Professor Ian Acheson is a former prison governor. He was also Director of Community Safety at the Home Office. His book ‘Screwed: Britain’s prison crisis and how to escape it’ is out now.
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I was in London recently carrying a simple piece of kit I never thought I would need: a lanyard tethering my phone to my wrist. This would make it harder for my mobile to be snatched from my hands on the street by latest scourge plaguing London: gangs of masked young men on e-bikes targeting
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David Lammy had a good outing yesterday – they are as rare as hen’s teeth when you’re leading the Ministry of Justice – so he ought to take the win. The Deputy Prime Minister was in the House of Commons to make a statement on a report by Jonathan Hall KC into prison terrorist separation
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This afternoon, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood unveiled a set of sweeping police reforms. These include increased police response times, the reduction of constabularies from 42 across the country to 12, a new licensing regime for officers and a new centralised agency, the National Police Service, created to deal with national challenges such as organised crime,
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Local monitors at Britain’s newest £400 million ‘super prison’, HMP Millsike, have written to ministers to raise the alarm about plunging standards there. Millsike, a medium security category C prison in the Vale of York, opened in March last year and run by Mitie Custodial Services, has a capacity of 1,500 prisoners. It’s not clear
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In the shadow of recent scandal, the Metropolitan Police’s tougher vetting regime promised a cultural renaissance. Yet the admission yesterday that thousands of recruits slipped through without proper vetting, breeding predators within, reveals a force still haunted by its own institutional rot. After the conviction of PC Wayne Couzens for the rape and murder of
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In 42 months’ time we will be at the start of yet another summer that Andrew Clarke will never see. That’s the amount of time the law has decided Mr Clarke’s killer Demiesh Williams, convicted of manslaughter, should spend in custody before being released on license. Our sentencing guidelines and the judge interpreting them have failed
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The Home Secretary is feeling the collars of our 43 chief constables. Shabana Mahmood has let it be known that she favours a dramatic reduction in police forces in England and Wales to as few as 12. Her comments come ahead of the publication of a white paper on policing in the new year. The
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Should cops spy on kids? The revelation that police are including surveillance of young people in their expanding use of live facial recognition (LFR) systems to detect criminals and deter crime has upset the civil liberties lobby and a few MPs. Should we take these concerns seriously? LFR was introduced in south Wales in 2016
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So farewell then, Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs). The government has just announced that this weak and useless experiment in local democracy will be terminated. Few people will notice outside the cottage industry of ineffectual crime busters who will be receiving redundancy notices. That’s part of the problem. Elected PCCs were introduced in 2010 as
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Our state counterterrorism strategy ‘Prevent’ is overwhelmed. This is the strand of our national plan, ‘Contest’, to defeat extremism. Prevent is charged with spotting and stopping tomorrow’s terrorists, but the official data on its operation over the last reporting year, released yesterday, paints a picture of mission creep and distraction and an organisation and that
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You’d need a heart of stone not to feel sympathy for Alex Davies-Jones. Labour’s minister for victims was on human sandbag duty for the Justice Secretary David Lammy this morning – tasked with explaining to the media why there had been another two accidental releases of convicted prisoners. The fact these blunders came only days
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After the very latest mass casualty attack on Saturday night, on a busy London North Eastern Railway train in Huntingdon, police and government quickly told us not to speculate about the motives of the alleged attacker. Eleven people were hospitalised in the attack, with one in a critical condition at the time of writing. It’s
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The Southport inquiry into the murderous frenzy of Axel Rudakubana has broken for half term. Officials who have been already damned by their own evidence of incompetence and disarray must be thanking their lucky stars that the accidental release of Hadush Kebatu from HMP Chelmsford has stolen the media’s attention. But this is a slow-motion
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We desperately need the national inquiry into child grooming gangs to get underway – both for the sake of the many victims and to hold both institutions and individuals to account. After months of backsliding then hopeless dithering by this government we are close to getting an inquiry chair appointed. Two candidates are in the frame,
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As a title, Harry Potter and the Potholes of Devon wouldn’t survive the editor’s pen – but sometimes life is more spellbinding than fiction. Just ask the villagers of Lustleigh, a few miles from where I live on Dartmoor, who have J. K. Rowling’s franchise to thank for making one of the lanes of their
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Why should we care about a degenerate paedophile allegedly put to death by those locked up with him in prison? Ian Watkins, the former lead singer of the Welsh rock band the Lostprophets, was reportedly stabbed to death in HMP Wakefield yesterday. Watkins was convicted in 2013 of multiple counts of sexual violence against children,
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David Norris was convicted of the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in April 1993 and now wants to be released from prison. Should he be? That is a question the Parole Board will consider as Norris has now served the minimum custodial term of a life sentence imposed in 2011. This body has the power
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A little over two months ago, I stood in the fallow murderscape of the Nir Oz kibbutz facing towards the barbed border fence with Gaza. Once, this village in southern Israel was a thriving community of 400 Jewish people, known for their left-wing ideologies and progressive ideals. But, two years ago on this very day,
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Ministers aren’t always the quickest to take accountability in a time of crisis. So, it is easy to see why, after yesterday’s atrocity at a Manchester synagogue, the line being pedalled by the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood this morning was that responsibility for the attack lies with ‘the assailants alone’. Snappy rhetoric, but it won’t
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Finally, some good news for the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) – tagging works! Last week, the prisons minister was unleashed to proclaim that the latest data on electronic monitoring (EM) of offenders not in custody shows the concept works. Well, up to a point, Lord Timpson. A study of 3,600 offenders on tagging orders has
