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Posts tagged Wales
Inside England and Wales’s Prisons Crisis

By Cassia Rowland | Thomas Pope 

The prison system in England and Wales is in an extremely poor state. Levels of violence, self-harm and drug use are shockingly high, prisoners’ work and education opportunities severely limited. Buildings are crumbling or in severe disrepair, many dangerously so, and physical conditions often unsanitary.1,2 Inexperienced staff are struggling to cope with these increasingly fraught circumstances. The failure of successive governments since at least the early 2000s to expand the number of places to meet the growing number of prisoners has put severe pressure on capacity and exacerbated this decline.3 Deep funding cuts implemented in the early 2010s have still not been fully reversed, even as the prison population has hit new highs.4 And while capital investment has risen sharply in recent years, this is focused on building new prisons and is insufficient to address the growing maintenance backlog.5 In just the last two years, eight prisons have been issued with ‘urgent notifications’ by the prisons inspectorate, escalating serious concerns directly to the secretary of state.6 Cuts to prison officer numbers as part of the coalition government’s austerity programme began to bite from 2012/13, with officer numbers in 2013/14 down 26% from 2009/10 and then staying flat until 2016/17, even as the prison population rose.7 Recruitment since 2017/18 has partially reversed this, but many of these new officers have been to staff new prisons, leaving the number of prison officers per 1,000 prisoners in March 2024 still 8% below 2009/10 levels. Crucially, even as workforce numbers have recovered, the average officer is now much less experienced than before staff cuts. This combination of reduced staff numbers and experience is likely to have contributed substantially to prisons’ overall declining performance. That is the national picture. But what is the situation within individual prisons? Which are doing better or worse, and what might be driving that? This report – the first in a new series of analyses of public services at the local level across England and Wales from the Institute for Government and funded by the Nuffield Foundation – digs into the detail of prison performance to answer some of these questions. We find widespread decline across most prisons on a range of measures. Violence, self-harm and ‘protesting behaviours’ have risen sharply across almost all prisons. However, some buck the trend – particularly open prisons (category D sites). Clearly this is at least in part to do with the types of prisoner these prisons hold. But that is not the whole story, with open prisons continuing to outperform other categories even as the prisoner mix has changed in the last year. What is clear is that overcrowding and a lack of purposeful activity for prisoners are significantly associated with poor performance, especially violence. Reception prisons, with the highest levels of overcrowding and lowest purposeful activity, are over-represented among the worst performers 

London: Institute for Government, 2025. 45p.

Determining rates of death in custody in England and Wales

By Stella Botchway and Seena Fazel

In England and Wales, there has been considerable work over recent years to reduce the numbers of deaths in custody. Currently, there is no standard,internationally agreed definition of a death in custody, which limits compar-isons. In addition, rates of death in custody are often reported per country or region inhabitants, but it would be more useful to report per number of detainees. In this short communication, we present data on deaths in indivi-duals who have been detained in England and Wales between 2016 to 2019. Wealso present a method to calculate rates of death per custodial population in key settings using routine data, allowing for more consistent comparisons across time and different settings. Most deaths in custody between 2016–2019 occurred in prisons (56% of all deaths in custody over 2016–19; Table 1). However, when rates are considered, those detained under the Mental HealthAct had the highest rate of deaths, which ranged from 1103–1334/100,000 per-sons detained. Around one in five deaths were self-inflicted. The data presented highlights the need to maintain focus on improving the physical health and mental health of all those detained in custody, both whilst in detention and after release

THE JOURNAL OF FORENSIC PSYCHIATRY & PSYCHOLOGY2022, VOL. 33, NO. 1, 1–13

The Parole System of England and Wales

 By Jacqueline Beard

The Parole Board. The Parole Board is an executive non-departmental public body, responsible for the parole system. The Parole Board carries out risk assessments on these prisoners to determine whether they can be safely released into the community. It is governed by the Parole Board Rules, secondary legislation that sets out the procedures that must be followed when determining parole cases.

Reforms 2018-19: transparency and reconsideration. In 2018-2019 there were reforms to Parole Board procedures, partly in response to the case of John Warboys (now known as John Radford). Rule 25 of the Parole Board Rules was amended in 2018 to allow summaries of Parole Board decisions to be provided to victims and other interested parties. Previously Rule 25 had prohibited any release of information about parole proceedings.

Root and branch review 2022. In March 2022 the Government published a root and branch review with plans for further reforms, some of which require legislation. The Government has said it will legislate for those changes which require it as soon as possible.

Most comment regarding the root and branch review focused on the proposal for a Minister to review release decisions where the Parole Board directs the release of a person who is serving a sentence for a ‘top tier’ offence. Organisations such as Justice, the Howard League for Penal Reform and the Prison Reform Trust have raised concerns about political interference in legal processes and the possibility of ‘political grandstanding’.....

London: House of Commons Library 2023. 31p.

Contrasts in Tolerance: Post-war Penal Policy in The Netherlands and England and Wales

By David Downes

From chapter 1. Comparative criminology is nothing new. In their broadest sense, of contrasting institutional arrangements and/or forms of conduct between whole societies, comparative studies have long been an invaluable, though under-used, resourcein historical and socio-economic studies. Travels abroad can be as influential as journeyings at home in the realm of criminal and penal policies. It is difficult otherwise to account for such phenomena as the rapid rise of the penitentiary across the continents of Europe and North America in the first few decades oft h e nineteenth century. More recently, the appeal ofvictim-related measures has, from relatively small beginnings in the United States in the late 1960s, fanned out to most liberal democratic societies around the globe. From time to time, Britain has attracted streams of enquirers into the workings of the latest penal or reformative innovation. The Borstal system in the interwar period was much admired abroad.

Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1988. 236p. CONTAINS MARK-UP