Frances Crook’s blog

I don’t know anything more about the background story of Girl X than anyone else, but I think what we do know raises some serious questions for various authorities about the decisions they made and their responsibility for her plight. First off, she is far from alone. Over the years Howard League lawyers and caseworkers have …  Read more

On 4 July 2017 the High Court ruled that AB, a child represented by the Howard League legal team, had been treated unlawfully. The boy had been isolated and deprived of education by Feltham prison over several months.  As the Chief Inspector of prisons reported recently, the routine isolation of children in prisons is no …  Read more

The final evaluation of the Peterborough prison Payment by Results (PbR) pilot was published last week. This was a scheme to provide support for people released from Peterborough prison after serving short sentences aimed at reducing reoffending. Services were provided by charitable organisations in the main, were tailored to individuals needs and, most crucially, people volunteered …  Read more

Most businesses and charities assess how effective they are being at delivering their objectives and they hold individuals to account. If staff do not deliver or do work that damages the business they are dismissed. Indeed, in public service, people can be held accountable many years after they have left – look at Hillsborough. Ministers, however, …  Read more

A few weeks ago I discovered that the prison service had quietly abandoned sex offender treatment programmes. These courses have been a mainstay of dealing with men convicted of a range of sex crimes and have been a prerequisite for securing transfer to open conditions and eventual release from prison. Tens of thousands of men have …  Read more

The first duty of government is to keep citizens safe. Over the past few years this has happened as crime has fallen. But there are still intractable problems and the Queen’s Speech singularly ignored one of the most corrosive and potentially explosive – prisons. Prisons are in a shambles. They are riven with violence, drugs, assaults …  Read more

There were reports in the media that Wandsworth prison has officially lost ‘reform' status. Actually it never really had it. Neither did any of the other prisons that were given the title. For, title was all it really was. Of course, there were also the highly paid additional governors who were imposed on top of the …  Read more

The last Labour government presided over an explosion in the number of men, women and children sent to prison and the length of time those people were incarcerated. People in prison are generally from economically poor families, with experience of mental health and social deprivation. The sort of people that Labour has claimed to represent. This …  Read more