How to find your local justice service
A much shorter than usual blog post today but I thought you might find these links useful. Yesterday (15 July), the MoJ published a map of all its properties as well as lists of them all divided into prisons, courts, probation offices, judges’ lodgings and headquarters buildings. If you’ve ever struggled to find locations of contact details for any of these or would like to see just how prisons of different categories there are, these resources might well be worth bookmarking.
The property map
The property map (see the header image) can be found here and shows the location of every court, judges’ lodgings, probation office, approved premises, prisons and headquarters buildings in all four countries of the United Kingdom. It is a Google map so you can do all the normal things, zoom in and out, move around.
You can toggle the different categories on and off (the image below shows just the approved premises) and can restrict the properties shown to one particular region (North, Wales & Central England, South, London & the East of England).
Property lists
In addition to the map, there are also separate property lists for prisons, courts, judges’ lodgings, probation (conspiracy theorists will find it typical that the link to the much-neglected probation service is spelt Probabtion) and headquarters buildings.
The lists (in the form of a Google spreadsheet) provide basic information.
The prisons list shows the name of every establishments, its role, whether it is a public or contracted out prison, its postcode, Prison Service region and includes a link to the individual prison entry on the MoJ prison finder website which gives contact details, visiting arrangements etc.
The probation list shows simply the full address, postcode and probation region of every office.
I didn’t have the authority to access the courts, judges’ lodgings or headquarters lists.
So, there you have it. I hope that’s useful for some people.
2 responses
This is useful up to a point. But the data is rather out of date. For example, it shows Dartmoor as Active – but Dartmoor has now closed. It shows Blantyre House as Active – but this prison closed quite a number of years ago. I have a much more limited data set showing active prisons and approved premises, which I try to keep up to date. See https://my123.link/prisonpagesindex for an index to some of my lists and map pages.
Hi Peter
You are right, some of the newest prison are also not there. I’m guessing there was the usual gap between doing the work and publication. I’m hoping they will update the sheets on a more regular basis. I’m guessing most people will find what they want via the MoJ or your resources – thanks for sharing
All the best