The Museums Association Esmee Fairburn Collection Fund has awarded £120,000 to the National Justice Museum to introduce its unique 200-year-old HM Prison Service collection to a wider audience.
The funding supports a three-year project ‘Ingenuity, Creativity, Hope’ involving people in prison, their families and ex-offenders in the development of the collection and its display in a new exhibition at the Nottingham-based Museum in 2022.
Welcoming the funding, National Justice Museum Artistic Programme Manager Andrea Hadley-Johnson said: “We’ll now be able to tell the largely unseen stories behind the historic objects we hold by involving people from the widest possible range of backgrounds in their curation.
Planned government changes to sentencing will add to pressures on our overcrowded and overstretched prisons, without reducing crime or improving public confidence, a new Prison Reform Trust report warns.
The latest edition of the Bromley Briefing Prison Factfile reveals that, contrary to the impression given in much recent political debate and media coverage, England and Wales have become much tougher in their approach to punishing serious crime over the past few decades, on a scale which exceeds comparable countries or historical precedent
One of the facilitators for social enterprise Beyond Recovery staged his second solo art exhibition in the Noho Studios, Fitzrovia, London, recently. Artist Paul Lock featured incredible portraits of three of the men with whom Beyond Recovery has worked in prison and have since been released. Now Beyond Recovery apprentices, the men attended a private viewing of the exhibition – ‘You Simply Are II’ – on 24th September along with family and friends, including the Beyond Recovery team.
Prisons, courts and police stations have been given the opportunity to engage more collaboratively with the construction sector thanks to a major new procurement agreement which will help shape public sector construction.
All public sector bodies can use Crown Commercial Service’s (CCS) Construction Works and Associated Services agreement to find companies to help build things like new schools, hospitals, office buildings, universities, prisons, and houses. It has a maximum potential value of £30bn over the next seven years.
Following the Prime Minister’s announcements about prisons in mid-August, the Prison Reform Trust wrote three letters seeking clarification:
- to the Permanent Secretary, Richard Heaton, about the sentencing review
- to the Secretary of State, Robert Buckland, about the £2.5bn for new prisons, and
- to the CEO of HMPPS, Jo Farrar, about the extra £100m for prison security
To their collective credit, they have replied only three weeks later, and with some detail. Their replies can be found at these links:
Inevitably, only some of our questions have been answered, and it pays to look closely.
Commenting on the findings of HM Inspectorate of Prisons’ Independent Review of Progress report on HMP Bedford published today (12 September 2019), Peter Dawson, director of the Prison Reform Trust said:
“It is no surprise that the prisons which most consistently fail to deliver decent, safe conditions are overcrowded, very often with prisoners on remand or serving pointless short sentences. Bedford, a 200 year old pre-Victorian prison, is just one of many examples. If it is serious about ending this scandal, the government must start by quitting its addiction to imprisonment.”
Commenting on the findings of the HM Inspectorate of Prisons report on HMP Forest Bank, Peter Dawson, director of the Prison Reform Trust said:
“This report sums up the futility of the Prime Minister’s idea that you can build your way out of the prisons crisis. Forest Bank is a modern prison with a solid history of good local management. But 60% of the prisoners it holds are in overcrowded cells with half of them locked up during the working day. Unsurprisingly, violence and self-harm are common. It’s a similar story in other new prisons built over the last two decades, as the political addiction to imprisonment continually outstrips the willingness to provide the number of cells it requires.”
Commenting on the findings of the HM Inspectorate of Prisons report on HMP/YOI Swinfen Hall, Alex Hewson, Senior Policy and Communications Officer at the Prison Reform Trust said:
“This report highlights a fundamental challenge for the prison service—that an attempt to improve safety in one establishment simply leads to instability in another. Reducing the pressure on heavily criticised HMYOI Aylesbury by sending young men to Swinfen Hall just led to a predictable spike in violence there instead. With young adults over-represented in incidents of self-harm, segregation and poor behaviour, and many hundreds of young men now routinely sentenced to astonishingly punitive jail terms, the Chief Inspector is right to call for a specific focus on this age group. A young adult strategy, as recommended by the cross-party Justice Committee, is long overdue.”
CNL Software, a world leader in Physical Security Information Management (PSIM) software, is pleased to announce that its IPSecurityCenter PSIM solution has won the Convergence & Integrated Software and Solutions award in the 2019 New Product of the Year Awards by Security Today.
The Security Today New Product of the Year Award honors the outstanding product development achievements of security equipment manufacturers whose products are considered to be particularly noteworthy in their ability to improve security. Nearly 100 entries were received in the 11th successful year of the independently juried contest.