News

Prison overcrowding underestimated for years

Prisons minister Andrew Selous has admitted that statistics on prison overcrowding in England and Wales have been understated for six years because some prisons were counting doubled-up cells incorrectly, reports...

12 June 2015
Comment

How to stop prison privatisation

“There’s some will rob you with a six gun and some with a fountain pen”. So sang the great American folk artiste Woody Guthrie in the Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde.

The criminality of those in...

18 March 2015
News

Call for most prisoners to be held in open conditions

Our director Richard Garside appeared on Going Underground, Russia Today's UK current affairs programme, talking about absconding prisoners, electronic monitoring and criminal justice privatisation.

Richard argued that the vast majority of prisoners did not need to be held in high...

29 May 2014
Comment

The prison estate and the pound sign

As a qualitative researcher I’m often quick to point out the limits of interpreting the world through numbers. However, having worked on...

11 December 2013
Comment

Police, prisons and crime rates

The man with a hammer tends to see every problem as a nail. By the same token, the think tank in search of prison as the answer to crime will surely find it.

11 July 2012
Comment

Thinking about prisons and political economy

Between the mid 1950s and the mid 1970s the number of prisoners in England and Wales doubled, from 20,000 to 40,000 inmates. A further 20,000 inmates had been added to the prison population by the...

19 March 2010
Publication

Wings of Learning: the role of the prison officer in supporting prisoner education

Previous research has shown that prisoners involved in education value support and encouragement from officers on the wings.

Wings of Learning: the role of the prison officer in supporting prisoner education was aimed at discovering how officers viewed prison education, what support they could offer, and how it might best...
1 November 2005
Publication

Community Sentences Digest (2nd edition)

Community Sentences Digest highlights that in 2007, 162,648 people started court orders in the community, the highest ever recorded number. It represents a 36 per cent increase in the decade since...
25 November 2008