Two reports published today by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons paint a bleak picture of youth custody in England and Wales. While the number of children in custody continued to fall in 2022-23, levels of violence and self-harm rose by just over a quarter and a third respectively. The Children… The number of children held in Secure Training Centres and YOIs has continued to decline...
Last week the Chief Inspector of Prisons, Charlie Taylor, issued an urgent notification for improvement within days of finishing the inspection on 9 November 2023. Bedford becomes the fifth establishment to receive with an urgent notification in the past 12 months. Mr Taylor said that conditions had deteriorated very sharply… The escape of a prisoner who was meant to be subject to constant supervision in July 2022 highlighted substantial weaknesses in security...
A report published today by the Centre for Women’s Justice takes a deep dive into the murders and suicides of Black and minority women linked to domestic abuse. The report, ‘Life or Death’, highlights how barriers to reporting and failures by police and other services, against a backdrop of intersecting… The researchers built a dataset of 4,370 post-death investigation reports into the deaths of BAME women who have died in the last 10 years...
Yesterday's publication of the latest HMPPS workforce statistics which cover the period up to the end of September are the first grain of good news for the prison and probation services for a considerable period of time. The headline figures comparing this June – to September with the previous quarter… Some better news but the number of probation officers in post still represents a shortfall of 2,129 FTE against the required staffing level of 6,780 FTE...
A significant part of our prison capacity crisis is the growing remand population. The September 2023 remand population figure of 16,196 is 12% higher than in September 2022 and is the highest September figure in at least the last fifty years. The untried prison population rose by 8% (to 10,521)… The researchers ask why custodial remand is so often ordered when conditional bail might be appropriate....
The last 20 years have seen a dramatic increase in the number of people serving long prison sentences. There is no official definition of how long a person needs to spend in prison to be classed as a ‘longterm’ prisoner, but the general understanding is that this term applies to… Today’s King’s Speech contained a long list of hardline criminal justice measures committing the Government to introduce tougher sentences for rapists and murderers...
Regular readers will be more familiar than most with the chronic overcrowding in our prison system and the recent emergency measures that the government has had to institute to tackle them. The early release provision and other measures have succeeded in reducing the number of people inside by 424 people… There have been more than 23,000 assaults in the prison system in the 12 months to June last year ...
Last week the Ministry of Justice and the Office for National Statistics published the annual report on Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements for 2022/23. Although MAPPA has only been in existence since 2003 and despite the surge in the prison population in the last year, there remain more people supervised under… There are more offenders being managed under MAPPA arrangements than there are in prison ...
Last Saturday was an important day for anyone with a criminal record looking for work or to change their job. Eighteen months after the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act was passed, changes to spending periods finally came into effect on 28 October 2023. In a change, much more profound… For the first time, many prison sentences of four or more years will be able to become spent....
Today’s edition of the MoJ Offender Management Statistics cover the prison population up to the end of September and other prison and probation data until the end of June. They confirm the inexorable rise of the prison population and the fall in the probation caseload. Prison adjudications and licence recalls… On 30 June 2023, there were 238,264 offenders supervised by the Probation Service in England and Wales...