News

Coming up

Friday, 28 January 2022

We have a number of reports due out in the coming months.

Joint enterprise

Back in 2016, the Supreme Court ruled that many prisoners had been wrongly convicted under the so-called 'joint enterprise' doctine. The joint enterprise doctrine 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.

Over the last year, we have been working with our friends at JENGbA (Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association) assessing what has happened since the Supreme Court ruling, and why it is that so many people still appear to face joint enteprise prosecutions.

We're aiming to publish our findings in the spring this year. In the meantime, you can find out more about our work on joint enterprise here.

Our Head of Programmes, Helen Mills, is discussing some of our emerging findings at this event, hosted by JENGbA, next week.

Imprisonment for Public Protection

The sentence of Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) is an unjust, open-ended sentence, abolished by parliament in 2012. Yet more than 3,000 IPP prisoners continue to languish in custody under IPP sentences.

The House of Commons Justice Committee is currently conducting an inquiry into the IPP sentence, with one witness telling them that many prisoners serving IPP sentences have been made mentally ill as a result, their clinical presentation being "increasingly akin to those who have been wrongfully convicted".

You can read our written evidence to the Justice Committee here.

We are currently working on two reports, as part of our work pressing for transformative action to deal with the injustices of the IPP sentence. The first will offer an up-to-date account and assessment of all the existing evidence of the psychological impact of the IPP sentence. The second will assess all the written and oral evidence presented to the Justice Committee Inquiry, highlighting options for transformative change to the current status quo.

If you want to know more about the campaign against the IPP sentence, book your place at the February 2022 edition of Lunch with..., on 9 February. Our Director, Richard, will be in conversation with Doona Mooney and Shirley Debono, campaigners with UNGRIPP, the United Group for Reform of IPP.

Understanding UK criminal justice systems

Over more than a decade, through our ground-breaking UK Justice Policy Review programme, we assessed criminal justice developments across the UK's three criminal justice jurisdictions: England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.

Building on this work, we spent some of lockdown working on an up-to-date overview of the development and current operations of criminal justice across the UK.

Across four of the criminal justice institutions – the police, the prosecution function, the courts, and prisons – we consider three sets of questions:

  1. Current governance and accountability structures.
  2. How the governance and accountability structures work in practice.
  3. How these structures and working practices changed over time; and what prompted these changes.

After some hiccups and delays along the way, we're expecting finally to publish this report in late spring 2022.