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.
I want a public sector provider that sits at the heart of the process. I can’t turn the clock back but I can make sure that one part of the system takes overall responsibility. It’s got to be the public sector because I can’t see that justice and transparency are served by any other sector playing the role.
There are a hundred things I’d like to do as my third priority, like reverse the cuts to prison budgets or fully implement the Corston review. But unless I also happened to have time-shifting superpowers, the likelihood is that I couldn’t afford any of them. But there is one more thing that’s fairly inexpensive, cannot be cast as either soft or illiberal and would finally bring a much-n
How does the new Justice Secretary direct extra resources at interventions that achieve the departmental objective of reducing reoffending, while managing what is likely to be a further 20-30% cut to the departmental budget? A brave leader would use this opportunity to end the madness of the highest prison population in Europe – costing taxpayers over £3 billion per year, a high proportion of which is
The Coalition’s policy of making prison “not smaller but cheaper” has left the system in a parlous state, endangering prisoners, staff and the wider public. An urgent rebalancing of penal policy is required to create an affordable and effective approach to people in conflict with the law.
My final policy for the day would be to commission a review of NOMS. Ever since its inception it has been criticised as a bureaucratic, expensive and unnecessary arm of the MOJ. I would be asking senior NOMS managers some difficult questions such as: what does it actually offer? Why do we need it? And if we do, then how can we make it more diverse, more affordable, more accountable to public scrutiny and more efficient?
The UK has one of the largest prison populations in Western Europe and it comes at a significant economic and social cost – not least the high rates of reoffending. This is particularly true for women – with HMP Holloway and HMP Bronzefield being the largest women’s prisons in the EU.
In times of austerity it becomes more important than ever to acknowledge that safe and decent prisons only come about by listening to staff and inmates. I would seek to dismantle the present MoJ command and control structure and return to a position where Governors have authority to innovate and find local solutions that can improve each regime as they see fit.
We need more evidence to underpin the decisions made at every level of the criminal justice system, not least of which is sentencing. I would create an institute for evidence-led policy, like the National Institute for Clinical Excellence. Let’s see more use of scientific methodology, such as randomised control trials.
The purpose of this blog series is to stimulate a debate about where our criminal justice system should be heading. I’d love to hear your thoughts on what the justice priorities should be.
