eBulletin, 1 December 2023

The annual Longford Lecture, now in its 21st year, has become something of a fixture in the criminal justice reformer’s calendar.

I hadn’t been for several years until this year’s lecture, given by the former prisons minister Rory Stewart. Diary clashes and the small matter of the Covid lockdown had conspired against attendance.

Rory Stewart is an unlikely pin-up boy for criminal justice reform. Best known these days for the Rest is Politics podcast he co-hosts with former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell, Stewart has a background in the military and diplomatic service. He was the prisons minister for little over a year, during the dying days Theresa May’s premiership.

He did, though, bring a freshness and passion to the role of prisons minister – generally considered a stopgap role by ambitious ministers hoping for something more interesting in the next reshuffle – and he clearly cared about the state of prisons and the importance of decent, safe regimes.

Unsurprisingly, his message that the current state of our politics has left it ‘particularly ill-suited to address the problems in prison’, and his criticism of a naive belief in panaceas and easy answers, went down well with the audience.

Prior to Rory Stewart’s speech, it was lovely to see the fierce and inspiring campaigners from JENGbA receive this year’s Longford Prize for their work challenging the injustices of joint enterprise convictions.

Jan Cunliffe and Gloria Morrison, and the network of activists they have organised, are some of the most effective campaigners currently working in criminal justice reform today. The Longford Prize is well-deserved and I am thrilled for them.

Jan and Gloria were recently praised by Raymond Smith in an Inside Time article; two of four women ‘fighting... key injustices in Britain today’. The other two women he praised were Donna Mooney of UNGRIPP and Shirley Debono of IPP Committee in Action.

Donna and Shirley have been at the forefront of the campaign to resolve the outstanding injustice of the Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence. In a few short years they and their network of activists have accomplished what many campaigners would be happy to have achieved in a decade or two of graft.

Jan Cunliffe, Gloria Morrison, Donna Mooney, Shirley De Bono and Rory Stewart. Outsiders to criminal justice reform, until circumstances not of their making made them insiders, of sorts.

I have previously written about escaping the monotony of repeated policy failure, and there still remains much by way of monotonous policy failure in relations to prisons, joint enterprise and the IPP sentence, among other areas.

But I don’t think its a coincidence that some of the most inspiring campaigning, some of the clearest thinking, on criminal justice is currently coming from the relative outsiders.

There are lessons here for the criminal justice insiders and established organisations, including the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies.

So let’s hear it for the unusual suspects. Let’s learn from them, and others like them, on how to shake up and challenge what Rory Stewart described in his lecture as the ‘institutional sclerosis’ of rigid and decaying institutions. 

Richard Garside
Director

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Longer reads

Mike Guilfoyle, a long-standing friend of the Centre for Crime and Justice, died peacefully at home on 19 November, after a long battle with cancer.

Many will know of Mike through the regular articles he wrote on probation practice for the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies website. The articles evoke what feels like a lost world: a service motivated by the values of ‘advise, assist and befriend’.

As part of our tribute to Mike, we asked Deb Borgen, Rob Canton, Chris Hignett, Patricia Johnson and Charron Culnane, and Russell Webster to offer their own personal reflections.

You can read them here.

It was totally characteristic of Mike that he was insistent on submitting his articles even as he became progressively more ill. We published his latest article – The street vibe – in mid-November. We have one final article, which Mike sent us before he died. We will publish it in mid-December.

We are currently partnering with StopWatch on scrutinising Serious Violence Reduction Orders (SVROs), a new civil order that can be imposed on anyone convicted of an offence involving an offensive weapon. As StopWatch’s Holly Bird points out, in her latest update, the grounds for imposing an SVRO are very widely drawn. It can be imposed, for instance, on someone based merely on ‘their perceived association’ with someone else, thus ‘operating in a similar way to the controversial legal doctrine of joint enterprise’

Anyone who is the subject of an SVRO can be stopped and searched by the police at any time, for any number of times. A senior officer in Merseyside has said that the force would ‘relentlessly target’ those subject to an SVRO. There are already worrying indications, Holly writes, that SVROs are being used more widely than the government claimed would be the case.

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News

Our Director, Richard Garside, is due to appear before the House of Commons Justice Committee in the new year, as part of the Committee's inquiry into the prison population and prison capacity. Our written evidence to the Committee can be found on the Committee website here (HTML) and here (PDF).

We have also produced this summary of our written evidence, highlighting:

• the inexorable rise in the prison population under successive political administrations over several decades
• the dramatic shift to longer and longer prison sentences, and the decline in shorter prison sentences
• the sharp rise in recalls to custody over the past thirty years
• the worrying predictions of prison population growth over the current decade

Following the announcement of further reforms to the Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence, we are calling on the Justice Secretary, Alex Chalk MP, to consider introducing a compassionate release programme for those IPP prisoners still languishing in custody years after the tariff period set by the judge at their trial. Read our call here.

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Coming up

Over recent months we have been working on a comprehensive review of government activity in relation to the Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) prison sentence, a sentence the Justice Secretary Alex Chalk MP acknowledges is a ‘stain’ on the justice system. The review will include an assessment of the Justice Secretary's announcement earlier this week of some limited, if welcome, reforms – which parliament still needs to agree – to the period IPP prisoners are subject to post-release supervision.

While these latest proposals have been widely welcomed, and go further than Justice Secretary committed to only a month earlier, the government continues to reject a more meaningful agenda for reform. As our draft review observes: ‘There appears to be an underlying political consensus that any change leading to the more rapid release of prisoners labelled as “dangerous” would be politically risky, regardless of considerations about effective sentencing, simple justice, or whether those prisoners refused release really are dangerous in the way that is claimed’.

We will be publishing our review early next year, (or before Christmas if we get our skates on) and you’ll hear all about it in this bulletin.

In the meantime, you can view some of the key IPP content on our website here.

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Partner news

Our friends at Agenda Alliance and Alliance for Youth Justice have published a new briefing – A Call to Action – calling for an age-, sex-, trauma- and culturally-responsive practice for young women subject to criminal justice capture. It forms part of their Young Women’s Justice Project, challenging the ways in which young women between 17 and 25 are systematically overlooked in policy and practice across the criminal justice system.

In its latest newsletter, StopWatch reflects on ‘an eventful month in policing’, including the standoff between the Met Commissioner and the Prime Minister over the policing of the Gaza protests. The newsletter also shares examples of recent use of Section 60 notices, which allow the police to stop members of the public without reasonable grounds for doing so. Read their latest newsletter and subscribe here.

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