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Crying Woolf: has the report impacted on life for prisoners?
Author(s) -
TUMIM STEPHEN,
JENKINS DAVID,
BODDIS SIMON
Publication year - 1993
Publication title -
criminal behaviour and mental health
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.63
H-Index - 54
eISSN - 1471-2857
pISSN - 0957-9664
DOI - 10.1002/cbm.1993.3.4.484
Subject(s) - prison , legislation , crying , prison population , criminology , population , political science , falling (accident) , economic justice , sentence , criminal justice , psychology , sociology , law , demography , social psychology , psychiatry , linguistics , philosophy
While major prison expansion has been occurring in the USA and several other western democracies, in the last decade the UK has locked up proportionately more members of its population than any country except Turkey and Austria — some 95 people per 100 000. This paper starts with the core recommendations to emerge from the major independent enquiry into serious prison riots that occurred in 1990 in six prisons geographically widely scattered across England and Wales, and questions their impact. Falling numbers of prisoners under the criminal justice legislation of 1991 have enabled some considerable progress, but the force of that legislation is about to change. Concerns are expressed about the effect of a likely new influx of prisoners before management can consolidate changes to in‐prison regimes and the organisation of cooperation between prisons in sentence planning. Modest changes to the physical environment are necessary, but insufficient, reforms.