David Shipley is a former prisoner who writes, speaks and researches on prison and justice issues.
Two RAF engineers were spared jail today, after pleading guilty to vandalising a statue of Paddington Bear in the Berkshire town of Newbury. The young, drunk servicemen broke the Peruvian bear in half and then transported his front façade back to RAF Odiham in a taxi. Later jars of marmalade, sandwiches and poems were left
Everyone knows that Britain’s jails are filthy, failing and dangerous. But there’s another less obvious problem with our prisons: those locked up can find it impossible to get anything done. In prison, your ability to achieve the most basic of tasks done is almost entirely dependent on others. This means that if a prisoner needs
Tommy Robinson has lost his attempt to force the prison service to move him out of segregation. Robinson’s lawyers said he is being held in ‘inhuman’ and ‘degrading’ conditions at HMP Woodhill in Milton Keynes. But the High Court ruled that Robinson, also known as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was being kept away from other prisoners for
The Sentencing Council – the organisation that advises judges on how long convicted criminals should be locked up for – has hit back at criticism from the Justice Secretary. Shabana Mahmood challenged the Council’s apparent embrace of ‘two-tier justice’ last week, after it told judges to order a pre-sentence report (PSR) if an offender is from a
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, has accused his Labour counterpart Shabana Mahmood of not believing in ‘equality under the law’ and ‘enshrining’ a ‘double standard’ over who is, and isn’t, sent to prison. The accusations against Mahmood – and the Labour government – came after new guidelines from the Sentencing Council were published, which
There are just over a thousand men’s prison places left in the UK out of a total of 88,618 total. Where does the government go from here? Are our prisons about to run out of space? If they do, will we see even earlier releases? To put these figures from the start of the week
Former justice secretary David Gauke’s Independent Sentencing Review (ISR), running since October, was not due to report until the spring. However, following the latest published prison population statistics, which showed there are only just over 1,000 spaces left in men’s prisons and soaring numbers for serious further offences, an interim report has been published. It
In October 2021, Ali Harbi Ali assassinated David Amess, the MP for Southend West. The aftermath of this killing was marked by a debate in which MPs called for ‘love not hate’ and insisted that this showed the need for an Online Hate Bill. Now, almost three years after the murderer was sentenced to a whole
Now that the Southport killer Axel Rudakubana has been sentenced for his horrific crimes, we can try to understand how he was free to kill, and what can be done to stop crimes like this in the future. Between 2019 and 2021, this young man was referred three times to Prevent, the counter-extremism programme. On
The details of the terrible murder of Sarah Mayhew are almost too appalling to bear, but one question stands out most of all: why was the convicted murderer who killed her free to take Sarah’s life? Sansom had murdered before, when he was just 19 Sarah, a 38-year-old mother of two, was lured to a
Southport killer Axel Rudakubana will serve a minimum of 52 years in prison for the horrific murder of three young girls. But despite the lengthy sentence handed to the teenager at Liverpool Crown Court today, it’s hard to say that justice has been served. Rudakubana should die behind bars, yet the law prevented the judge,
‘The Amazon Killer’, screams the Sun front page today. ‘Total disgrace he was able to buy knife on Amazon,’ says the Daily Mirror. The backlash to the news that Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana brought his weapon online has been swift. But blaming Amazon for what happened on that horrific day last summer is missing the
What is prison for? I’ve wondered that a lot, these past five years. In February 2020, just a few days after the UK left the European Union, and as scientists worked to agree an official name for the ‘new coronavirus’, I was sentenced to 45 months in prison for a fraud I’d committed in 2014.
Britain should move thousands of inmates into low-security open prisons, according to David Gauke, the former Tory justice secretary, who is chairing the government’s Sentencing Review. Gauke’s comments have sparked a predictably furious backlash, but he’s absolutely correct – and I should know. Locking someone up costs the public about £52,000 per prison place each
‘The first team at Wormwood Scrubs is said to be better than QPR’s’. That line from Toby Young’s article from November has stuck with me. Could it be true? Are our jails full of talented footballers who didn’t quite make it? Are players regularly ‘spat out’ without any qualifications? Is there an academy-to-prison pipeline? One
What is the British Transport Police playing at? Biologically male officers identifying as female will be allowed to intimately search women so long as they have a gender recognition certificate (GRC). The guidance, which was revealed by the Daily Telegraph, shows that the police aren’t quick to learn lessons when it comes to resolving the question of who
Two recently-released prisoners have lifted the lid on corruption and sexual harassment in Britain’s prisons. Beatrice Auty, who was imprisoned for money laundering, said that she was harassed by a male prison officer at HMP Bronzefield in Surrey. A former officer, Lee Davis, who spent two years in prison for corruption, also told the BBC
Yesterday, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published its annual report on crime in England and Wales. This combines data on crimes reported to the police and the Crime Survey for England and Wales to produce the best estimate of how much crime is being committed. It makes for grim reading. While overall crime is up 10
September’s tranche of early releases did not go as smoothly as the government might have hoped. Footage of delighted prisoners celebrating outside jails, or saying ‘I’m a lifelong Labour voter now’ will, no doubt, resurface in Reform’s local election campaign videos in the spring. Then there was Amari Ward, the man who allegedly sexually assaulted
One of the new government’s first decisions was to announce that most prisoners would be released 40 per cent of the way through their sentence, not half-way through as had been the case before. In July the expectation was that around 5,500 inmates would be released early. In fact 1,700 were released in September, and
