19/11/2008 10:21:00
A failure of leadership and direction across the criminal justice system has resulted in vulnerable people facing ‘personal, systemic and routine’ discrimination from the point of arrest through to release from prison, according to a groundbreaking, three year review published by the Prison Reform Trust.
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28/10/2008 14:25:00
Yesterday Jack Straw declared reclaiming the "unfashionable" concepts of punishment and reform would not herald a Victorian approach to crime. Yet, with the publication this week of figures showing the number of babies born in prison is soaring, you don't need to read Little Dorrit to feel there's already something very Dickensian about our prison system.
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15/10/2008 15:52:00
This report lays bare the scale of the damage done by IPP’s.
IPP’s are a text book example of the dangers of chasing headlines by acting tough, not smart. As our report last year first highlighted, the sentence was unnecessary and proved to be unworkable, overfilling prisons and leaving prison staff to try to make sense of the mess.
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24/09/2008 15:22:00
Lack of training and inadequate resources for prison staff in dealing with prisoners affected by learning disabilities is leaving some of the most vulnerable prisoners in Northern Ireland prisons unidentified, bullied and effectively excluded from rehabilitation courses, according to new research published by the Prison Reform Trust.
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18/09/2008 16:00:00
The dramatic fall in the projected prison population pulls the rug from under the case to build 2,500 place Titan prisons. Last year these same projections were cited by ministers as the reason why we need more and bigger prisons; today, they show that sentencing reforms make much of this colossal building programme redundant.
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