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.
‘What rhymes with Patsy Gillespie?’ That was the starkest reaction on social media to the recent announcement of the launch of a poetry prize dedicated to Derry IRA commander and former deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, Martin McGuinness. Mr Gillespie, 42, was a cook at the Fort George Army base in Derry city. In
What’s it like being locked up during lockdown? The latest statistics on prison safety paint a grim picture of life behind bars, which has been made worse by the pandemic. Even the good news must be caveated. Assaults on staff have reduced quite dramatically, which in any circumstances must be a good thing given a
Jonathan Hall QC, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, has launched an inquiry into how our prison service is managing the threat posed by terrorism. The backdrop to his review is the rapidly accumulating evidence that, across our penal system, violent extremism has increased its grip resulting in outrageous attacks on either side of
On this day in 1974, a body was recovered in quiet fields near the Country Tyrone village of Clogher, hard against Northern Ireland’s frontier. It was that of Cormac McCabe, the headmaster of a nearby secondary school, who was also a part-time officer in the Ulster Defence Regiment, locally raised ‘home battalions’ of the British
Was Reading terrorist Khairi Saadallah radicalised behind bars? What we do know is that locking Saadallah in HMP Bullingdon to develop a ‘close’ relationship with radical cleric Omar Brooks was an extraordinary lapse in operational security. Only 16 days after leaving the prison, the violent, troubled and combat experienced Saadallah launched his murderous attack in Reading.
It’s slow business for global terrorists these days with all the targets banged up under Covid house arrest. But there’s one place in the United Kingdom where it has been pretty much business as usual for violent extremism. Northern Ireland’s police service has just released its security assessment for 2020. This contains some startling information
Is it possible to ‘deradicalise’ terrorists? Jonathan Hall QC, the government’s terror watchdog, doesn’t think so. He may have a point, but it’s complicated. One of the institutional problems we have is a sort of misplaced arrogance based, in part, on the historic experience of counter-insurgency against violent Irish republicans. Until quite recently, the Ministry of Justice press office referred
Use of force isn’t like the movies. It’s often messy, frightening and it can go sideways very quickly. I vividly remember my first arrest as a volunteer police officer, surrounded by jeering teenagers in a seaside amusement arcade wrestling on the ground with a completely non-compliant powerfully built kid. When we eventually got the cuffs on
This weekend is the first anniversary of the London Bridge attack. Usman Khan murdered two young people at an event he was invited to, run by the ‘Learning Together’ scheme, which is part of the University of Cambridge. The conference was designed to celebrate the achievements of people like Khan who had joined the course while serving
Series four of The Crown begins with the murder of Lord Mountbatten at Mullaghmore in August 1979. Mountbatten was killed with three others, on the same day 18 British soldiers were ambushed at Warrenpoint. It was a devastating blow for the British establishment. But it held a more intimate horror too. If you listen carefully
What is the Equality and Human Rights Commission for? It’s definitely not for the likes of David Goodhart, according to plenty of progressive types reacting to the news of Goodhart’s appointment as one of the EHRC’s commissioners. ‘Appointing the spectacularly ill-suited Goodhart to the EHRC is an awful move from the government,’ says the journalist Rachel Shabi. ‘The EHRC’s
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
