Report says failings mean ministers still do not know if tagging criminals is helping to cut reoffending
A failed government plan to transform the system for electronically tagging offenders wasted £98m of taxpayers’ money, Whitehall’s spending watchdog has found.
The National Audit Office (NAO) said attempts to upgrade HM Prison & Probation Service’s (HMPPS) tagging system were abandoned in March after 11 years and a net spend of £153m.
Continue reading...Head of Howard League urges party to abandon ‘cheap politics’ and develop evidence-based position
The Labour party is indulging in “cheap politics” by accusing the Conservatives repeatedly of being soft on crime, the head of a leading prison reform charity has claimed.
Andrea Coomber QC, the chief executive of the Howard League, said the opposition is trying to outflank Boris Johnson’s government on law and order instead of developing evidence-based policies to solve a crisis within the criminal justice system.
Continue reading...Justice secretary says safeguarding concerns must be addressed, and criticises Human Rights Act
Granting Levi Bellfield’s request to get married in prison is “inconceivable” unless serious safeguarding concerns are addressed, Dominic Raab has said.
Bellfield, who murdered Marsha McDonnell, Amelie Delagrange and Milly Dowler, is engaged and has requested a prison wedding, the Ministry of Justice has confirmed.
Continue reading...Most seriously ill inmates left to wait in cells often due to bed shortages at secure hospitals, data shows
Hundreds of severely mentally ill prisoners in urgent need of hospital treatment are being left in prison cells due to bed shortages in secure NHS psychiatric units, an investigation has discovered.
Freedom of information (FoI) responses from 22 NHS trusts reveal for the first time that just over half of the 5,403 prisoners in England assessed by prison-based psychiatrists to require hospitalisation were not transferred between 2016 and 2021 – an 81% increase on the number of prisoners denied a transfer in the previous five years.
Continue reading...Unusual move to seek legal clarification, which cannot reverse verdict, amounts to the ‘politicisation of jury trials’, says defence lawyer
The attorney general has referred the case of four protesters cleared of the toppling of the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston to the court of appeal for legal direction.
In a rare move, which cannot reverse the not guilty verdicts, Suella Braverman is to ask appeal judges for clarification on whether defendants can cite their human rights as a defence in a case of criminal damage.
Continue reading...Court closures, defunded legal aid and barrister shortages are adding to an already excruciating ordeal, while invasive investigations are leading many to drop proceedings altogether
For Nina, the prospect of walking into a police station and reporting her stepfather for child sexual abuse was, she says, her “worst nightmare ... It was something I’d dreaded my whole life,” she says. She had been raped by her stepfather for years when she was a child – and he had promised all sorts of consequences if she ever told anyone. Her mother, he told her, would kill herself. He implied that he might, too – but one thing he always assured her was that he would never go to jail.
When she was in her late teens, Nina finally told her mum, who was devastated, but believed her. It took years, however, before she felt ready to press charges. “One of the things that stopped me from telling anyone that it was happening at the time was the terror of standing in a courtroom putting all that shame on show – and that felt even worse the older I got.
Continue reading...Academics and clinicians say bill ‘will have a profound negative impact on young people’s mental health’
Hundreds of clinical psychiatrists and psychologists have warned that the police and crime bill reaching its final stages in parliament “will have a profound negative impact on young people’s mental health”.
“We cannot think of better measures to disempower and socially isolate young people,” they say in an open letter signed by more than 350 academics and clinicians and published online.
Continue reading...Darren Collins, 56, downloaded thousands of images from police databases
A police worker who illegally downloaded and took home thousands of images, including those showing murder victims and postmortems, has been jailed for three years.
Darren Collins, a digital forensic specialist from Stafford, admitted misconduct in a public office last month after being sacked by Staffordshire police for gross misconduct.
Continue reading...He experienced horrendous abuse in foster care, then suffered terribly years later when the case came to court. Now a police officer, he is determined to change how the system treats survivors
Jon Needham looks like a copper. Tall, broad and imposing, he works in a lifetime offender management unit, where he deals with serious and organised criminals. So when he speaks, his gentleness comes as a surprise. “I joined the police because I was passionate about helping people,” he says. “It sounds like a cliche to say you want to make a real difference, but I genuinely mean it.”
Needham gets paid for working with “nominals” – people who are on the police database (“That’s what the police call them, I call them people,” he says). But he is also transforming how his colleagues deal with victims of rape and sexual assault.
Continue reading...For 16 years, on and off, I was held at Her Majesty’s pleasure. It was the struggles and loss of a friend on the outside that made me realise how powerless I was
I am sure those who know my backstory of criminality imagine – reasonably – that the toughest times of my life were while I was a guest of Her Majesty, who kindly gave me full board and lodgings for 16 years, on and off, during the first six decades of my existence. And they are half right.
My first taste of her hospitality came in 1957 when, at 14, I was ordered to spend three months in a detention centre. Then a relatively new concept, these were designed to give miscreants a “short, sharp shock” that would teach us to stay on the straight and narrow.
Continue reading...Observer investigation finds officers without the usual certification used risky restraint techniques at Brook House
Suicidal asylum seekers were subject to force by guards who the Home Office allowed to remain on duty despite being “effectively uncertified” in the safe use of restraint techniques, according to internal documents charting conditions inside one of the UK’s most controversial immigration centres.
Experts say the department endangered lives last year by deploying custody staff whose training in the safe use of force had expired, as it detained hundreds of people who had crossed the Channel in a fast-track scheme to remove them.
Continue reading...Lawyers and campaigners fear decision not to grant appeal against conviction risks silencing other victims of domestic abuse
A mother jailed for harming her baby has accused the courts of “injustice” after judges accepted she was a victim of abuse but ruled against an application for an appeal against her conviction made on the grounds that her violent ex-partner coerced her to lie at her trial.
The woman, known as “Jenny”, was convicted in 2017 of causing or allowing serious harm after her child sustained skull fractures and bleeding on the brain. The baby’s father was her co-defendant but was acquitted on a lesser charge.
Continue reading...Penelope Gibbs, former magistrate and founder of Transform Justice, on whether harsher sentences are effective
Until recently, the subject of criminal punishment hasn’t been a massive concern for the public (putting aside that small demographic committed to a “hang ’em all!” approach). But in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder, calls for misogyny to become a hate crime have gone from a whisper to a roar. That change would give judges the power to increase sentences when misogyny was found to be an aggravating factor in a crime. But would harsher sentences do much to stop such crimes happening? I asked Penelope Gibbs, former magistrate and founder of Transform Justice, a charity campaigning for a more effective justice system.
Did you hear about the Thai fraudster who was sentenced to jail for more than 13,000 years? I guess they needed a number to describe ‘throwing away the key’. Are long sentences becoming more common?
I don’t know about across the world, but I can tell you that in England and Wales sentences have been getting steadily longer over the past decade, by roughly 20%.
WikiLeaks founder and Stella Moris are preparing legal action against Dominic Raab and Belmarsh jail governor
Julian Assange and his fiancee, Stella Moris, say they are being prevented from getting married and are preparing legal action against Dominic Raab and the governor of Belmarsh prison.
The action accuses the justice secretary and Jenny Louis, who runs the prison where the WikiLeaks co-founder is being held while the US is seeking his extradition, of denying the human rights of the couple and their two children.
Continue reading...The US is appealing to Britain’s high court over a refusal to extradite the WikiLeaks founder on espionage charges, saying he ‘has no history of serious and enduring mental illness’
US authorities have told British judges that if they agree to extradite Julian Assange on espionage charges, the WikiLeaks founder could serve any US prison sentence he receives in his native Australia.
In January, a lower UK court refused a US request to extradite Assange over WikiLeaks’ publication of secret US military documents a decade ago.
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Continue reading...Playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm on how the groundbreaking female punk band helped her tell the story of women suffocating in the prison system
It was a bit of a “pinch me” moment, to be honest. Earlier this month I sat in the rehearsal room for Typical Girls and watched our incredible cast play the music of the Slits to Tessa Pollitt, an original member of the band.
When I first started writing this show, never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined we would get to this point. This absolute legend, punk royalty, was beaming at the liveness of it all and so were we. This is what we’ve all been aching to do.
Continue reading...Pilot scheme hopes to discover patterns that will help prevent more deaths
Measures are being introduced to try to identify what is driving rising murder rates in the wake of a spike in teenage deaths in some of the UK’s homicide hotspots.
All homicides in London, Birmingham and south Wales will be reviewed by the authorities in an attempt to learn from the chaotic sequences of events that often preempt a death.
Continue reading...When I was called in to assess Seb, I needed to understand why he had committed such a horrendous crime. But first I had to get him to talk
Even before Seb had arrived at the prison, five weeks before my first visit, the staff had received a notification that he ought to be subject to close monitoring. While still in police custody, an out-of-hours forensic psychiatric assessment had been requested.
Seb had been compliant with the arresting officers, but he had given the impression that he was unconcerned by what had happened – it seemed as though he didn’t mind at all that he was being arrested. More bizarrely, there were flickers of apparent self-satisfaction. Seb had been arrested on suspicion of murdering his mother.
Continue reading...Family celebrate success of campaign to halt deportation of 22-year-old, who has autism
A 22-year-old man who has autism and his family are celebrating after the Home Office abandoned plans to deport him to Jamaica.
Osime Brown, who left Jamaica aged four to settle in the UK with his mother, Joan Martin, was facing deportation after being released from prison where he had been serving a sentence for stealing a friend’s mobile phone, though he and others said he did not do it.
Continue reading...Round-the-clock tracking condemned as ‘Trojan horse’ giving government vast surveillance powers that violate human rights
More than 40 human rights organisations have condemned the Home Office’s introduction of 24-hour GPS monitoring of people on immigration bail in an expansion of surveillance powers that has involved no consultation process.
The new policy marks a shift from using radio frequency monitors (which alert authorities if the wearer leaves an assigned area) to round-the-clock GPS trackers (which can track a person’s every move), while also giving the Home Office new powers to collect, store and access this data indefinitely via a private contractor.
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