As the Commonwealth heads of government meet in Kigali, Catherine Heard, Director of the World Prison Research Programme, calls for better data as a first step to ending chronic prison overcrowding.
This week, heads of government from across the Commonwealth have been meeting in Kigali, Rwanda. The CHOGM has come round again.
Dr Sarah Lamble is a Reader in Criminology and Queer Theory at the School of Law, Birkbeck and researches issues of gender, sexuality and imprisonment, as well as alternative forms of justice. Sarah is an organiser with Abolitionist Futures and a founding member of the Bent Bars Project, which coordinates a letter-writing programme for LGBTQ prisoners in Britain.
Here, Sarah reflects on Justice Edwin Cameron’s recent ICPR annual lecture, titled: 'Do prisons work? If not, do prisons inspectorates do more harm than good?’, applying the concept of ‘non-reformist’ reforms. This term, coined by Austrian philosopher André Gorz with reference to political economy, was further developed by prison abolitionists Thomas Mathieson and Angela Davis.
Ready to lead a cutting-edge comparative prisons research project? We are recruiting for a senior postdoctoral researcher to lead a project examining prison-based work and employment in the UK, Brazil, and the USA.
Do prisons work? If not, do prisons inspectorates do more harm than good? Justice Edwin Cameron will consider these questions in a lecture titled: ‘Prisons and prisons inspectorates: puzzles and paradoxes'.
Some 11.5 million people are held in penal institutions throughout the world, according to the latest edition of the World Prison Population List (WPPL), researched and compiled by Helen Fair and Roy Walmsley and published on 1 December 2021 by the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research (ICPR), at Birkbeck, University of London.
What explains the world’s rising prisoner numbers? Does prison overcrowding impact public health? How has the pandemic affected prisoners and prisoner numbers? All countries use prison as a response to crime and disorder, but to vastly differing extents. Countries face similar dilemmas in how to deal effectively with crime, yet they make widely different policy choices in response – choices with huge societal impacts.
The prisons research team at the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research (ICPR) at Birkbeck, University of London has published new research on measures taken to control the risk of COVID-19 in prisons, and their impact on prisoners’ health and wellbeing. The research covers a diverse group of countries across five continents and includes first-hand accounts of how life in custody changed from March 2020.
ICPRs latest comparative research on the sentencing of burglary, drug importation and murder highlights vast disparities between different jurisdictions in their approaches to custodial sentencing across a range of offences. Here, Catherine Heard discusses some of the most striking disparities.
The Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research (ICPR) at Birkbeck, University of London has published a report revealing vast disparities between countries in their approaches to criminal sentencing, with important implications for justice reform.
Professor Mike Hough, Emeritus Professor and Founder of Birkbeck’s Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research (ICPR) explains how thousands of prisoners are still facing injustice, ten years after IPPs’ failings were first exposed, and endorses latest demands for action.