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.
We’re looking at a busy weekend for the country’s criminal justice system, already permanently running red hot. The activist group Defend our Juries is organising a mass protest in London on 9 August to oppose the government’s ban on Palestine Action (PA), which was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in early July. The stated purpose
Policing and crime commissioners haven’t exactly fired up the public imagination since they were introduced in 2012. PCCs were intended to make police forces more accountable, but you’re more likely to come across one in the headlines for personal misconduct than their crime-fighting zeal. However, there are some signs of change in the air thanks
A few years ago, I was encouraged to apply for a role within the College of Policing for an advisory body on a revamped code of ethics for police officers. When asked what sort of qualities the code should embody, my answer was succinct: ‘moral and physical courage.’ I didn’t make the cut, of course,
‘Bear in mind these dead, I can find no plainer words,’ wrote the Northern Irish poet John Hewitt reflecting on the Troubles’s terrible death toll. How we remember the victims of terrorism and articulate the harm it causes comes to mind today, the 20th anniversary of the 7/7 Islamist attack on London’s transport network. The
The murder of a prison officer on duty is closer now than at any time in the last 25 years. That was the inevitable conclusion I reached after the shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick commissioned me to look into the threat posed by terrorists inside our high-security prisons and the safety of front-line staff in
The sentencing reforms announced by Labour last week were primarily an attempt to address a capacity crisis. This is something we need to be clear on, however much David Gauke’s report is embellished by talking points borrowed from the progressive criminal justice commentariat. Eliminating short sentences of twelve months or less is not about community
Could the carnage and horror that played out on the streets of Liverpool city centre yesterday have been averted? We now know that 24 people were hospitalised, four with very serious injuries, when a car drove into crowds attending Liverpool’s Premier League championship victory parade. Merseyside constabulary, undoubtedly stung by their mishandling of the Southport
Our prisons are nearly full to bust once again so the Ministry of Justice has been flying some kites ahead of the review of sentencing led by recovered Tory David Gauke. The ‘leaked’ idea involves the reintroduction of remission of time spent in prison for good behaviour. While the Justice Secretary Shabanna Mahmood is said
The disconnect between actions and consequences that bedevils this country’s justice system suffered a modest reversal today. The government has announced that legislation will be introduced to compel convicted offenders to appear before the judge at a sentencing hearing or face sanctions. This honours a promise made by Keir Starmer’s predecessor Rishi Sunak after he
How do you break the rule of law inside our jails? You could do worse than try to murder a prison officer on duty, which by all accounts nearly came to pass yesterday. The terrorist Hashem Abedi, the brother of the Manchester Arena bomber, reportedly came within seconds of doing so in a frenzied attack
The Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report, published today, addresses the prison cell crisis in the UK, highlighting huge government and organisational failures in managing prison capacity. We may be wary of the term, but it is yet another description of a system in crisis, with many prisoners stuffed into ‘inhumane conditions’, looked after by
At least two people have died and several injured after a car was driven down a busy shopping street yesterday in Mannheim, in western Germany. A 40-year-old man has been arrested. It is not clear yet if this attack was ideologically motivated. But car attacks like this are becoming horrifyingly common in Germany. In Magdeburg
What sort of mojo do you want your police officer to bring with them the next time you’re stopped and searched? The Metropolitan police asked Londoners to help them use this procedure better: one quoted consultation response was to stop using ‘bad energy’ in such an encounter. Perhaps the answer to London’s awful street crime
I’ve yet to meet an oncologist, thank God. But if I did turn up to be told I had cancer I wouldn’t expect him to start treating me with a chainsaw. That was my thought this morning when I read that our national counter-terrorism chief had described the effect of exposing kids to violent content
How do you create a low-trust society? One way to do so is to have an administrative class which seems to treat the views of ordinary people with contempt. Today’s news of a leaked Home Office report on counter-extremism is a classic of the genre. The report, commissioned by the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, in the wake of
The assailant in the Southport massacre has pleaded guilty to the murders of three children in the town last year. Keir Starmer has leapt with unusual speed to authorise a public inquiry into what drove Axel Rudakubana into his frenzy of killing and if it could have been prevented. We now know that the state’s
On 23 September last year at 6.30 p.m. in the evening in a street in Woolwich, London, Daejaun Campbell cried out, ‘I’m 15, don’t let me die’ as he bled out on a pavement after being stabbed. You probably won’t remember Deajaun but he was a one of nine children murdered by knives in London
The police establishment has delivered its initial verdict on this summer’s rioting, following the massacre of children at Southport. Andy Cooke, His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary and a former chief constable for Merseyside, yesterday published the first part of a report ordered by the Home Secretary to examine the policing response and make recommendations. The review
This week, the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper plans to announce new police performance targets. Perhaps the government has been stung by the growing perception that Labour’s stance on law and order consists mainly of hurty words overreach and emptying jails. But as the legacy of well-meaning but dumb crime policies introduced by the last Labour
Does Airbnb drive up crime in London? That’s the question posed of the world’s most successful short-term rental service in new research by the Cambridge Institute of Criminology. The UK’s holiday rental market is enormous, projected to reach £3.5 billion this year. Airbnb eats up a sizeable chunk of that revenue; millions on the move
