
10 little known criminal justice facts
A recent trawl of the MoJ’s recent responses to Freedom of Information requests generated some interesting nuggets…
Tags are keywords. I put tags on every post to help you find the content you want. Tags may be people (Dominic Raab, say), organisations (The Howard League, PRT), themes (women offenders, homelessness) or specific items (heroin, racial disparity, ROTL). If you’re looking to research a particular issue, they can be invaluable.
A recent trawl of the MoJ’s recent responses to Freedom of Information requests generated some interesting nuggets…
Why me? report finds that victims’ access to restorative justice depends, to a very large degree, on where you live in England and Wales.
New FOI releases shed light on prison staff sickness and discipline and the number of mobile phones found in our prisons.
Nuggets of interesting criminal justice information from recent MoJ FOI requests including the fact that 38 people were imprisoned for not having a TV licence.
Despite an increase in the number of women sentenced in English & Welsh courts between 2011-2015, the number of community sentences fell by 28%.
New Freedom of Information request shows that 48 prisoners were accidentally released in 2014/15 – including one murderer and 5 prisoners from HMP Bullingdon.
As always, it is difficult to speculate how accurately these figures reflect the amount of drink and drug driving on our roads. While drivers are routinely tested when they are involved in serious accidents, the majority of arrests for drink and drug driving reflect police activity.
Whenever there is any public debate about rates of imprisonment, you can be fairly confident that the tabloid press will produce figures on how many crimes are committed by people on bail. But what are the real figures?
Quite what so many short sentences (with prisoners spending a maximum of 13 weeks inside) achieve, given the disruption to the lives of women and their children, is very unclear to me.
Professor Brooker concludes with a plea that both the National Probation Service and the new private Community Rehabilitation Companies should be equipping their staff with training to at least recognise mental health disorders and to take some action in attempting to connect probationers to existing services.
The ideal is for social media networks to police themselves, but you only have to look at some of the outrageous, sexually violent tweets that many women routinely encounter online to know that this approach isn’t always sufficient.
Cuts in public expenditure have resulted in very well-publicised shortages of prison staff. It may well be that these figures fall in 2014/15 , not because there are less drugs getting into our prisons, but because there are less prison staff to detect them.