UK prison population should be cut by a third: parliamentary report News
UK prison population should be cut by a third: parliamentary report

[JURIST] The UK Parliament Justice Committee [official website] released a reinvestment report [text] on Thursday urging the prison populations in England and Wales to be reduced by a third. The committee found that incarceration is a relatively ineffective way of reducing crime except for serious offenders, and the amount of repeat offenders could be more efficiently reduced through rehabilitation programs such as housing, employment, education, and drug and alcohol services. The Ministry of Justice, which is currently spending £4.2 billion on a new prison, claims that its current strategy of longer prison sentences, which incorporate rehabilitation services, is working and the number of repeat offenders has declined. According to the report, the new prison is a "costly mistake" and funds would be better allocated to local public services outside of the prisons.

We believe that that if reform, rehabilitation and reparation to victims were given higher priority, then sentencing and penal policy overall could make a much more significant contribution to reducing re-offending and making communities safer. We see risks that the direction of current policy will increase pressure on the prison estate, negating the valuable work on offender reform that does take place in prison, particularly for those in custody for over two years. It seems equally clear that, as matters stand, the probation service will also be overwhelmed by demand for resettlement services in relation to those coming out of prison, let alone the effective management of offenders in the community.

The committee admits that the implementation of their proposed strategy would be complex and challenging, but that it is necessary to reduce the UK's heavy burden of prison overcrowding and the reduction of repeat offenders.

In 2007, the UK justice minister gave authority to prison governors to release prisoners [JURIST report] coming to the end of their sentences as a way to relieve prison overcrowding [JURIST news archive] across England and Wales. Other countries are also facing a similar problem. In the US, a panel of three federal judges approved [JURIST report] a revised plan this week for reducing California's prison population. Earlier this week, a Russian law [JURIST report] allowing minor offenders to serve their sentences under house arrest rather than in prison entered into force. The bill is aimed at reducing the number of inmates in Russia's overcrowded prison system.

THIS DAY @ LAW

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.

Former communist countries admitted for EU accession

On April 16, 2003, the 2003 Treaty of Accession was signed by 10 countries, admitting them for European Union (EU) ascension. After Malta and Cyprus, eight of the ten new EU nations (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) were former communist countries. The signing of the treaty in Athens marked the first time that former members of the Soviet Bloc joined the EU.

Learn more about EU expansion from the organization's website.

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