Professor Ian Acheson is a former prison governor. He was also Director of Community Safety at the Home Office. His book ‘Screwed: Britain’s prison crisis and how to escape it’ is out now.
Texas. Big country, big ideas. The new Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood has become enamoured with an intriguing idea from the Lone Star state – letting prisoners out early for good behaviour. Those of you who still watch reruns of Porridge on BritBox will be having déjà vu. Back before the Criminal Justice
Are you ready for SDS40? You might need to be if you’re unlucky enough to live in a high crime area. This is the anodyne descriptor for the government’s emergency release of an estimated 5,000 offenders this month and next, having served only 40 per cent of their sentence in prison custody. This is the
Can the Ministry of Justice carry on without our failing prison system seizing up altogether? Today we learned that Magistrates are being urged by the Chief Judge not to send convicted offenders to prison until room can be made for them in prison cells. After the riots last month, there are only a few hundred
The Home Secretary has admitted a thing that has long been known to those of us without close protection officers: that in many communities, people often feel that ‘crime has no consequences’. Her remarks this morning also acknowledged another pretty obvious fact: that the country has lost respect for the police. Yvette Cooper’s words are strikingly
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Keir Starmer will be chairing his first Cobra meeting, as the government continues to grapple with the rioting that has broken out across the country. The weekend saw numerous examples of violence, including at hotels thought to be hosting asylum seekers. We had a statement from the prime minister condemning the ‘right wing thuggery’, but
The last comparable period of civil disorder in this country happened in 2011. Then as now, the courts acted with speed and severity to try to quell five days of rioting in multiple locations, which traumatised the nation, caused hundreds of millions in damage and injured more than three hundred officers. The head of the
Merseyside police were very keen to rule out the Southport attack as ‘terrorism-related’. This was despite subsequent remarks from the Home Office that counter-terrorism police were still assisting the investigation. That muddled explanation will fall on deaf ears. Whether this turns out to be an act encompassed within the dry legalistic definition of terrorism, the
Is there any point in rehabilitating prisoners sentenced to ‘whole life’ tariffs, who will die in custody? Today’s announcement banning such prisoners from a fundamental human right – to get married – would suggest the state thinks there isn’t. This act, contained in an innocuous statutory instrument is a rare example of retribution in action. We don’t
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Justice secretary Shabana Mahmood has acknowledged that ‘our prisons are on the point of collapse’. She has announced that, from September, most prisoners serving sentences of less than four years will be released 40 per cent of the way through their sentences instead of the halfway point, which is currently the case. The policy will
Let’s talk cobblers. The Prime Minister has responded to the jail space crisis by ennobling the nation’s shoe mender-in-chief James Timpson and making him minister for prisons, probation and parole. This is a bold move but not one without risk. It would only take one high-profile crime committed by a prisoner on early release to plunge the
Imagine the scene. It’s Friday morning and the new Secretary of State for Justice, Shabana Mahmood, has just slipped into the big chair. Her predecessor has left her a note on the desk, ‘I’m afraid there is no cell space. Kind regards – and good luck! Alex.’ With prison capacity running at 99 per cent and
It’s Monday afternoon and I’m walking through the estate where I was born on the outskirts of Enniskillen in Northern Ireland. Here in the United Kingdom’s most westerly and most marginal constituency, politics continues to be war by other means. The Unionist marching season beckons and as well as the usual red white and blue
Manifestos come and go but women continue to be murdered by men they know in grotesquely high numbers. According to the Times, the Conservatives are set to crack down on femicide in their manifesto, with the minimum sentence for murders that take place in the home raised from 15 to 25 years. Will this make any difference?
Tommy Robinson, a self-invented English ‘patriot’, was free to attend yesterday’s St George’s Day event in central London which descended into ugly clashes between participants and police. Earlier in the day, he had been released from court after successfully arguing that a police dispersal order that resulted in his arrest and charge in November last
Aldous Huxley’s dystopian best seller Brave New World, published back in 1934, envisaged a society where stability was enforced by a numbing drug called ‘soma’. Constant consumption of soma, mandated by the state, dulled the senses, vanished despair and discouraged rebellion. I was reminded of this by comments made by some of the Times‘ new
Why did Gideon Falter cross the road? Or try to? That is a question that went viral this weekend. A video emerged of Falter, who leads the Campaign Against Antisemitism, being threatened by police for trying to cross a pro-Palestinian protest in central London. He was wearing a kippah and carrying a prayer shawl bag,
We know our prison system is awash with drugs but just what are they smoking at the Ministry of Justice? A shocking story in the Times yesterday revealed what a desperate state Britain’s jails are in. Paul Morgan-Bentley, an undercover reporter, was hired at breakneck speed to work as a uniformed Operational Support Grade (OSG)
What should we do when there’s no cell space left in our disordered jails? The prison population figures published yesterday show a small drop compared to last week, with nearly 87,900 currently incarcerated. There’s precious little room for manoeuvre. We are perilously close to a time I can remember back in the mid-90s when governors
Michael Gove has a reliable track record for sounding the alarm on ideological hatred, so are his latest proposals on redefining extremism a cure for what ails us? The communities secretary has unveiled a plan to broaden the definition of extremism. The new official meaning aims to ban those with a ‘violent or intolerant’ ideology
Are we being ‘poisoned’ by extremism? The Prime Minister seems to think so. His speech on the steps of Downing Street following the Rochdale by-election described a country where values of tolerance and civility were being deliberately undermined by Islamists and the far right. ‘Islamist extremists and the far right feed off and embolden each other,’
