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.
Former Justice Secretary Michael Gove recommends the release of all IPP prisoners in this year’s Longford lecture. But why wait till he was a backbencher?
A timeline of the main events in the battle for prison reform. A clickable resource including background information on main policy documents, speeches etc.
New review from the Centre for Justice Innovation finds that many (but not all) models of problem-solving courts are effective. But what will Liz Truss do?
Latest post on RSA’s blueprint for the Future Prison explores the key concepts of risk and rehabilitation and why they are too often considered to be opposites.
Justice Secretary says autonomy for prison governors is critical to successful penal reform and that he has no plans for privatisation.
Summary of Michael Gove’s appearance before the House of Commons Justice Committee setting out his plans for penal reform.
In order that education is truly placed at the heart of youth custody, we must reconceive youth prisons as schools. The review’s ambition is for smaller custodial establishments which are created as secure schools…
Once Michael Gove publishes more details of the nine new prisons he intends to build and we know for sure that they will be PFI, we can start testing out the Chancellor’s claim that the prison estate will be £80 million a year cheaper to run.
While there are clear advantages to inspectors having an outsider’s view and a fresh perspective on the service they are responsible for, they are also vulnerable to accusations of not understanding the context in which they are working.
Our history shows that when new prisons are built, they are too frequently filled with more prisoners while old prisons are not decommissioned at all.
This litany of figures hides of course the distress and tragedy behind all these individual incidents for both prisoners and staff. For just as self-harm incidents have increased by over one fifth, serious assaults on staff are up by over two fifths.
The review has been met with some scepticism among seasoned justice commentators such as Rob Allen who are surprised at the exclusions and wonder if the review is an excuse to finally go through with the abolition of the Youth Justice Board. The next few months will be a good test of Mr Gove’s pledge to build a new justice system based on the evidence.
