After a year in which prisons held a record number of prisoners, the prison system remains under pressure, and important lessons must be learnt if prisons are to be safe and effective. Despite sustained and chronic pressure, the report recognises progress over the past year. Overall, the Inspectorate's assessments of prisons inspected last year were more positive than those of prisons inspected the previous year, particularly in resettlement work. The number of self-inflicted deaths also decreased last year. The Chief Inspector identifies a number of warning signs, and new concerns: growing concerns about safety, particularly in dispersal prisons and young offender institutions, and rates of self-harm among women; unsuitable, cramped or unhygienic accommodation in some prisons; difficulties in complying with duties under the Disability Discrimination Act, and other equality duties; low activity levels in too many training prisons; the growing problem of alcohol misuse and the limited investment in this in prisons or the community; the potential effect of the recession on prisoners' employment and resettlement prospects. The report also refers to the inspection of immigration detention and the new inspection programme on police custody. Immigration removal centres were, on the whole, less safe and respectful than those inspected last year, though activity and welfare support had improved. The detention of children remains a major concern and is ripe for review. Inspections of police custody, jointly with the Inspectorate of Constabulary, have confirmed much good practice, but also revealed some deficiencies.

During the inspection year (September 2008 to August 2009) a total of 93 custodial establishments were inspected. Each establishment is assessed against four healthy prison tests: safety, respect, purposeful activity and resettlement. 72 per cent of assessments were positive. Full inspection reports made 4,513 recommendations for improvement, of which 96 per cent were accepted, wholly or in principle, by the National Offender Management Service. Unannounced follow-up inspections found that overall 67 per cent of recommendations had been achieved. Open and women's prisons performed best, with training prisons showing the lowest level of achievement. The Inspectorate published 103 reports on a wide range of establishments and topics. The annual report reflects on progress in reducing the women's prison population, contrasting with no discernable progress for young adults in prison who remain a neglected and under-resourced age-group with a high rate of re-offending. The report stresses the continual pressure from an increasing population set against actual and threatened budget cuts. Population pressure affects the whole system - stretching resources and managerial energy, keeping in use buildings that should be condemned, doubling-up prisoners in cramped cells, leading to unnecessary and destabilising prisoner moves. All this compromises successful rehabilitation. In 2009 the Inspectorate became the co-ordinator for the UK's National Preventive Mechanism (NPM) established under the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention against Torture and Inhuman and Degrading Treatment. The NPM consists of 18 existing bodies which are independent and have the right to inspect all places of detention.

The new edition of Doing Time brings this widely recognized book up-to-date and provides an accessible and informed discussion of current debates around prisons and penal policy. Drawing on a range of international material the book provides a critical sociological analysis of developments in imprisonment.

This text presents an overview of sentencing and punishment from penological, social policy and legal perspectives. It provides an accessible account of the changing attitudes of the public, policy makers and the judiciary regarding what constitutes 'just' punishment.

This annual report from Her Majesty's Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales, covers the 2006-07 period. During this time the prison population increased to 81,500 prisoners, with over 1,000 a week being held in police cells, awaiting a prison place. The report also charts the effects on prisons and prisoners of an increasingly pressurised system. There were 40% more self-inflicted deaths in custody last year, particularly during a prisoners early days within the prison system, and particularly amongst groups of vulnerable prisoners, such as foreign nationals, indeterminate-sentenced and unsentenced prisoners and women. The effects of prison overcrowding place great strain on training prisons and local prisons, with more suicides, poorer resettlement outcomes and insufficient exercise activity. Further, the greater use of indeterminate sentences stranded many prisoners within inappropriate prisons further driving up the prison population. The Chief Inspector does commend the prison system stating they are better places than 10 to 15 years ago, with some prisons showing improvements. There are improvements in healthcare, though there are concerns expressed about such provision in private sector prisons. There is also more support during the vulnerable early days of custody, though too many prisoners spend their first night in a police cell. The Inspector believes the prison system is at a crossroads and praises recent signs of a more effective and measured approach to policy and strategy, with new initiatives and good operational practice to build on. But, there is also a real risk that the prison system will move towards large-scale penal containment so losing the progress gained in improving the prison system.

This volume is in part intended to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. We are now a generation on from its formulation, and, as this varied collection of articles by leading thinkers in the field reflects, children's rights have come a long way. Yet the aim of this volume is not to look back, but to take stock and look forward. It explores subjects as diverse as socio-economic rights, corporal punishment, language and scientific progress as they relate to children and their rights, and offers new insights and new ideas. Edited by one of the most respected and leading scholars in the field, The Future of Children's Rights constitutes a stimulating and useful resource for academics and practitioners alike.

Winner of the 2018 Inner Temple New Authors Book Prize and the 2016 SLS Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship. Damages and Human Rights is a major work on awards of damages for violations of human rights that will be of compelling interest to practitioners, judges and academics alike. Damages for breaches of human rights is emerging as an important and practically significant field of law, yet the rules and principles governing such awards and their theoretical foundations remain underexplored, while courts continue to struggle to articulate a coherent law of human rights damages. The book's focus is English law, but it draws heavily on comparative material from a range of common law jurisdictions, as well as the jurisprudence of international courts. The current law on when damages can be obtained and how they are assessed is set out in detail and analysed comprehensively. The theoretical foundations of human rights damages are examined with a view to enhancing our understanding of the remedy and resolving the currently troubled state of human rights damages jurisprudence. The book argues that in awarding damages in human rights cases the courts should adopt a vindicatory approach, modelled on those rules and principles applied in tort cases when basic rights are violated. Other approaches are considered in detail, including the current 'mirror' approach which ties the domestic approach to damages to the European Court of Human Rights' approach to monetary compensation; an interest-balancing approach where the damages are dependent on a judicial balancing of individual and public interests; and approaches drawn from the law of state liability in EU law and United States constitutional law. The analysis has important implications for our understanding of fundamental issues including the interrelationship between public law and private law, the theoretical and conceptual foundations of human rights law and the law of torts, the nature and functions of the damages remedy, the connection between rights and remedies, the intersection of domestic and international law, and the impact of damages liability on public funds and public administration. The book was the winner of the 2016 SLS Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship and the 2018 Inner Temple New Authors Book Prize.

Over the last decade, the reformed youth justice system has seen increases in the numbers of children and young people in custody, a sharp rise in indeterminate sentences and the continuing deaths of young prisoners. This report brings together contributions from leading experts to critically examine current policy and practice.

When is it fair to hold young people criminally responsible? If young people lack the capacity to make a meaningful choice and to control their impulses, should they be held criminally culpable for their behaviour? In what ways is the immaturity of young offenders relevant to their blameworthiness? Should youth offending behaviour be proscribed by criminal law? These are just some of the questions asked in this thoughtful and provocative book. In The Moral Foundations of the Youth Justice System, Raymond Arthur explores international and historical evidence on how societies regulate criminal behaviour by young people, and undertakes a careful examination of the developmental capacities and processes that are relevant to young people’s criminal choices. He argues that the youth justice response needs to be reconceptualised in a context where one of the central objectives of institutions regulating children and young people’s behaviour is to support the interests and welfare of those children. This timely book advocates a revolutionary transformation of the structure and process of contemporary youth justice law: a synthesised and integrated approach that is clearly distinct from that used for dealing with adults. This book is a key resource for students, academics and practitioners across fields including criminal law, youth justice, probation and social work.

Controversial Issues in Prisons is a textbook designed to explore eight of the most controversial aspects of imprisonment in England and Wales today. It is primarily a book about the people who are sent to prison and what happens to them when inside. Each chapter examines a different dimension of the prison population and draws upon the sociological imagination to make connections between the personal troubles and vulnerabilities of those incarcerated with wider structural divisions which plague the society we live in. The book investigates controversies surrounding the incarceration of people with mental health problems, women, children, foreign nationals, offenders’ with suicidal ideation, sex offenders, drug takers and the collateral consequences of incarceration on prisoners' families. Each chapter on these eight substantive topics shares a common structure and answers the following key questions: How have people conceptualised this penal controversy? What does the official data tell us and what are its limitations? What is its historical context? What are the contemporary policies of the Prison Service? Are they legitimate and, if not, what are the alternatives? Ultimately the authors argue that in combination these controversial issues raise fundamental concerns about the legitimacy of the confinement project and the kind of society in which it is deemed essential. The book concludes with a discussion of why it remains important to make penal controversies visible, challenge penological illiteracy and provide alternative means of responding to human wrongdoing rooted in the principles of human rights and social justice.