Suchergebnisse

Prison suicides reached a record high in 2016 in England and Wales. Provides the first detailed case study of the investigations that follow prison suicides with findings relevant at a global level.

The penal voluntary sector -- Punishment and charity : historical and contemporary context -- Actor-network theory and its application -- Mapping a loose and baggy monster: scoping the sector -- Charitable innovations in punishment -- (in)voluntary control -- The effects of charitable work -- Conclusions: punishment and charity in a neoliberal age

The penal voluntary sector and the relationships between punishment and charity are more topical than ever before. In recent years in England and Wales, the sector has featured significantly in both policy rhetoric and academic commentary. Penal voluntary organisations are increasingly delivering prison and probation services under contract, and this role is set to expand. However, the diverse voluntary organisations which comprise the sector, their varied relationships with statutory agencies and the effects of such work remain very poorly understood. This book explores what voluntary organisations are doing with prisoners and probationers, how they manage to undertake their work, and the effects of charitable work with prisoners and probationers; and demonstrating how the legacy of philanthropic work and neoliberal policy reforms over the past thirty years have created a complex three-tier penal voluntary sector of diverse organisations.

Prison suicide/self-inflicted death is an international public health crisis, harming stakeholders including bereaved families, prisoners, prison staff and death investigators. England and Wales' record prison suicide numbers in 2016 cost at least £400 million. Death rates are an indicator of prison safety, and unsafe prisons mean unsafe societies. I present four case studies of people with very severe mental illness who were remanded to prison from police and/or court custody and went on to take their own lives in prison. I use publicly available data from Ombudsman and Coronial death investigations in England and Wales, highlighting that these accessible sources could be more widely mobilized to reduce the substantial harms and costs of prisoner deaths. Case studies include three men (Lewis Francis, Jason Basalat and Dean Saunders) and one woman (Sarah Reed) who took their own lives between January 2016 and April 2017. All four people were clearly very mentally unwell at the time of their alleged offense and remand to prison. I develop the concept of "risky remands" to highlight that people with very severe mental illness being remanded to prison is a particularly problematic practice. I highlight the implications of people with very severe mental illness transitioning into prison in the first place, arguing that being remanded to prison is not an acceptable or safe pathway into healthcare. I illustrate that police custody suites and courts may lack awareness of mechanisms and/ or the practical ability to transfer ill detainees charged with a serious crime to mental health facilities for assessment and/ or treatment. My analysis amplifies and extends recent Criminal Justice Joint Inspection findings that it is unacceptable to use prisons as a "place of safety," and that the Department of Health and Social Care, NHS England and the Welsh Government must increase the supply of medium and high secure beds. Moreover, Ombudsman investigations did not engage with the remand transition, effectively legitimizing this ...

In custodial contexts, the duty of states to protect the most fundamental right – to life – is heightened. Nevertheless, prisoner deaths are a universal and frequent concern. The mortality rate among the 11.5 million prisoners globally is up to 50% higher than amongst non-imprisoned persons, forming a human rights and health equity concern. It is therefore peculiar that prisoner deaths have attracted only piecemeal scholarly attention. In this article, we problematize epistemologies of prisoner death, highlighting obfuscations and agglomerations in existing datasets based on poor definitions, reductive statistics and constrained medico-legal categorizations. We provide a springboard towards a new epistemological approach that makes the scale and breadth of prisoner deaths and deceased prisoner characteristics more visible to facilitate prevention. We advance three tenets: count prisoners who die rather than deaths in prison, disaggregate prisoner death data through rights-informed dimensions and adopt explicitly defined, mutually exclusive categorizations.

A duty to investigate deaths in detention is enshrined within international legislation including Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). A core purpose of these investigations, following UK case law, is that bereaved families 'have the satisfaction of knowing that lessons learned […] may save the lives of others.' We highlight the striking absence of evidence illustrating the 'satisfaction' of bereaved families, utilising a case study of prisoner death investigations undertaken by the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman (PPO) and Coroners in England and Wales. Drawing on data from semi-structured interviews with 26 stakeholders, we explore what may produce familial 'satisfaction' and question who is satisfied by prisoner death investigations. Our analysis demonstrates that bereaved family 'satisfaction' was regularly spoken about by investigators and invoked to legitimise investigations despite limited evidence thereof. In conclusion, we highlight how the Ombudsman and Coroners should reconsider their practices to better satisfy families and manage expectations.

A duty to investigate deaths in detention is enshrined within international legislation including Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). A core purpose of these investigations, following UK case law, is that bereaved families 'have the satisfaction of knowing that lessons learned […] may save the lives of others.' We highlight the striking absence of evidence illustrating the 'satisfaction' of bereaved families, utilising a case study of prisoner death investigations undertaken by the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman (PPO) and Coroners in England and Wales. Drawing on data from semi-structured interviews with 26 stakeholders, we explore what may produce familial 'satisfaction' and question who is satisfied by prisoner death investigations. Our analysis demonstrates that bereaved family 'satisfaction' was regularly spoken about by investigators and invoked to legitimise investigations despite limited evidence thereof. In conclusion, we highlight how the Ombudsman and Coroners should reconsider their practices to better satisfy families and manage expectations.

Mass incarceration and supervision operate through a mixed economy. Using the case study of Samaritans' emotional support for prisoners in distress in England and Wales, we present an original framework of five normative criteria to facilitate nuanced assessment of voluntary sector criminal justice participation. This is an urgent, significant task for theory and practice: we need to find forms of public input that can deconstruct bloated penal systems. Whilst citizen involvement can be a positive form of 'people power', our assessment of Samaritans' ostensibly welcome humanitarian intervention reveals how it deflects attention from severe shortcomings of the penal system. In the context of mass incarceration, we conclude that voluntary sector and citizen involvement in individualised service delivery alone risks obscuring deep problems and delaying much-needed change. This topic is particularly timely, given increasing non-state involvement in criminal justice and the global problem of prison suicide.

Abstract
Mixed economies of welfare have seen increasing numbers of service users funnelled into voluntary, rather than statutory sector services. Many service users with (complex) human needs now fall within the remit of ill-researched voluntary organisations that are rarely social work led. Voluntary sector practitioners comprise a large and rising proportion of the social services workforce, but their experiences have received minimal analysis. Despite the importance of emotions across the helping professions, voluntary sector practitioners' emotional experiences are largely unknown. We address this gap, using an innovative bricolage of original qualitative data from England and Canada to highlight how 'emotions matter for penal voluntary sector (PVS) practitioners across diverse organisational roles, organisational contexts, and national jurisdictions'. We examine the emotions of paid and volunteer PVS practitioners relating to their (i) organisational contexts and (ii) relationships with criminalised service users. Problematising positive, evocative framings of 'citizen participation', we argue that continuing to overlook voluntary sector practitioners' emotions facilitates the downloading of double neo-liberal burdens—'helping' marginalised populations and generating the funds to do so—onto individual practitioners, who are too often ill-equipped to manage them.

AbstractVolunteers and voluntary organisations play significant roles pervading criminal justice. They are key actors, with unrecognised potential to shore up criminal justice and/or collaboratively reshape social justice. Unlike public and for‐profit agents, criminal justice volunteers and voluntary organisations (CJVVOs) have been neglected by scholars. We call for analyses of diverse CJVVOs, in national and comparative contexts. We provide three categories to highlight distinctive organising auspices, which hold across criminal justice: statutory volunteers, quasi‐statutory volunteers, and voluntary organisations. The unknown implications of these different forms of non‐State, non‐profit justice involvement deserve far greater attention from academics, policymakers and practitioners.