David Shipley is a former prisoner who writes, speaks and researches on prison and justice issues.
From our UK edition
Keir Starmer has repeatedly promised to smash the gangs to secure our borders. But the reality is rather different. Yesterday, the Prime Minister tweeted a short clip once again attempting to reassure British voters that the government is ‘going to the source to smash the people smuggling gangs’. The video is an odd, cheap thing.
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Officially, blasphemy was abolished by New Labour in the 2008 Criminal Justice Act. But today, with the conviction of Hamit Coskun, blasphemy laws now exist in England. This law has been created by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and District Judge John McGarva. Between them they have prosecuted and found a man guilty of a
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When Tommy Robinson walked out of prison this week, he was unrecognisable. The far-right activist, who was jailed for contempt of court, was sporting a huge bushy beard as he emerged from HMP Woodhill. Robinson looked more like a man who had been marooned on a desert island, or lost in the mountains, than someone
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Another day, another sign of the British state’s acceptance of criminality. This time it’s the news that almost half of people caught in possession of Class A drugs avoid criminal sanction, with the police either issuing a ‘community resolution’, which does not create a criminal record, or avoid any action at all ‘in the public interest’. This
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Robert Jenrick tweeted a 60 second video this morning, showing him confronting suspected fare dodgers at Stratford London Underground station. He watches people reportedly forcing their way through the barriers while TfL staff seemingly do nothing to stop them. Jenrick then follows the suspected freeloaders down escalators, challenging them on why they haven’t paid. They’re not
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Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor, has called for the possession of cannabis to be decriminalised, because he believes that the police disproportionately target black Londoners when policing drug possession. This announcement by Khan is in response to a report by the ‘London Drugs Commission’ (LDC), a body set-up by City Hall, chaired by Tony Blair’s old
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Usually when I start listening to a true-life podcast, I don’t know how it ends. That’s not the case with The Smuggler, BBC Radio 4’s new investigation into people smuggling. Across ten episodes, its Orwell Prize-winning presenter, Annabel Deas, tells the story of ‘Nick’, on the face of it an unlikely protagonist. Nick is white,
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David Gauke’s long-awaited Sentencing Review is here. If its recommendations are accepted, we will see thousands of people spared jail and thousands of inmates released as early as a third of the way through their sentence. The government is relying on the review to save the justice system from collapse. As the Lord Chancellor explained
From our UK edition
Anarcho-tyranny is a term used to describe societies which obsessively regulate and punish law abiding citizens, while being unwilling or unable to protect them from crime, violence and abuses of their good nature. These societies are terrible places to live. Many people believe that the UK is either already an anarcho-tyranny or close to becoming
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Lucy Connolly has lost her appeal against her 31-month sentence for inciting racial hatred following the following the horrific murders committed by Axel Rudakubana in Southport. But having attended the hearing l believe she is the victim of a great injustice. I believe the evidence I heard at the Royal Courts of Justice showed that
From our UK edition
David Gauke’s sentencing review, which will report this week, is going to be far bolder than anyone expected. Today it has been reported that the Lord Chancellor Shabana Mahmood has secured £700 million of funding from the Treasury to buy 30,000 more electronic ‘tags’ which will be used to curfew people at home, track their
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If you are ever unfortunate enough to need legal advice after being charged with a crime, and you can’t afford to pay for a lawyer, you will probably end up turning to the Legal Aid Agency (LAA). I’m familiar with the system. When I was charged with fraud in 2018 I applied for legal aid.
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After the horrific attacks at Frankland, after last week’s attack at Belmarsh, and after countless warnings, today’s news of three separate assaults on prison staff is grim, but unsurprising. According to the Prison Officers Association (POA), two assaults occurred at HMP Woodhill, the jail near Milton Keynes which holds Tommy Robinson and a high number
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Peter Sullivan, a man of ‘limited intellectual capacity’ and ‘suggestibility’, has been exonerated after spending 38 years in jail for a murder he didn’t commit. Now aged 68, Sullivan has spent most of his life in high-security jails. DNA evidence has demonstrated that another man was responsible for the brutal assault and murder of 21-year-old
From our UK edition
Late last night, news broke of another attack by a high-profile prisoner at what should be one of our most secure jails. This time it seems that Axel Rudakubana, the Southport killer, has thrown boiling water in the face of an officer at HMP Belmarsh, the London jail which Hashem Abedi was moved to after
From our UK edition
Even for our broken prison service it’s been a terrible few days. On Saturday the jihadi terrorist Hashem Abedi used boiling oil and ‘homemade weapons’ in an assault at HMP Frankland which hospitalised three prison officers, the Prison Officers’ Association has said. Given the severity of the injuries, with one man suffering a severed artery
From our UK edition
On Saturday, an awful assault took place at HMP Frankland. According to a statement from the Prison Officers’ Association (the union for frontline jail staff), Hashem Abedi, brother of the Manchester Arena bomber, allegedly committed an unprovoked attack on three prison officers. It seems he ‘threw hot cooking oil’ over them, and then used ‘home
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It’s a story so wild as to be almost unbelievable. Kerri Pegg was a ‘rising star’ of the prison service, promoted to governor at the open jail HMP Kirkham just six years after joining as a graduate trainee. And yet she was also in a relationship with a prisoner, Anthony Saunderson, serving ten years for
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Thank God for Katie Lam. Yesterday the government tried to conduct a grubby betrayal of thousands of young girls groomed and raped in towns and cities across the country. On the last day parliament sat before the Easter recess, Jess Phillips, the junior minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls spoke to an
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The Southport killings were horrific, but should they have happened at all? We already know that the government’s counter-extremism programme, Prevent, failed to identify the risk Axel Rudakubana posed. That’s a key question which the Southport Inquiry, the first stage of which began on Monday, aims to answer. The Home Office has said that the
