One of the surprise announcements in the recent speech by UK Justice minister Chris Grayling was a review of the secure facilities for juvenile offenders and a promise to make education more central to the work that they do. He expressed concern at both the costs – five times the fees at a private school -and poor outcomes of the current system. Encouragingly in developing his policy he wants to listen to people in the education world not just the ...

While prison reform has hardly figured in the US Presidential campaign, there are signs that America’s love affair with incarceration may be coming to an end.  Hard pressed states can no longer afford the luxury of imprisonment on a scale that dwarfs European rates.  At its peak in 2008, despite spending 11.5% of its budget on prisons,  California still had inmates living on  three level bunks in prison gyms or other forms of “non traditional housing”. Federal and Supreme Court ...

British Prime Minister David Cameron unveiled a new “tough but intelligent” criminal justice policy this week in a major speech delivered after a visit to Wormwood Scrubs prison in West London. Having replaced a  socially liberal Justice Minister with more of a hardliner last month,   Cameron was expected to usher in a harsher set of policies , partly to satisfy the more punitive members of his own Conservative party and also to seek to restore some credibility with the ...

A few miles south west of Kampala, past the turn off to Buddo, lies a small wooded area a bit bigger than a football pitch.  The field is surrounded by a trench, mostly about ten metres deep but with larger holes in places. The ground is well tended and a couple of small fires burn, one next to a tree another down in the ditch, where a young man, clasping a bottle sways drunkenly about , surrounded by  spears  and ...

Next week the UN General Assembly will spend a day considering what can be done to strengthen the rule of law across the globe. The agenda will be self evidently high level, looking no doubt at matters such as how to combat impunity at an international level and the importance of transitional justice in post conflict countries.
Member states will probably be encouraged to improve access to justice for the poor, to ensure that courts operate independently of the government ...

What might have been a depressing morning observing the arraignment Court in Newark New Jersey was anything but. Yes there was a parade parade of poor, ill educated and often mentally ill black and latino defendants, sometimes appearing in person, sometimes via video link from the county jail. Yes the offences for which they were charged, were petty and sometimes as in the case of “wandering” – a kind of trespass – questionable.
In fact what could simply have been ...

Earlier this week, Justice and Prisons took part in a roundtable hosted by the Open Society Institute in New York on the subject of data and criminal justice reform- and in particular how collecting statistical information can improve the quality of pre trial justice.
The meeting heard presentations about the development of indicators to measure justice in post conflict countries, audits of case-flow through justice processes in Zambia and Malawi and a planned survey of the extent of excessive pre ...

One of the current trends in criminal justice thinking is what’s known as procedural justice.  One of its leading advocates American Professor Tom Tyler is in the UK this week to talk about the way the police and courts deal with people in reaching a decision about them may produce consequences at least as important as the nature of the decisions they reach. Even if the outcome is negative, people who feel they have been treated fairly in their dealings ...

This week is due to see the opening of what will be the UK’s largest prison, the 1605 place Oakwood near Wolverhampton. Originally intended to be one of three so called Titan jails the capacity was scaled back from 2,500 after the last Government eventually bowed to widespread concerns about the desirability and safety of such large establishments.  But the medium security prison, when fully operational in the autumn will still fly in the face of evidence that smaller prisons ...

The judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in upholding the extradition of terrorist suspects from the UK to the USA contains damaging implications for the idea of international standards in the use and practice of imprisonment.  The Court’s finding that the likely detention conditions and length of sentences for the five alleged terrorists  would not amount to ill-treatment gives a seal of approval to an approach to imprisonment fundamentally at odds with human rights and civilised values.
The ...