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Crime and punishment in Brazil will be under the spotlight at a special event being hosted by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies later this month.
On 25 January, Leandro Ayres França, of the Universidade Estácio Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, will be talking about how the war on drugs and the criminalisation of poverty have fuelled organised crime and created a chaotic prison situation.
His talk comes at a time of growing crisis in the Brazilian prison system.
Looking ahead to 2017, our Director Richard Garside said:
There is a growing consensus that criminal justice is not working.
Thousands of our fellow citizens are unnecessarily imprisoned each year, often in squalid conditions. Probation in England and Wales is in a mess following an ill-conceived privatisation. All too often, gaps in other services are leaving the police to act as social service of last resort.
The Centre's Director, Richard Garside, today said that a major prison downsizing programme was the reform challenge of this generation.
His comments came in reaction to a call by senior politicians for the prison population to be halved. The call was made by the former Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, the former Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke, and the former Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, in the letter published today in The Times newspaper.
The publication by the influential House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of a report into the Troubled Families Programme is 'a complete dressing down' for the Government, the Centre's Deputy Director has said.
His comments came in advance of a summit the Centre is holding next month to assess the purpose and impact of the controversial Troubled Families programme.
The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies is publishing a new report today on the role of inspection in preventing torture and mistreatment in custody.
The January 2017 edition of the British Journal of Criminology is out now.
In a free-to-download article, Hannah Bowes and Nicole Westmarland of Durham University write about their research on the rape of older people. Among their findings are that older victims of rape usually know the perpetrator, who is generally younger than they are.
Other articles in the January edition include:
The Centre's Director, Richard Garside, has today called on the government to get a grip on the problem of a rapidly deteriorating probation service.
His call comes in response to the latest report from the Probation Inspectorate, into probation work in North London.
The Inspectorate found that the service had deteriorated since its previous inspection in 2014, prior to the 'Transforming Rehabilitation' privatisation of probation.
The redevelopment of the former Reading prison should benefit the local community, the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies has said.
The former prison has been hosting an arts exhibition – Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison – since September, attracting over 50,000 visitors.
Now Artangel, the exhibition organisers, have called for the Grade II-listed prison to remain as an arts centre on a permanent basis.
Our Director, Richard Garside, has called for a long-term plan to reduce the prison population, in a letter published in The Times on Saturday.
On Friday, 25 November, well over a hundred people met at the Williamson Street Community Centre in Holloway to begin discussing how a community vision for the former prison site might be developed.