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Prisons - new material (45)

01 March 2001

Prison Report. Issue 54 (Spring) 2001, pp28. Latest issue of the redesigned journal contains an edited version of Lord Woolf's lecture to the Prison Reform Trust (“We still fail our prisoners”), Privatisation Factfile and a section on prisoner education. Available from Prison Reform Trust, 15 Northburgh Trust, London EC1V 0JR, Tel. 0207 251 5070.

Special issue on mass imprisonment in the USA. Punishment & Society vol 3 no 1 (January) 2001, ISSN 1462-4745.

With the number of inmates incarcerated approaching 2,000,000 this issue focuses on the emergence, over the past 20 years, of mass imprisonment in the United States. Described as “an unprecedented event in the history of the USA”, the imprisonment rate is five times as large as it was in 1972, and is six to 10 times higher than European and Scandinavian countries. In his introduction David Garland defines mass imprisonment by two characteristics; i. “a rate of imprisonment and a size of prison population that is markedly above the historical and comparative norm...” and ii. when imprisonment “ceases to be the incarceration of individual offenders and becomes the systematic imprisonment of whole groups of the population.” The issue contains 13 papers and an introduction and epilogue by Garland.

Modernising the management of the Prison Service: an independent report by the Targeted Performance Initiative Working Group, Lord Laming (Chair). Home Office 2001, pp34.

The working group on “targeted performance improvement” was announced by Jack Straw in January 2000 with the remit “to assist the Prison Service in its commitment to tackle under-performing prisons.” This report has sections on i. The blocks to effective performance, ii. Systems of delivery, iii. Setting standards, iv. Levels of accountability and v. The role of the community. It includes 16 recommendations.

Parliamentary debates

Prison Service Lords 20.2.01 cols 667-683
Haslar Prison Lords 14.3.01 cols 961-980
Birmingham Prison Lords 4.4.01 cols 812-815