Today’s report from HM Inspectorate of Prisons said that when Inspectors visited HMP Lowdham Grange in May this year, they found a prison in a state of turmoil following the handover from one private provider to another, the first transition of its kind. The fallout from this was affecting almost… The prison is operated by the private contractor Sodexo who took over the running of the prison from another private operator, Serco...
The proportion of people in prison because they have been recalled has been steadily rising over recent years. The most recent (27 July, 2023) MoJ Offender Management Statistics revealed that the number of people recalled to prison jumped 23% to 6,824 in just the first quarter of this year compared… The number of people recalled to prison has risen dramatically following changes introduced by the Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014...
This practice was based on the (perhaps dubious) basis that while people were wrongfully imprisoned, they were saving on their rent or mortgage costs. The Malkinson case It was in response to the case of Andrew Malkinson who served seventeen years in prison for a crime he did not commit… Yesterday, the Ministry of Justice announced that people wrongly convicted of criminal offences who spend time in prison will no longer have their prison “living costs” deducted from the compensation to which they are entitled. ...
What are Independent Monitoring Boards? Independent Monitoring Boards (IMBs) exist for every prison and immigration removal centre. They are made up of ordinary members of the public who are independent, unpaid and make an average of 3-4 visits to their local institution per month. Their role is to monitor the… The new National Chair of the Independent Monitoring Boards (IMBs), Elisabeth Davies has hit the ground running. In post for less than a month, she has already written to the Prisons Minister Damian Hinds to urge him take urgent action to improve the conditions in which children are held across young offender institutions (YOIs) in England....
Authored by Aimee Brinn, John Preston, Rosina Costello, Tyler Opoku, Emily Sampson, Ian Elliott and Annie Sorbie, the 92-page evaluation concludes that : “over a two-year period from release, those who had participated in TSP were less likely to reoffend, reoffended less frequently, and took longer to reoffend, compared to… Last week (27 July) the Justice Data Lab published its impact evaluation of the prison-based Thinking Skills Programme (TSP) on reoffending. ...
Urgent Notifications are the inspectorate’s last resort when a prison is, frankly, dangerous to live and conditions and very poor. They are used very rarely. There was only one issued in all of 2022 but this is the second to be issued in the last three months (HMP Cookham Wood… More dreadful news today with the Chief Inspector of Prisons Charlie Taylor invoking the Urgent Notification process for HMP Bristol which he described as a prison with “apparently chronic and intractable problems”. ...
1: “Proper jobs” Let’s start with some good news for a change. In the 12 months ending March 2023, an average of 1,088 prisoners worked each month and were subject to the Prisoners Earnings Act. This is basically an indication of those earning a proper wage working for outside employers.… The MoJ published a raft of statistical bulletins and annual reports today and included within them was the official HMPPS Annual Digest for 2022/23, a sort of compendium of facts and figures not included in the regular statistical bulletins. We thought readers would be interested in some of the more arcane facts and figures hidden within its 40 pages....
Prisons As we know, the prison population has been growing rapidly this year. There were 85,851 prisoners in England and Wales on 30 June, 6% more than last year. One of the contributory factors to this rising population has been the increasing remand population trend that we have seen since… The Ministry of Justice and Office for National Statistics have today published the latest edition of the Offender Management Statistics covering the first quarter of this year. While sometimes this set of statistics confirms lots of things we already know about the prison and probation system, on this occasion there are some significant changes....
When I first started working in the criminal justice field, HMP Risley was known as “grisly Risley”; today’s inspection report makes it appear that nothing has changed for the better over the last forty years. HMP Risley is a mixed sex offender and general category C men’s resettlement prison near… A prison for sex offenders and with a high proportion of foreign offenders is struggling to shake off its long standing moniker ...
Unpaid work is frequently the Cinderella of the probation service, largely ignored except for in photos accompanying MoJ press releases emphasising how tough on crime the latest government is. So it’s refreshing to see it being the subject of the latest Academic Insight from HMI Probation. “A tripartite strategy for… New research highlights the need to enhance understanding of the unpaid work requirement and to gain public support and buy-in....