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Earlier this week, Shirley Debono and Donna Mooney were the guests on our latest Lunch with... programme, when they discussed their work campaigning against the Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence.
Both have personal reasons for campaigning on this injustice, having relatives themselves subject to this cruel and unusual punishment. While the sentence was abolished in 2012, thousands remain languishing in prison, unsure of when, if ever, they will be released. Thousands more who have been released from prison live under the constant shadow of being sent back to prison, in many cases for the most minor of errors or infractions.
Shirley and Donna spoke with great clarity about the toll of the sentence on prisoners and their families, and explained why fundamental reform is needed.
You can watch the discussion here. I would like to put on record my thanks and appreciation to Donna and Shirley for making the time to talk about this difficult issue with me.
Richard Garside
Director
Available to view
The February edition of Last month in criminal justice featured Rona Epstein of Coventry University, Kate Coleman from Keep Prisons Single Sex, and the academic and former Chief Constable Peter Neyroud. Among the issues they discussed was the policing of party-gate, the management of transgender prisoners, and the (non-)prosecution of sexual offences. Watch the video here.
You can access all our Last month in criminal justice Programmes here.
Videos of our other monthly programme, Lunch with... are available here. Alongside with this week's Lunch with Shirley Debono and Donna Mooney, you can catch-up on our programmes with Whitney Iles, Pragna Patel and Suresh Grover, and Frances Crook.
Coming up
For the March edition of Last month in criminal justice, Charlotte Henry from JENGbA and Whitney Iles of Project 507 will be joining Richard to discuss, among other things:
- What's going on with the campaign against joint enterprise convictions
- Latest developments in women's imprisonment
- Is police credibility and legitimacy at an all-time low?
For more information, and to book your place, check out the event page.
Gloria Morrison and Jan Cunliffe of JENGbA will be in conversation with our Head of Programmes, Helen Mills, on the March edition of Lunch with... Gloria and Jan will be talking about the long campaign against joint enterprise prosecutions, and why the law needs to change.
Working in parliament
We've been working with members of parliament, pressing the case to change the law on the use of short prison sentences. You can read up on what we've been up to, and watch some of the key moments in the parliamentary debates, here.
We have also been working to influence the House of Commons Justice Committee Inquiry into the IPP prison sentence. In our written evidence to the Committee we proposed a number of options for reform, including serious consideration being given to backdating the the 2012 abolition of the IPP sentence to all those serving IPP sentences.
Last week, our Head of Programmes, Helen Mills, spoke about our research into joint enterprise prosecutions, at a parliamentary event organised by JENGbA. Despite the Supreme Court ruling six years ago that the laws on joint enterprise had been wrongly interpreted, Helen said that we found no evidence that the ruling has had any discernible impact on the overall number of joint enterprise prosecutions. We'll be publishing the research in April. In the meantime, you can check out Helen's speech here.
On the comment pages
Last week we published a nuanced assessment of the current debate on transgender prisoners by Jo Phoenix. Yes, we should support measures to stop the drive towards mixed-sex prison placement policy in women's prisons, Jo argued. "But why stop at keeping males out of female prisons? Why not keep the women out as well? If the experiment proves successful then we have the blueprint for abolishing prison more widely".
We have also published two pieces by Mike Guilfoyle, part of our long-running series where Mike shares stories from his career as a probation officer. The first relates to work he did with a prisoner convicted of murdering his female partner. The second, recalls a complex case involving allegations of child neglect. We remain grateful to Mike for sharing these challenging stories, which draw out the complexity and challenge of probation work.
Eye on criminal justice
At the beginning of February, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) published a disturbing report on misogynistic, racist and threatening behaviour by police officers predominantly based at Charing Cross police station in central London. Earlier this week, the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said that the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Cressida Dick, had a matter of weeks to win back the trust of the public. Yesterday, she resigned. Is this the greatest crisis ever faced by the Met, or just the latest in a long line of failings and controversies? Is police credibility and legitimacy at and all-time-low, or is this just business as usual?
In what it described as a “rare and unexpected finding”, the prisons inspectorate this week released a report that assessed Foston Hall prison for women and girls as poor in relation to safety. Inspectors found very high violence and self-harm and inadequate care for vulnerable women. The inspectorate also published a briefing paper on women's prisons. Women in mental health crisis, the inspectorate reported, were still being sent to prison as a ‘place of safety’. “Nobody would agree that prisons are the right place to keep women who are acutely unwell”, inspectors wrote.
Also this week, the College of Policing published a Fundmental Review of its work. The report included criticisms of the police inspectorate, which it claimed was blurring the lines between the College, senior police officers and the Inspectorate, and straying “into standard setting, rather than inspection”. The criticism earned a rebuke from the Chief Inspector of Police, Tom Winsor, who in a letter stated that such a criticism was “fundamentally wrong both in law and in policy”.
We'll be discussing these developments, and more, in the March edition of Last month in criminal justice.
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