News

Should we send fewer people to prison?

Our director, Richard Garside, was on Sunday Morning Live on BBC One yesterday, discussing whether we should send fewer people to prison.

18 March 2024
Comment

Don’t close the city Victorian jails

The newly re-appointed chief inspector of prisons, Charlie Taylor, has told The Guardian that he thinks 14 Victorian prisons should be closed as they are insanitary and not providing activities.

27 September 2023
Comment

Getting out of the prisons crisis

There are at least two ways of thinking about the prisons crisis and about what it would mean to get out the crisis.

First, we can think about the prison crisis as a crisis in prisons...

25 April 2019
News

Welcome for Justice Committee prisons report

The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies has welcomed today’s report from the House of Commons Justice Committee on the government’s prison planning approach.

The report – Prison Population 2022: planning the future – finds that the government’s current approach to planning and funding future prison accommodation is inefficient, ineffective, and unsustainable.

Speaking today, the Centre’s Director, Richard Garside, said:...

3 April 2019
News

Conference cancellation: Prison abolition in the UK

We are saddened to announce that the conference, Prison Abolition in the UK, planned for 23 and 24 May, has been cancelled.

Unfortunately, one of our conference partners has, in recent weeks, been subjected to concerted pressure by those intent on disrupting the conference. In the circumstances, they felt they had no option but to pull out.

As an organisation, the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies walks the...

6 March 2019
Comment

Why can't a prison be more like a bank?

Whether there are too many people sent to prison can be debated, but that there are too many people in prison for the system to manage decently is generally agreed. Little by way of improvement in...

14 January 2019
News

Major conference on prison abolition in May 2019

The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies and the Harm & Evidence Research Collaborative at The Open University, in partnership with Professor Joe Sim of Liverpool John Moores University, will be holding a major conference on prison abolition in the UK in 2019.

The conference will be on Thursday 23 and Friday 24 May, at The Open University campus in Milton Keynes.

The prison system in the UK is in ongoing, systemic crisis. While politicians pay lip service to the need to reduce prisoner numbers, further growth and expansion are far more likely...

20 December 2018
News

Treasury budget confirms new mega-prisons

October's Treasury Budget announcement confirmed the construction of two new mega prisons as part of the Prison Estates Transformation Programme, Corporate Watch reports.

The programme plans to build six new prisons altogether, whilst the two confirmed in the budget will be built on the HMP Wellinborough and HMP Glen Parva sites and will create 4,000 new prison places. 

Our former Senior Policy Associate, Rebecca Roberts, has previously...

8 November 2018
Comment

Using solutions that work to tackle the prison crisis

Once the envy of the world, UK crime and punishment policies have lost all semblance of what is smart or humane to do about crime. As always, the bureaucracy and its chorus line want to hire more...

22 February 2018
News

Close prisons rather than try to fix them

Our Director Richard spoke about the prisons crisis at a meeting of the Friends of Le Monde Diplomatique earlier this week.

Richard said that that 'the prisons crisis is not, fundamentally, a crisis in prisons: one that can be resolved if the right reforms, the right action, is taken. It is a crisis of prisons: of our unbending attempts to treat a complex set of social problems - violence, drug,...

8 February 2018