Forthcoming events
As mentioned in our last bulletin, our friends at JENGbA are holding an online event on Tuesday, 1 February, to launch a new push to change the law on 'joint enterprise' convictions.
The joint enterprise doctine allows courts to find someone guilty by association. Thousands of people are serving prison sentences, some of them very long, merely because of their perceived association with a perpetrator. Five years ago the Supreme Court accepted that many prisoners had been wrongly convicted. Yet they remained trapped in a kafkaesque nightmare, unable to appeal their unjust convictions.
If you want to learn more about JENGbA's plans to make it easier for unjust convictions to be appealed, you can register for the event here. Our Head of Programmes, Helen Mills, will be among the speakers, reporting on our work with JENGbA tracking the joint enterprise dragnet. I will also be discussing the campaign against joint enterprise convictions with JENGbA's Gloria Morrison and Jan Cunliffe in a forthcoming edition of our Lunch with... programme on 16 March. More information in our next bulletin.
On 9 February, our Director, Richard Garside, will be discussing another grim injustice of the current system – the open-ended Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence – with UNGRIPP's Donna Mooney and Shirley Debono, on February's Lunch with... programme. Late last year, the Psychiatrist Dr Dinesh Maganty told MPs that many prisoners subjected to the trauma of an IPP sentence had been made mentally ill. "Their clinical presentation is increasingly akin to those who have been wrongfully convicted", he said.
If you missed the January edition of Lunch with..., when Richard had a fascinating discussion with Project 507's Whitney Iles, or you were there and want to watch it again, here's the video.
Yesterday we published an article by Rona Epstein and Geraldine Brown, profiling their new research on pregnant women in prison. One prisoner told Rona and Geraldine: "I was constantly worried about my safety and if I would be released before the birth. Petrified that he would be taken from me. I couldn’t bond with my baby as I was constantly told by the staff there were no beds in the mother and baby unit so my baby would be taken". The starting point, Geraldine and Rona write, must be that no pregnant woman should be in custody.
Rona will be talking about her research, and the wider issues of pregnant women being held in prison, in the next edition of Last month in criminal justice, on 2 February.