In the media
- 01.03.10 | Community Care
Local approach to youth justice ‘could save millions of pounds’ - 01.03.10 | The Guardian
£140,000: What it costs to jail a young criminal for a year - 14.02.2010 | The Observer
Gordon Brown set to end early jail release scheme - 03.03.2010 | Metro UK
Put paid to young offending - 01.02.2010 | Times Online
Prison ships: return to an unsuccessful experiment
The final insult
25.09.09
We should be ashamed that we are not offering the kind of mental health, drug and alcohol support that is clearly badly needed to support those who have risked their lives to protect our liberty.
The final insult of the week has to be the the rising number of our former servicemen ending up in the criminal justice system.
Instead we now have over 8,500 veterans behind bars – over 10% of the total held in our prison system: a system which is overburdened and under resourced.
Surely now is the time to divert as many of these veterans as possible, with the resources it costs to lock them up, away from custody into properly robust and appropriate services in the community.
Fresh from the States:
23.09.09
“(Springfield, IL) – As part of a prison reform package, nearly one-thousand low-level and non-violent prisoners in Illinois will be released to parole agents. The move will allow Illinois Department of Corrections officials to concentrate on higher-risk offenders. The prisoners will face strict rules and will be subject to electronic monitoring for the duration of their sentence. Another part of the plan will reduce the number of offenders sent to prison. Two-million dollars has been provided for community-based programs to keep non-violent offenders out of jail.”
…America has learnt from its prison fest – isn’t it time we did?
Sheila McKechnie Campaigner Awards
21.09.09
It was the Sheila McKechnie Campaigner Awards last week and I was honoured to have been a finalist for the Social Inclusion Campaigner of the Year Award.
What an amazing group of campaign winners – a young man had literally just flown in from Ghana to be presented with the International Campaigner Award. Do check out the winners.
Cut, cut, cut short-term prisoner numbers…
18.09.09
There has been much discussion about cuts this week from both the Conservatives and now Labour. My concern is that this haggling about cuts detracts from another important issue, which is how existing public expenditure can be better used. This is never more urgent than in criminal justice.
Make Justice Work is not advocating sweeping cuts throughout the system – what it is campaigning for is much more sensible use of existing resources, which can help to maintain public safety, reduce overcrowding in prisons and can impact on reducing the level of re-offending amongst those low level offenders who come in and out of prison with increased regularity. Paul Tidball (Cash crisis in prisoner rehabilitation scheme adds to overcrowding, Sep 17) is absolutely right to point out his concern that the mismatch between prison places and the resources to make sentences work is effectively clogging up the system with those longer sentenced prisoners who could access rehabilitation. Remove the thousands of low level offenders from prisons into well resourced and effective community sentences and you will free up badly needed resources to work with those more complex prisoners.
Michael Caine is right…
Michael Caine is totally correct in his call for more disaffected youngsters to receive alternative help rather than prison (Daily Mail, September 14). Throwing young low-level, non-violent offenders in prison on short-term sentences simply gives them yet another push up the crime career ladder while costing the taxpayer thousands of pounds. Putting a young offender in custody for 12 months costs more than it would to send them to Eton for a year whilst also allowing them to mix with hardened criminals. We have to think twice about what is the most effective way of tackling crime.
Dominic Grieve at Prison Radio
08.09.09
In my capacity as founder and chair of the Prison Radio Association I hosted a visit yesterday to Brixton prison with Dominic Grieve, the shadow minister of justice, so that he could come and see how Electric Radio Brixton works and also gain an insight into our vision of a national prison radio service. As much as one can feel optimistic in these uncertain times, his genuine enthusiasm and empathy with our work and the wider world of criminal justice gave me a real feeling of hope. It is now up to us, the voluntary sector, to build on such glimmers of hope – sooner rather later.
We are not the only country with children who drink….
07.09.09
Did you know that in Milan parents of underage drinkers are to fined up to 900 euros under a strict new law. The move comes in response to a growing problem of young people drinking excessively in public rather than enjoying moderate amounts of alcohol with family. A recent survey showed that a third of 11 year olds in Milan had alcohol problems. Mayor Letizia Moratti says the law has been passed to address an emergency situation.
Stop this netwidening lunacy
What a jolly weekend…..not content to lock up children who have done something wrong, this government is now intent on locking up children who have done absolutely no wrong at all.
What sort of society are we turning into? More and more people are being swept into the criminal justice system – at great cost to the public purse. Netwidening is endemic.
And I do sympathise with the magistrates’ concern about ‘Alcohol Asbos‘ – AA for short….Surely it would make more sense to invest in existing programmes that are already at the disposal of the courts?
For starters, how on earth are these new Asbos going to be enforced? Are we going to see breach rates go sky high, resulting in these people being drawn into the criminal justice system? Will they have to wear high visibilty vests so that the pubs, bars and off licences from which they are banned can identify them?
Quite frankly, it seems to me that we are coming at this from the wrong end. It is the alcohol “dealers” who should be curbed first – the supermarkets, Happy Hours, etc.
Yet again, Scotland are ahead of the game and are now banning irresponsible promotions and providing free tap water in pubs and clubs.
Alcohol is undoubtedly a major scourge of this country and is a key contributory factor to our crime rate and communities’ misery. But it will take more than a gimmick to solve this problem.
Broken Society or Boring Script?
If Chris Grayling (Telegraph, 26 August) truly believes that The Wire reflects aspects of our so-called ‘Broken Society’ then he will also know that it is considered to be one of the most sophisticated and intelligent TV scripts ever written.
So can he offer a suitable and intelligent script which can cure our ‘Broken Society’ or will his ideas be great drama, sound and visual effects, but in the end just be fiction?
Watch this space.
Too quick to condemn
25.08.09
The Guardian reports today of the supposed failure of a government programme to help rehabilitate our most serious youth offenders. Again, we are experiencing shoddy journalism with regard to putting the facts across to the public in a rational and fair way. Vikram Dodd chooses to only focus on the comments of two offenders who rather blithely (and naively) suggest that they think prison would have worked better for them. No mention of whether they had been to prison to see just how well that would work for them, no mention of those for whom such a programme had worked. Frances Done quite rightly defends the programme as how can researching 2 programmes out of 100 be representative and an accurate reflection of what works?
Most importantly, this kind of research must in no way impact on such a programme being improved upon – it remains absolutely essential to keep these young people out of prison where they are more likely to re-offend on release, having received nowhere near the kind of support that such a community programme can offer. It simply doesn’t make sense to rubbish a programme which is grounded in common sense values and reflects, in essence, much of what is good about work that is being carried out in the community to support young offenders out of crime.