The Backstop Journals » Criminal justice

Ken Clarke says imprisonment not linked to crime fall

Backstop — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 10:41:33 +0000

BBC News reports that Justice Secretary Ken Clarke has said there is no link between rising levels of imprisonment and falling crime. With crime having fallen in most of the Western world in the 1990s, he said the decline may have been due to economic growth and high employment levels. Meanwhile, the Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales, Dame Anne Owers, warned that “overpopulated” prisons are “increasingly brittle”. She said the government should invest in alternatives to locking people up.

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Prison uses creative programme to reduce reoffending

Backstop — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 08:42:50 +0000

Erwin James, a patron of the arts charity Create, writes for the Guardian about Doncaster Prison, which uses the creative arts to help change prisoners’ lives and reduce reoffending.

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EHRC to launch inquiry into disability hate crimes

Backstop — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 10:35:06 +0000

The Guardian reports that the Equality and Human Rights Commission is to launch a probe into disabiliy hate crimes and harassment after figures revealed that a person appears in court every working day charged with abusing the disabled – often violently.

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More Crown Court trials without jury may go ahead

Backstop — Thu, 06 May 2010 09:13:29 +0000

BBC News reports that two more crown court trials without a jury may be held, just over a month after the first juryless trial for centuries. The applications were lodged after a trial in March, when four men were convicted of armed robbery by a judge, because of fears of jury tampering. It was the first Crown Court criminal trial in England and Wales to be held without jurors for more than 350 years. Critics called it an attack on a basic democratic right.

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Illiteracy and innumeracy UK’s “dirty little secrets”

Backstop — Tue, 04 May 2010 10:00:27 +0000

Digby Jones writes for The Guardian on how, he says, the election campaign is dodging the issue of low basic skills and that prisons provide the most acute examples of this issue.

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Crackdowns on drug dealers led to rise in violent crime, study finds

Backstop — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 09:26:34 +0000

The Independent reports that police crackdowns to cut the supply of illegal drugs by removing dealers and criminal overlords actually lead to rises in drug-related violence, gun crime and murder, according to an international study.

Campaigners for the reform of drugs policy said the findings, which follow numerous studies showing that prohibition has failed to stop narcotics from becoming more plentiful, added to the pressure on governments to declare the “war” on the £200bn global illicit drugs industry over, and adopt a policy of controlled legalisation.

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Sex offenders win legal challenge over register

Backstop — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 10:06:10 +0000

BBC News reports that two convicted sex offenders have won the right to challenge their inclusion on the UK’s sex offenders register. The UK Supreme Court ruling paves the way for other offenders to seek to have their details removed. The two offenders are a teenager who was convicted of rape aged 11 and a man in his 50s guilty of indecent assault. They argued the register breached their human rights because they could not have their inclusion reviewed, even if they had evidence they had reformed.

But they had argued that permanent inclusion with no chance of a review was a disproportionate interference in their family lives.

Lord Phillips, president of the Supreme Court, said: “It is obvious that there must be some circumstances in which an appropriate tribunal could reliably conclude that the risk of an individual carrying out a further sexual offence can be discounted to the extent that continuance of notification requirements is unjustified.”

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Backlash fears after reincarceration of Bulger killer

Backstop — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:11:02 +0000

Children & Young People Now reports that prison reformers fear that the return to prison of James Bulger killer Jon Venables could spark a backlash against attempts to liberalise youth justice. The trial of Venables and his co-defendant Robert Thompson sparked a shift to more punitive measures for young people in both Labour and Conservative crime policy during the 1990s. Andrew Neilson, assistant director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, is concerned that this latest development could spark a similar trend. He said: “we should be looking at the bigger picture and striving for what makes a safer society, rather than what makes for good headlines. Unfortunately, the media have increasingly been allowed to dictate the agenda in criminal justice, often with very unhappy outcomes”.

What else can a youth offending team officer do?

Backstop — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 11:01:31 +0000

The Guardian today has a feature on the possible career options to a youth offending team officer looking to develop their career further.

Comment: Blame the rapist, not the victim

Backstop — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 10:30:48 +0000

Julie Bindel writes for The Guardian today on the results of a new survey, Wake up To Rape, which found that one in 10 respondents consider most claims of rape to be “probably false”, and more than half the female respondents think there are situations where the rape victim is to blame. Elizabeth Harrison, manager of the Whitechapel Haven in east London, said she was shocked by the results. “We were surprised by the number of women in particular that think rape victims should take responsibility for what happened,” she says. “The findings actually support an argument for vetting juries. Our survey suggests that, statistically speaking, the majority of jurors come into court with a bias against the rape victim before they hear any evidence.”

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