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Following the Prime Minister’s announcements about prisons in mid-August, we wrote three letters seeking clarification, to Permanent Secretary Richard Heaton, to the Secretary of State, Robert Buckland and to the CEO of HMPPS, Jo Farrar. To their collective credit, they have replied only three weeks later, and with some detail.
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Photo credit: Andy Aitchison
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09/09/2019 16:25:00
Commenting on the publication of the Joint Committee on Human Rights report Right to Family Life: Children whose mothers are in prison, Jenny Earle, programme director of the PRT Transforming Lives programme to reduce women’s imprisonment said:
“Today’s report recognises that women overwhelmingly commit non-violent offences, spend short spells behind bars, and are more likely to be the primary carer of their children. Ensuring that children’s welfare is more consistently and effectively factored into sentencing decisions, requires changes to both law and practice. This means that women have the opportunity and the confidence to disclose if they have children, and a prohibition on custodial sentencing without a pre-sentence report. The government must act on the recommendations of this expert cross-party parliamentary committee, and break the cycle of intergenerational crime once and for all.”
You can download a copy of our evidence to the JCHR inquiry by clicking here.
You can download a copy of our report on maternal imprisonment, 'What about me?', by clicking here.
Click read more to see our Head of Prisoner Engagement, Paula Harriott speaking to Channel 5 News about maternal imprisonment.
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04/09/2019 00:01:00
A year after the publication of the government’s Female Offender Strategy, the Prison Reform Trust, in partnership with NHS England and NHS Improvement and the Centre for Mental Health, are bringing together allied organisations to support the delivery of better outcomes for women in trouble with the law.
The event, held at The Supreme Court today (4 September), will host a keynote speech from Lucy Frazer QC MP, Minister of State for Prisons and Probation, and bring together practitioners, politicians and policy makers from health, social care and criminal justice fields, alongside women with lived experience of the justice system. London’s Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, Sophie Linden, will also address the event.
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Photo credit: UK Parliament, licenced under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)
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28/08/2019 00:01:00
Commenting on the findings of the HM Inspectorate of Prisons report on HMP Eastwood Park, Dr Jenny Earle, Prison Reform Trust lead for reducing women’s imprisonment said:
“The cause of at least some of Eastwood Park prison’s failings lie outside its walls in the lack of housing and mental health support for women in the community. It is shocking that inspectors found that more than two in five women were being released homeless—only increasing the likelihood that they will return back to custody. Over a year on since the publication of the government’s Female Offender Strategy, this report suggests that progress in key areas remains disappointingly slow. Women are still too often being set up to fail.”
Photo credit: Andy Aitchison
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22/08/2019 12:00:00
Commenting on the publication of the results from the 10 prisons project by the Ministry of Justice today, Peter Dawson, director of the Prison Reform Trust said:
“Any reduction in violence in any prison is welcome. But the 10 prisons project and the fate of a prisons minister always risked being a distraction from the real issue facing the government. That is about overcrowding—still running at over 20% despite three decades of prison building. It has always been possible to yank a very poor prison back from the abyss for a while, but the strategic problem of prisons holding too many people has never been properly addressed. Any glimmers of systemic improvement will be quickly snuffed out if we return to the failed ‘prison works’ policies that have created this calamity in the first place.”
The Prison Reform Trust has produced two infographics to show performance in each of the 10 prisons for assaults and positive drug tests.
Click here to see performance in assaults
Click here to see performance in positive drug tests
Photo credit: Andy Aitchison
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