and the Planning and Infrastructure Bill.
They also discussed what is behind the pomp and ceremony of the King’s Speech (including why one lucky MP gets to sit out the occasion in Buckingham Palace as a ‘hostage’), and what was missing from the Speech that the panel would have like to have seen included.
Catch-up on what the panel discussed, via our website or on our YouTube channel.
In case you missed it
In late June, a week before the General Election, Jo Phoenix, Ian Acheson, Frances Crook and Phil Bowen discussed the crime and justice manifesto pledges, with a particular focus on the Labour manifesto.
If you missed it at the time, you can catch up on what our panellists made of the new government’s plans here.
Time for action on Imprisonment for Public Protection
Earlier this month, we were signatories to a joint letter by more than 70 campaigners, trade unionists, activists, lawyers and civil society representatives, calling for urgent action on IPP (Imprisonment for Public Protection) reform.
The letter, addressed to the new Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood MP, argued that swift and decisive action to resolve the IPP scandal once and for all is both the right thing to do and would help the government resolve the immediate population pressures facing the prison system.
It was hand-delivered to the Ministry of Justice on 11 July by former IPP prisoners and family members.
Read the letter and find out more about the issues here.
In the news
The joint letter on the IPP sentence attracted a lot of media coverage, including a piece on ITV news, and article on the BBC News website, and coverage by Sky News, The Independent and the Morning Star.
Check out our list of the main coverage.
What’s what in The British Journal of Criminology?
For more than sixty years, The British Journal of Criminology has published some of the most significant research in the field. Here’s a run down of some of the new articles published this month:
- Nils Braakmann on the relationship between use of force on civilians by London’s Metropolitan Police Service and decreased crime reporting and civilian engagement with the police.
- Eoin Guilfoyle and Jose Pina-Sánchez find that judicial discretion in Crown Court sentencing tends to favour white defendants over black defendants.
- Nancy Lombard and Katy Proctor examine the experience of the Scottish justice system by female victims of stalking and coercive control.
- Nikhaela Wicks examines the ‘white racial ideology’ of British policing.
- Henrique Carvalho, Sally Foreman, Simon Tawfic, Ana Aliverti, Anastasia Chamberlen and Belinda Rawson analyse modern slavery policy as a ‘punitive humanitarian complex’.
Prison Service Journal
The July edition of Prison Service Journal includes articles by:
- James Gacek and Amin Asfari on Muslim women in prison and on release, and
- Ailie Rennie on the experience of life sentence prisoners shortly after release.
Also in the July edition: interviews with outgoing President of the Prison Governor’s Association, Andrea Albutt, and with Deputy Director of the Youth Custody Service, Ed Cornmell.
Read all the articles and download the entire edition here.
Commentary
We’ve been so busy in July on the other activities highlighted in this bulletin that we have been neglecting our comment pages a bit.
We have, though, published the second of two articles by John Kendall on the problems with the police custody visitors scheme. In his second article, John Kendall how how police custody visiting could be reformed, turning it from “a watchdog which doesn’t bark into an effective regulator of police behaviour”.
You can read his first article here.
News from our partners
Just before the General Election, Parliament agreed changes to post-release licence conditions imposed on those serving an IPP or DPP (Detention for Public Protection) sentence. The changes have not yet become law, but when they do, the length of time that released IPP prisoners will have to serve under supervision in the community will be reduced.
Our friends at the Howard League, Prison Reform Trust and Prisoners’ Advice Service have put together a helpful guide on when and how a person serving an IPP or DPP can get their licence terminated. Access the guide here.
In the latest ‘Trapped’ podcast on IPP, Sam Asumadu talks to the Chief Inspector of Probation, Martin Jones CBE. He tells her that 97 per cent of probation areas are falling short of expectations and argues that the new Labour government needs to invest in the struggling service.
Download and listen to the episode, and access the Trapped back catalogue, here.
Martin Jones’ comments also made their way into The Independent.
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