Hope and Change: Campaigning for a better future

What sustains us? What gives us hope in the possibility of a better future, when today’s criminal justice process is marked by so much injustice and dysfunction?

Is meaningful change even possible? Does our best hope lie in eking out small victories and minor concessions, while the penal juggernaut careers on?

These are some of the questions we will be debating at a specially-organised panel discussion on the early evening of Monday, 15 May.

The challenge of meaningful change is a systemic one, affecting the entire criminal justice process. There are also specific examples of injustices and dysfunctions, examples that are expressions of the wider criminal justice malaise.

Three such examples are the scandals of deaths in state custody, the prosecution of innocent people under joint enterprise rules, and the never-ending ‘imprisonment for public protection’ prison sentence.

On the panel

• Gloria Morrison: Gloria is Co-Founder and Campaigner at Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association (JENGbA), who support over 1,400 prisoners wrongly convicted using the now-discredited application of joint enterprise.
• Marcia Rigg: Marcia Rigg, sister of Sean Rigg, is an activist and public speaker on issues of mental health and deaths in police custody. Marcia spearheads the United Families and Friends Campaign (UFFC), a coalition of families whose loved ones have died following contact with state agencies, including the police and prison system.
• Sara Ramsden: Sara started campaigning when her partner was sentenced to imprisonment for public protection (IPP). She has been campaigning with United Group for Reform of IPP (UNGRIPP) for over eight years.

Hosted by our Chair of Trustees and expert facilitator, Charlie Weinberg, Hope and Change was an opportunity to share experiences of how we ‘keep on keeping on’ pushing for change in the face of institutional injustice and repeated policy failure.

Watch the event