Prison reform and criminal justice are the issues addressed in my book which I am discussing in a Q and A session Monday evening at the Queens Hall Hexham - the proceeds from the book go to my favourite NHS charity the National Brain Appeal
Please feel free to come along - its my first Book Festival! I will be signing copies of the book with the bookshop Cogito Books afterwards in the foyer.
The BBC reviewed the Book here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-20270600
The short summary would be as follows:
A ground-breaking study of national importance of our criminal justice system by an MP and a former criminal barrister of note.
Prison does work. It locks people up so that the prisoner cannot then commit a crime: yet prison for years has failed to change the prisoner's behaviour. It is a disappointing fact of our prison system that under the last government released prisoners had a reoffending rate of approximately 70%. Prisons are a short term fix, not a long term solution. The public does not want us to be soft on prisoners. The Justice system needs to command the respect and confidence of the people. It clearly has not commanded that respect for some considerable time. Repeated polling shows that the public wants prison to be more effective at changing prisoners' behaviour. Put simply, it wants government to knuckle down and make prisons work . This study attempts to analyse what went wrong with the prison regimes in the past, makes suggestions for future changes, and assesses how things are changing under the new government. By ignoring prisoners, locking them up, and then discharging them with no basic skills, and still drug addicted, we have created a recipe for disaster and ever increasing prison numbers. This government should make the tackling of crime and reoffending a number one priority. The key point is that we know what the problems are: all are capable of being addressed.
