David Shipley is a former prisoner who writes, speaks and researches on prison and justice issues.
Mark Rowley, the head of the Metropolitan Police, has been discussing London’s crime rates. Rowley it seems, is eager to talk about London’s homicide rate – which fell last year. During one interview he told listeners that he ‘is about facts and evidence cos I’m a copper’, before going on to provide some highly selective statistics
There’s a strange pattern in how the UK discusses policy, and once you notice it you realise it’s everywhere. What happens is that there’s a problem, often something which makes us less safe. The problem will be fundamentally a result of policy, and often something we’re ‘forced’ to endure because of laws we have created.
It’s a difficult Monday for the Prime Minister. Shortly after Keir Starmer expressed his ‘delight’ that Egyptian dissident Alaa Abd el-Fattah had arrived in the UK, it emerged that the PM’s ‘top priority’ apparently hates Jews, white people and the English most of all, if his past tweet are anything to go by. As a
British civil servants have almost never faced real consequences for their failures. If Reform come to power, that might change. Nigel Farage’s party has announced yesterday that they will introduce a new criminal offence of ‘dishonestly determining an asylum claim’. They will use this law to prosecute civil servants who have knowingly put British women
Shabana Mahmood’s plans to reduce migration hit a setback yesterday. It emerged that around 2,500 foreign national prison officers who no longer qualified to remain in the UK will have their visas extended. The officers, most of whom are from West Africa, were going to have to leave their jobs because the new skilled worker
Perhaps because it’s the week before Christmas, the Migration Advisory Committee’s (MAC) latest annual report has attracted little attention. Many people can’t have read it, because it is full of incendiary details which demolish the case for mass migration. The MAC is ‘an advisory non-departmental public body, sponsored by the Home Office’. It is not
After a long wait, the government’s Islamophobia definition has finally taken form. There has been plenty of criticism of the idea, and many warnings of the dangers it would pose to freedom and our ability to fight crime. But fear not, the state has come up with a brilliant solution: rebranding. Instead of ‘Islamophobia’ we are
On 10 May this year a 15-year-old girl was with friends near parkland on the outskirts of Leamington Spa. Shortly after 9 p.m. she was separated from those friends and abducted by Jan Jahanzeb, a 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker who arrived in the UK in January. The victim had the quick thinking to record the
It has now been six weeks since the inquiry into ‘Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse’ fell into chaos. Over the course of several days, numerous survivors quit – claiming that the civil servants running the process were seeking to dilute the inquiry – and the man being considered as chair stood down. Since then there has
It’s now over six weeks since Hadush Kebatu’s ‘release in error’ sparked a two day manhunt, and highlighted our prison system’s disastrous habit of regularly releasing inmates who should remain in jail. Since then we’ve heard about the accidental releases of Kaddour-Cherif, a prolific criminal from Algeria who overstayed a visa six years ago, and
Another week. Another video from within a prison. More words of outrage. This time it’s a video showing a prison officer inside a crowded cell, playing Fifa with a prisoner. Is this a problem? Is prison more of a holiday camp than a punishment? Is this another example of prison officer misconduct, just like the
Just two weeks ago Epping lost its court battle to shut the Bell Hotel and expel unwanted asylum seekers from the town. Now it seems the state has decided to punish the town for its act of rebellion. Eight properties in the town are to be converted to ‘Houses in Multiple Occupation’ (HMOs) and will be
I had hoped I would never have to write about Hamit Coskun again. After the Quran-burner won his appeal in October, it seemed that this particular battle in the free speech wars was over. Unfortunately the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) have other ideas. On Friday evening the state prosecutor announced that it was going to appeal Coskun’s
After the pandemic the Boris Johnson government took a fateful and disastrous decision to suppress rising inflation by massively expanding migration. It was one of the worst decisions made by a British government in my lifetime, made all the more appalling because it followed a solemn promise that Brexit would bring a tough, ‘points-based’ migration
‘This is a moral mission for me, because I can see illegal migration is tearing our country apart, it is dividing communities. People can see huge pressure in their communities and they can also see a system that is broken, and where people are able to flout the rules, abuse the system and get away
The Bell Hotel in Epping has hardly been out of the news since the summer. In July, Bell resident Hadush Kebatu’s sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl sparked weeks of protests. And if Epping was forgotten for a short time after he was jailed, it swept back to the headlines when Kebatu was released in
Charlie Taylor, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, has a habit of speaking difficult truths which senior civil servants might wish to keep quiet. He’s done it again, following the publication of a recent inspection at HMP Bullingdon. Taylor tweeted that ‘Bullingdon, like many other jails, is heavily dependent on prison officers recruited from West Africa.
Yesterday His Majesty’s Prison Service released a sex offender by mistake. That would be bad enough on its own, but this particular sex offender was Hadush Kebatu, the Ethiopian migrant whose assault on a 14-year-old girl sparked weeks of protests in Epping. Kebatu was only sentenced last month, receiving a 12-month sentence for two sexual
Quietly, day-by-day, the inquiry into the Southport killings is revealing how disastrous failures of the British state led to Axel Rudakubana murdering young girls in August 2024. Yesterday it was the turn of the killer’s former headteacher, Joanne Hodson, to give evidence. She first met Rudakubana in 2019 when he enrolled at the Acorns School
Should Jess Phillips resign? That’s the demand made by four survivors of the ‘grooming gangs’ in a public letter to the Home Secretary. The letter came after days of chaos which have left the inquiry in disarray. The collapse began on Monday morning when Fiona Goddard, a survivor from Bradford, quit the inquiry. Fiona was
