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.
Given recent stories about the police putting your door in if you have more than six people over on Christmas day, it seems almost quaint to be talking about Stop and Search as an abuse of state power. Yet the release of statistics this week that show black people are nine times more likely to
Is the British countryside racist? BBC Countryfile presenter Ellie Harrison thinks so. ‘Even a single racist event means there is work to do,’ she said. ‘In asking whether the countryside is racist, then yes it is; but asking if it’s more racist than anywhere else — maybe, maybe not.’ As a native Northern Irishman who has been warmly welcomed on
Later today, two men will be sentenced for their part in the attempted murder of a prison officer at high security HMP Whitemoor in January 2020. Unfortunately, extreme violence against the men and women who put on the uniform has become almost normalised in a system beset with squalor, overcrowding and unchecked predatory behaviour. Even
It ought to be a good day at the office (at last!) for Robert Buckland, the Secretary of State who has outraged the legal profession. He spent most of last weekend on the media rack defending the government’s position that it might break international law to defy an agreement with the EU that it had
This week saw the publication of an independent review into multi-agency arrangements that manage terrorist offenders released into the community. The report was ordered by the Government following the horrific murders committed by released Islamist extremist, Usman Khan in November of last year who was at the time subject to these arrangements and had convinced
The wheels of justice have, for once, turned with decent haste and Andrew Banks is now banged up. Banks’s crime? To relieve himself at Saturday’s demonstration just inches away from the memorial of PC Keith Palmer, who was murdered trying to prevent an Islamist terrorist gain access to Parliament in 2017. The contrast between supreme sacrifice and
Social media is predictably swamped by the usual well-heeled, left-wheeled liberal rights activists decrying the major changes to terrorism laws introduced by Justice Secretary Robert Buckland this morning. The new Counter Terrorism and Sentencing Bill entering Parliament today delivers swingeing changes to the sentencing, risk assessment and supervision of this countries violent extremists. Fatal defects in
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Covid-19 has entered our prison system. There are now at least two confirmed coronavirus cases in HMPs Manchester and Highdown in Surrey, which means staff and prisoners there are in isolation and hospital. This was inevitable, and as I have said previously, our overcrowded and under-resourced jails need special, urgent consideration. Prisons incubate many malign
Scared about coronavirus as you go about your everyday life? Spare a thought for those living and working inside our battered prison system. In Italy yesterday the anxiety that underpins all incarceration suddenly exploded into violence. Rioting left six prisoners dead, staff were taken hostage, dozens escaped and one prison in Poggioreale near Naples was ‘completely
What is the point of UN Special Rapporteurs? On Tuesday, their expert on terrorism and human rights, Fionnuala Ni Aolain, released a report which was seized upon by the Independent and the usual dodgy ‘advocacy’ groups that speak on behalf of convicted extremist as being evidence that our counter-terrorism Prevent strategy violates international law. Rapporteurs are
I got my first Irish passport a few months ago. It felt like a vaguely transgressive gesture because my primary British identity was forged on the Northern Irish border where many Unionists like me paid for their UK citizenship in blood. In the event, if anything, I felt proud of the way this document allowed
Sometimes it appears as if, over the past ten years, the government has been actively trying to destroy the whole criminal justice system. It’s like an evil experiment: impose a 20 per cent cut in the prisons budget, meaning a 26 per cent reduction in the number of operational front line staff — then sit
We’ve just celebrated the birth of a refugee who went on to radicalise a group of fishermen and transform the worldview of millions of people. You might not feel comfortable with this depiction of Jesus Christ but it does illustrate the challenges and limitations of language and labelling when dealing with contemporary violent extremism. I
London Bridge terrorist Usman Khan appears to have spent some of his final months behind bars at HMP Whitemoor, a high-security prison near Peterborough, where some of the country’s most dangerous people are held. The prison’s chequered history could be relevant to the horrific events that unfolded in the capital last week. I last visited Whitemoor
What should we do with adults who murder children? ‘Nothing good’ is a perfectly understandable response. Child killers occupy a unique position on the destitute outer fringes of humanity. Bogeymen made real, they are in fact often pathetic, hideously damaged individuals driven to satisfy appetites we can only guess at. The Conservatives have announced that
Home Secretary Priti Patel downgraded our national terrorism threat assessment last week from ‘severe’, where it has sat for the last four years to ‘substantial’. Attacks have now been reduced from ‘highly likely’ to ‘likely’. We’re never given the full analysis of the reasons for the changes in alert levels, which is independently assessed by
Rory Stewart’s announcement that he would run as an independent candidate for Mayor for London was typically civilised. This was no political suicide bomb. Instead Stewart waited for his erstwhile party’s conference to finish before making his move. But this trademark decency does not render his decision any less barking to his detractors. I’m on friendly
The Irish border is awash with journalists and pundits from Great Britain, scratching their heads in wet frontier fields patrolled by incurious Friesians. No border bridge has been left unmolested by visiting television crews in search of a sombre framing shot. The former ‘Killing Fields’ outside Enniskillen were my home until I left for university
The latest Operation Yellowhammer disclosures put me in mind of a book I read a few years ago describing an unsettlingly plausible zombie outbreak in Britain. When the streets were too full of undead shamblers for the government to ignore, the Home Secretary asked officials who were barricaded in his office for the contingency plan
