Home Affairs Committee calls for drug law reform

The House of Commons Home Affairs Committee has todaypublished a report simply entitled “Drugs”. The report makes a wide ranging set of recommendations. These include a call for reform of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and Misuse of Drugs regulations to support greater use of public health based drug… Enforcement needs to be bolstered by a stronger public health response that helps people escape drug addiction and related criminality according to a new report ...

Good probation supervision does reduce reoffending

Ground-breaking new research by HM Inspectorate of Probation published today has found that higher-quality probation supervision leads to significantly better sentence completion rates and reduced reoffending. The Inspectorate’s latest Research and Analysis Bulletins – compiled by the organisation’s own specialist research team – looked at what progress has been made… For cases getting high-quality probation supervision, the sentence completion rate was 24 percentage points higher, and the reoffending rate was 14 percentage points lower...

Prison and probation staffing picture causes concern

Last quarter’s HMPPS workforce quarterly statistics showed some hope that the chronic staff shortages in our prison and probation systems were starting to improve.  Yesterday’s edition of the figures (which covers prison and probation staffing numbers to the end of June this year) paints a much more dismal picture. Full… Sickness rates remain a concern with probation staff off sick for an average of 12.1 work days per year with probation officers off sick an average of 15.1 days or three weeks. ...

Lowdham prison 'in a state of turmoil'

Today’s report from HM Inspectorate of Prisons said that when Inspectors visited HMP Lowdham Grange in May this year, they found a prison in a state of turmoil following the handover from one private provider to another, the first transition of its kind. The fallout from this was affecting almost… The prison is operated by the private contractor Sodexo who took over the running of the prison from another private operator, Serco...

The growing number of prison recalls

The proportion of people in prison because they have been recalled has been steadily rising over recent years. The most recent (27 July, 2023) MoJ Offender Management Statistics revealed that the number of people recalled to prison jumped 23% to 6,824 in just the first quarter of this year compared… The number of people recalled to prison has risen dramatically following changes introduced by the Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014...

MoJ rights long-standing wrong for people wrongly convicted

This practice was based on the (perhaps dubious) basis that while people were wrongfully imprisoned, they were saving on their rent or mortgage costs. The Malkinson case It was in response to the case of Andrew Malkinson who served seventeen years in prison for a crime he did not commit… Yesterday, the Ministry of Justice announced that people wrongly convicted of criminal offences who spend time in prison will no longer have their prison “living costs” deducted from the compensation to which they are entitled. ...

Young Offender Institutions are increasingly "unsafe"

What are Independent Monitoring Boards? Independent Monitoring Boards (IMBs) exist for every prison and immigration removal centre. They are made up of ordinary members of the public who are independent, unpaid and make an average of 3-4 visits to their local institution per month. Their role is to monitor the… The new National Chair of the Independent Monitoring Boards (IMBs), Elisabeth Davies has hit the ground running. In post for less than a month, she has already written to the Prisons Minister Damian Hinds to urge him take urgent action to improve the conditions in which children are held across young offender institutions (YOIs) in England....

Thinking Skills Programme (TSP) Does Reduce Reoffending

Authored by Aimee Brinn, John Preston, Rosina Costello, Tyler Opoku, Emily Sampson, Ian Elliott and Annie Sorbie, the 92-page evaluation concludes that : “over a two-year period from release, those who had participated in TSP were less likely to reoffend, reoffended less frequently, and took longer to reoffend, compared to… Last week (27 July) the Justice Data Lab published its impact evaluation of the prison-based Thinking Skills Programme (TSP) on reoffending. ...

HMP Bristol the latest prison to need urgent improvement

Urgent Notifications are the inspectorate’s last resort when a prison is, frankly, dangerous to live and conditions and very poor. They are used very rarely. There was only one issued in all of 2022 but this is the second to be issued in the last three months (HMP Cookham Wood… More dreadful news today with the Chief Inspector of Prisons Charlie Taylor invoking the Urgent Notification process for HMP Bristol which he described as a prison with “apparently chronic and intractable problems”. ...

10 interesting facts from the HMPPS Annual Digest

1: “Proper jobs” Let’s start with some good news for a change. In the 12 months ending March 2023, an average of 1,088 prisoners worked each month and were subject to the Prisoners Earnings Act. This is basically an indication of those earning a proper wage working for outside employers.… The MoJ published a raft of statistical bulletins and annual reports today and included within them was the official HMPPS Annual Digest for 2022/23, a sort of compendium of facts and figures not included in the regular statistical bulletins. We thought readers would be interested in some of the more arcane facts and figures hidden within its 40 pages....