Former supreme court justice Lord Brown described the IPP sentence as the ‘greatest single stain on our criminal justice system’.
Articles on UK prisons
Displaying 1 - 20 of 72 articles
Attempts to understand why people offend can clash with deeply-held ideas about responsibility and what punishment someone deserves.
What shapes leaders’ responses to issues of crime and justice is not that toughness wins, but that leniency-gone-wrong loses.
With no clear plan to manage sentencing inflation, one option becomes to release prisoners early.
What people believe about choice and responsibility shapes what they think prison is for.
There are currently 74 people serving whole-life sentences.
Under UK law, the home secretary has a duty to pursue removal of foreign national offenders.
Mental ill health was the leading cause of prison officer absence in the year to June 2025.
Medical law is based on the idea that a patient consents to an intervention that will benefit them. Is that the case here?
‘With philosophy, people care about what I think. Nobody listens when you’ve been in prison. Everything you think is wrong, rubbish, you’re nothing.’
The prison population is projected to increase to up to 105,000 by 2029 unless changes are made.
Could working with dairy cows offer a surprising path to rehabilitation for prisoners?
A parliamentary committee surveyed 5,113 prison officers and found that 50% do not feel safe in the prison they work in.
Sports programmes have the potential to improve lives by offering positive social connection.
While crime has fallen since the 1990s, this is not reflected in the prison population, which has doubled in the same period.
Incarcerated women need trauma-informed support and mental health services.
Properly resourced probation services, drug and alcohol treatment and helping people build their social networks can all play a role.
An expert on rehabilitative prison design explains how the UK’s prisons could be much better.
Lengthy confinement within locked, poorly maintained and overcrowded cells triggers boredom and restlessness, and contributes to violent incidents.
Between 2005 and 2015 the Dutch prison population was indeed reduced by 44%.
Top contributors
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Associate Professor, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge
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Professor of Criminology, University of Portsmouth
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Professor of Criminology, University of Bath
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Criminology, The Open University
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Associate Professor of Forensic Psychology, University of Birmingham
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Professor of Criminology & Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London
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PhD Candidate in Criminology, University of Westminster
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Senior Lecturer in Social Work, University of Salford
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Senior Lecturer in Midwifery, University of Hertfordshire
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Lecturer in Psychology, University of Salford
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Senior Lecturer, Criminal Justice, Birmingham City University
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Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice, Deputy Director, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge
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Lecturer in Criminology, University of Salford
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Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick
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Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice, Wayne State University