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Prisons - new material (75)

01 January 2010

The diversion dividend: interim report, Rethink and The Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health, 2010, pp 14. Following the publication last year of the Bradley report on “diversion” for people with mental health problems in the criminal justice system, there have been growing calls for action to divert more people to the care, treatment and support that they need. This report argues that despite facing a decade of limited public spending growth, the case for an increase in the provision of diversion and liaison services is “compelling.” It considers the spending implications of reinvesting money already in the health and justice systems on diverting many more people with mental health problems to services that will improve their health and reduce their risk of criminal activity. See: http://www.scmh.org.uk/pdfs/Diversion_Dividend.pdf

Más cárceles, más presos y más mano dura, Diagonal, no. 123, 1.4.10. At a time when the penal code is being reformed to make sentencing harder, this article highlights that in spite of a decrease in serious crime, newspapers and television news programmes focus their work increasingly on these crimes, heightening social alarm and leading to continuing calls for harsher sentencing regimes. Meanwhile, figures show that there are 87 prisons in Spain, official figures on the prison population for March 2010 show that there are 76,570 prisoners, and that it has one of the highest rates of imprisonment at the same time as it has one of the lowest crime rates in Europe. Available at: http://www.diagonalperiodico.net/Mas-carceles-mas-presos-y-mas-mano.html

Inside Job, Max Blain. Police Review 29.1.10, pp 21-23. This article is about a group of 200 or so police officers working inside the prison system as Prison Intelligence Officers (PIOs). Their role is to “brief prison staff on the criminals coming in” and to “gather information on specific prisoners”. The article notes that: “While they do not work undercover and rarely come into direct contact with inmates, they do use a variety of covert techniques to keep tags on the prison population.”