29/06/2011 00:01:00
Community penalties are now outperforming short prison sentences, according to statistics released today from the latest edition of the Prison Reform Trust’s Bromley Briefings Prison Factfile. If government succeeds in reforming the justice system, building on the success of community measures including diversion into health treatment where appropriate, and holding prison numbers to an unavoidable minimum, it could deliver on its promise of a “rehabilitation revolution”.
Read more
06/06/2011 00:01:00
Effective community sentences that command the confidence of the courts should cut women’s offending, reduce the women’s prison population and save the public purse, according to a report launched today by the independent Women’s Justice Taskforce.
Read more
26/05/2011 10:34:00
In 1999, a prison governor writing in the Prison Service Journal, said:
"We… have a young offender who is due for release shortly… Everyone working with this woman accepts that she should not be in prison. She is severely learning disabled as a result of a physical abnormality of the brain…We know that regardless of court diversion schemes, many like her slip through the net....Perhaps the courts think such people are insolent when they don’t reply. In fact, when we had one of these women assessed we discovered that she had a mental age of between seven and eight."
Seven years later, concerned at the on-going plight of people with learning disabilities in the criminal justice system, the Prison Reform Trust embarked on a three year programme to draw attention to the particular experiences of people with learning disabilities and difficulties who offend, and the staff who work with them.
Read more
16/05/2011 08:21:00
As the Justice Secretary Ken Clarke has stated, currently many people in prison are not encouraged to take responsibility and are compelled to live a life of “enforced, bored idleness”. The Prison Reform Trust report demonstrates that encouraging active citizenship in prisons should play an important part in achieving the government’s aims for a “rehabilitation revolution” and developing the wider concept of the Big Society. It could help achieve the coalition’s plans, outlined in the Ministry of Justice’s green paper Breaking the Cycle, for making prisons places of hard work and purposeful activity.
Read more
12/05/2011 08:40:00
Too many children and teenagers are locked up, not for committing criminal or anti-social behaviour, but for failing to keep to the conditions of a previous court order. This is in spite of the fact that there is no evidence that tough enforcement is effective in reducing youth crime. In a new report commissioned from NCB, and launched in Parliament today, the Prison Reform Trust explores how and why so many children and teenagers are punished for missing appointments or for transgressing the terms of their anti-social behaviour order.
Read more