Our latest eBulletin, sent out to subscribers on Friday, 31 October
Earlier this week I attended an all-day event marking the 25th anniversary of the murder of Zahid Mubarek.
Organised by the Zahid Mubarek Trust, which was set up by family members to honour his memory and to press for lasting change in the prison system, the event was both uplifting and sobering.
Early on, Imtiaz Amin, Zahid Mubarek’s uncle, asked for a minute’s silence to remember a prisoner beaten to death by his racist cellmate wielding an improvised weapon: the broken wooden leg from a piece of in-cell furniture.
The prisoner he asked us to remember was not, however, Zahid Mubarek. Rather, it was Sundeep Ghuman: murdered in his cell in Belmarsh prison in 2020, in circumstances distressingly similar to Zahid Mubarek’s murder 20 years earlier, in Feltham Young Offender Institution.
It is difficult to imagine a more compelling way to make a simple but important point.
The prisons minister Lord Timpson followed, with the keynote address.
He started well enough: reflecting on the awfulness of Zahid Mubarek’s murder, the ongoing pain and distress his death has caused, and praising the impressive work of the Trust set up in his memory. After that, his speech degenerated into the kind of routine Ministry of Justice talking points familiar to anyone who has had to sit through a ministerial address.
It was a missed opportunity. The muted applause that followed spoke volumes.
I have been around criminal justice reform circles long enough to remember Zahid Mubarek’s murder, the inquiries that followed, and the resulting Prison Service activity to embed a commitment to race equality.
There were, and continue to be, impressive people in the Prison Service pushing the race equality agenda. Those speaking at and attending this week’s event were also clear that the institutional commitment has weakened in the intervening years.
The Zahid Mubarek Trust’s own response to this weakening is a new Manifesto on Race Equality in Prisons, calling on those who care to get involved. It is an important initiative that deserves support.
The event also left me wondering whether the way we do policy discussion and debate is as effective as it could be.
A few months after Zahid Mubarek’s murder, the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was heckled and jeered at the Women’s Institute national conference, after trying to use a speech to score political points.
Some years later, Theresa May’s speeches, as Home Secretary, to the Police Federation were regularly met with barely disguised disdain. Only this month, Donald Trump’s attempt to lecture the top brass of the US military was met with stony silence.
Yet at the event this week, I and others sat, listening politely to a ministerial speech that fell some distance short of what the occasion demanded.
I feel uncomfortable writing this, in part because Lord Timpson is someone who does appear to care about prisons and prisoners. Had he said what he thought, rather than what the government message grid demanded, he would probably have given a better speech.
I also feel uncomfortable writing this because I was one of those sitting politely and listening, rather than making my views plain. I can hardly claim the moral high ground.
This, for me, is the nub of the problem. When it comes to system change, it matters what senior politicians and leaders say in public, and not just in private. And while we should always have high expectations of our political leaders, I wonder whether we should also be better at making our expectations clear: in public settings, as well as in private meetings.
I am not arguing for routine boos and hisses when the minister comes to speak. Nor, though, should we be self-censoring for fear of being consigned to the naughty step.
In politics, as in other walks of life, what we tolerate tends to become the norm. The current norm in relation to prisons, and criminal justice more generally, is pretty unappealing. Perhaps it’s time for us to work for a new one.
Richard Garside
Director
Diversion in Practice: Implications for police reform and culture change
We have now posted the video of our live-streamed a roundtable discussion on diversion and out of court resolutions.
Diversion and out of court resolutions are both key to the Labour government’s aim to reduce knife crime and violence against women and girls, as part of the Safer Streets mission, and are a focus of the Leveson review of the Criminal Courts as a way to ease pressure on this part of the system. They also raise challenges for public trust and confidence in policing and criminal justice.
The roundtable panel presented current data on specific initiatives, shared practitioner perspectives, and reflected on the challenges of implementation.
The recording of the event is available to view on the event page.
The event was hosted in partnership with the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Crime, Justice and Policing and Professor Adam Crawford (Universities of Leeds and York).
Assessing Inquiry Recommendations: Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse Case Study
In the eigth paper of our Working Paper series, Dr Mike Lauder argues that, if the purpose of inquiries is to learn and prevent, then all recommendations should be scrutinised before they are endorsed and implemented – much in the same way that academic work is peer-reviewed. In this paper, he proposes a method that could be used to assess inquiry recommendations and trials its application using the final report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) as a case study.
The paper first looks at recommendations in terms of objectives and how they are reached. Lauder presents a rating system based on the clarity of the action required by a recommendation and its links to measurable outputs and outcomes. He demonstrates the method by applying these ratings to the 20 main recommendations in the final report of the IICSA.
The second aim of the method is to determine the probability that the recommendations would produce a ‘desired new end state’ (DNES). In this paper, the DNES is defined not by the original parameters of the inquiry but rather the concerns of those calling to renew it.
Our Working Paper series publishes research and analysis of an exploratory nature. Working papers are not formally peer-reviewed, but are intended to stimulate reflection and discussion on current and relevant areas. For more information on the series, and how to propose a paper, please visit our guidlines page.
Commentary and analysis
Reflecting on the Gauke review, Andrew Coyle looks at the pattern of prison population growth since 1990 and illustrates how reinvesting prison spending into communities would address the prison crisis.
Also this month, Rona Epstein presents the findings of a recent report by the Women’s Centre for Justice. She concludes that “recognising and addressing the realities of coercive control will not only protect victims but also make the justice system fairer and more effective”.
Interested in submitting a comment piece? Drop us a line.
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.
Among the open-access articles have been published since our last eBulletin are:
- Tahir Abbas on the impact on British Pakistani-heritage women of the imprisonment of a family member.
- Rosie Cornish and Iain Brennan on the relationship between school exclusion and serious violence victimisation.
- Pernille Søderholm Nyvoll on the impact of austerity policies on open prisons.
- Valerie Houghton and Thaddeus Muller on disability hate crime.
Prison Service Journal Archive
We are in the process of digitising and uploading the entire back catalogue of Prison Service Journal, from the first edition in 1960. A complete run from 1960 to 1991 is currently available, alongside a complete run from September 2010 to the present day.
This month the PSJ editors have highlighted articles from editions 10 through 12.
Edition 10
Social Work in Prisons, by Audrey Evans, looks at whether comparisons can be made between social work in prisons from the definition of what social work entails, and the various personnel in prisons dealing with social problems.
Edition 11
Prison After-Care, by B. J. Hartwell, describes the involvement and responsibility placed on prison social workers/welfare officers, probation officers, prison officers of all grades, prison chaplains, prison governors, prison medical officers, and others.
The article emphasises that good after-care requires the concerted effort on the part of every member of the staff of the institution, and any factor that might weaken the cohesion of that effort ought to be avoided.
Edition 12
In the article, The Cure for Crime, Kathleen J Smith (former assistant Governor at Holloway), argues that prisons have become too comfortable and fail to deter crime. She proposed a radical reform: a “self-determinate sentence” where prisoners would repay the financial cost of their crimes through prison labour, aiming to restore victims, reduce reoffending, and instil work habits. Smith suggests that this would make prisons productive, self-sustaining institutions, not idle warehouses.
Ramsbotham Memorial Lecture 25th November
This third lecture in the an annual lecture series in memory of Lord Ramsbotham, former chief inspector of prisons, will be held at 5:00pm on 25 November, 5.00 pm in Committee Room 5, Palace of Westminster.
If you want to attend, drop us a line and we’ll get an invitation sent over to you.
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