First offender to old lag – inevitable?

On Tuesday we went down to the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire’s meeting as they were holding a talk entitled “first offender to old lag – inevitable?” It was delivered by Angie Petit who is head of performance at the HM prison in Leeds.

It turned out to be a really interesting talk. A lot of it centred around what is being done to reform people in prison, what the prison has to deal with and what they actually do in prison though it covered a very broad spectrum. What was really interesting though was the statistics and results.

For example, 60% of people that come into prison have a hard drug problem. 80% have mental health problems. What passes for a mental health problem these days I don’t know (and I suspect that a lot of things do) but it’s still quite a shocking statistic. It was also suprising that short spells in prison, a throw back to the Conservates “short sharp shocks” don’t work and that movement of prisoners from prison to court is now done by a private company who can send a prisoner back to whichever prison they happen to be driving past. Crazy.

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 5:25 am and is filed under Humanism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.