David Shipley

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 his brutal attack on staff at HMP Frankland last month. Rudakubana is reported to have committed this attack on Thursday afternoon. Thankfully the member of staff has already been released from hospital and is expected to make a full recovery. The Ministry of Justice have insisted that ‘violence in prison will not be tolerated and we will always push for the strongest possible punishment for attacks on our hardworking staff’. Frankly, it isn’t good enough.

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 in his neck and the other being stabbed at least five times in the chest, it’s only thanks to luck that no staff were killed. Then, this morning, it emerged that John Mansfield, a convicted murderer serving his sentence at HMP Whitemoor, was killed by another inmate on Sunday. While few will shed tears for Mansfield, who killed his elderly neighbour in 2006, this killing raises serious concerns about the security and safety of our jails.

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 made weapons’ to stab them. According to the union, the officers ‘received life threatening injuries, including burns, scalds and stab wounds’. All three officers were rushed to hospital. As of 6 p.m. yesterday evening the Ministry of Justice confirmed that one officer, a woman, has been discharged, and two are still being treated.

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 drug offences. Saunderson was an inmate at Kirkham, and Pegg was ‘known to spend a lot of time in her office’ with him. Then, in October 2018, she broke prison rules to approve Saunderson’s release on temporary licence (ROTL). It seems that Saunderson was very grateful, gifting Pegg a Mercedes car. Despite Pegg claiming she had done nothing wrong, when police searched the governor’s home, they found a toothbrush and flip-flops with Saunderson’s DNA on it.

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 inquiry will ‘leave no stone unturned in uncovering how this attack happened and to not let any institution of the state deflect from their failure’. To that end the Southport Inquiry is to be ‘statutory’, meaning it will be able to compel witnesses to attend and give evidence under oath, require the production of documents and other evidence and hold its hearings in public.

HMP Frankland, in Durham, is supposed to be one of the most secure jails in the country. The category A prison holds terrorists and murderers, including Soham child killer Ian Huntley. Frankland should be a place of order, where the state is in absolute control. Yet the jail is said to be so overrun with Islamists that inmates who refuse to join their gangs are being forced into separation units for their own safety. Prisoners who refuse to convert to Islam are also being targeted, according to a leading criminal defence barrister who uncovered the shocking allegations on a visit to Frankland. Tony Wyatt told the Times that ‘there are so many…members of Muslim gangs in prison, you just can’t contain the problem.

The members of the Sentencing Council have been pushed into a humiliating climbdown – but it may well be too late to save them. The pressure rose over the weekend, with the Lord Chancellor and Prime Minister stating that they were considering emergency legislation in order to prevent the Council’s new, ‘two tier’ guidelines over Pre-Sentence Reports for ethnic minorities from coming into force. Yesterday morning the Lord Chancellor put more pressure on the Council when she met Lord Justice William Davis, its chairman, and informed him that she would be bringing in immediate legislation this week to render the controversial section of the guidelines unlawful. In response, Davis crumbled.

When the Ministry of Justice announced that the government would introduce emergency legislation this week to stop ‘two tier’ Sentencing Council guidelines being implemented, the Lord Chancellor may have hoped that her swift action would bring this story to a close. But today the debate over ‘two-tier’ justice has widened, with the Telegraph reporting this morning that ‘ethnic minority criminals are being given priority by judges considering bail under new two-tier justice guidelines drawn up by the Ministry of Justice.’ When someone has been is charged with a crime they are either held on remand, in a prison, or are bailed. When on bail conditions apply. After I was charged with fraud in October 2018, I was on bail until being sentenced in February 2020.

Two RAF engineers were spared jail today, after pleading guilty to vandalising a statue of Paddington Bear in the Berkshire town of Newbury. The young, drunk servicemen broke the Peruvian bear in half and then transported his front façade back to RAF Odiham in a taxi. Later jars of marmalade, sandwiches and poems were left at the crime scene by members of the public A few decades ago perhaps the bear’s disappearance would have remained a mystery, his fate known only to those who frequented the station’sbar. Unfortunately for Daniel Heath and William Lawrence, the two guilty men, Newbury’s CCTV captured their entire escapade. They were soon apprehended, with Paddington found by police in Lawrence’s car.

Tommy Robinson has lost his attempt to force the prison service to move him out of segregation. Robinson's lawyers said he is being held in ‘inhuman’ and ‘degrading’ conditions at HMP Woodhill in Milton Keynes. But the High Court ruled that Robinson, also known as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was being kept away from other prisoners for his own safety. Robinson is actually rather lucky: in many ways, his treatment behind bars is far better than the typical inmate receives Robinson's supporters have reacted with predictable fury. Are they right to be angry? Is Robinson the victim of a justice system determined to crush his will, which is treating him far more harshly than it does other prisoners?

The Sentencing Council – the organisation that advises judges on how long convicted criminals should be locked up for – has hit back at criticism from the Justice Secretary. Shabana Mahmood challenged the Council’s apparent embrace of ‘two-tier justice’ last week, after it told judges to order a pre-sentence report (PSR) if an offender is from a minority background. Lord Justice William Davis, the Council's chair, has now responded – and has doubled down on its new guidance to judges. Davis said that Mahmood and her officials had been briefed in advance about the instructions on sentencing offenders from ethnic minorities. He also said that ministers could not "dictate" sentencing and vowed to take legal advice.

Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, has accused his Labour counterpart Shabana Mahmood of not believing in ‘equality under the law’ and ‘enshrining’ a ‘double standard’ over who is, and isn't, sent to prison. The accusations against Mahmood – and the Labour government – came after new guidelines from the Sentencing Council were published, which appear to make prison less likely for ‘ethnic’, ‘cultural’ and ‘faith’ minorities who are convicted of crimes. This shake-up appears driven by a belief that the justice system is biased against minorities The Sentencing Council's updated rules state that, for a number of groups, the assumption should be in favour of a pre-sentence report (PSR).

There are just over a thousand men’s prison places left in the UK out of a total of 88,618 total. Where does the government go from here? Are our prisons about to run out of space? If they do, will we see even earlier releases? To put these figures from the start of the week in context, in August 2024 there were only around 700 spaces available. In the aftermath of the Summer riots there were concerns that courts might have to stop jailing people. Disaster was only averted by the government’s early release scheme, SDS40, under which thousands of additional prisoners were released in September and October. Meanwhile, David Gauke’s Sentencing Review has been underway since October, and has described our prisons as ‘on the brink of collapse’.

Former justice secretary David Gauke’s Independent Sentencing Review (ISR), running since October, was not due to report until the spring. However, following the latest published prison population statistics, which showed there are only just over 1,000 spaces left in men’s prisons and soaring numbers for serious further offences, an interim report has been published. It makes for revolutionary reading. As Gauke says, he is confronting ‘the consequences of decades of haphazard policy making and underinvestment in the criminal justice system – bringing it to the brink of collapse.’ Our justice system catches and jails fewer people, yet the prison population continues to soar. Why?

Now that the Southport killer Axel Rudakubana has been sentenced for his horrific crimes, we can try to understand how he was free to kill, and what can be done to stop crimes like this in the future. Between 2019 and 2021, this young man was referred three times to Prevent, the counter-extremism programme. On each occasion they took no further action. Yesterday the government released a redacted version of the ‘learning review’ conducted by Prevent, carried out in the wake of Rudakubana's attack. It’s a limited piece of work, and far from the full public inquiry we need. The reviewer wasn’t able to interview anyone involved, so limited their investigation to information stored on Prevent’s database.

The details of the terrible murder of Sarah Mayhew are almost too appalling to bear, but one question stands out most of all: why was the convicted murderer who killed her free to take Sarah's life? Sansom had murdered before, when he was just 19 Sarah, a 38-year-old mother of two, was lured to a flat in south London last March and never seen again. Steve Sansom and his partner, Gemma Watts, killed Sarah in a manner which involved sexual and sadistic conduct. The killers had previously exchanged messages detailing a desire to kill people with a knife or knives while engaged in sexual activity. After's Sarah's murder, the couple dismembered her and dumped her remains in different locations around London.