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Created: Friday, 19 April 2019 10:59

Written by Benjamin White

Aylesbury Young Offender Institution (YOI) has been placed in special measures following an internal review into the use of segregation at the prison. Prisoners were found to have been locked in their cells for up to 23 hours a day, with some kept in the segregation unit for three months at a time. Benjamin White reports.

Aylesbury YOI houses 440 young men and is the prison where 18-21 year olds serving the longest sentences are sent, with one in 12 serving life imprisonment. At the time of the 2017 Prisons Inspectorate report, 62% of prisoners at Aylesbury were black or minority ethnic (compared to 26% of prisoners across the system and 13% of the British population). The Inspectorate report further suggests that this group of prisoners is disproportionately targeted for use of force by staff and has less access to medical care than white prisoners.

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Created: Friday, 19 April 2019 10:54

Written by Nicki Jameson

On 18 February Justice Secretary David Gauke gave a speech setting out his ‘vision’ for the future of the criminal justice system – a future he described as ‘smart justice’, in which people currently being sentenced to very short prison terms will instead be subject to rigorous community supervision. Gauke is no liberal but he immediately faced a predictable backlash against the idea that any fewer people should be imprisoned. Nicki Jameson reports.

Gauke’s speech was reminiscent of those from then newly-appointed Con-Dem Coalition Justice Minister Kenneth Clarke in 2010. Like Clarke, Gauke began by highlighting the massive growth in the prison population which took place under the 1997-2010 Labour government, as well as during the previous Conservative regimes of Thatcher and Major – from around 45,000 in 1993 to 83,000 in 2006. Despite a few spikes, such as that caused by the mass imprisonment which followed the 2011 inner-city uprisings, prison numbers have remained generally stable since then. However, the punishment machinery is vast, unwieldy, inefficient by any standards and expensive to run. So, whoever is charged with making overall policy for it will look for ways to solve these problems. A recurrent theme in the quest for a ‘solution’ is the proposal to stop sentencing repeat low-level offenders to short prison terms.

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Created: Friday, 19 April 2019 09:35

Written by Wesam Khaled

While the Labour Party conducts an anti-Zionist witch hunt on the basis of a definition of anti-Semitism which claims it is anti-Semitic to call Israel a racist endeavour, the rhetoric around the election campaign for Israel’s April elections continues to demonstrate the inherently racist nature of the Israeli state. On 10 March, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared in line with the Nation-State Law that Israel is ‘the nation state, not of all its citizens, but only of the Jewish people.’ His prospects of winning the election have improved enormously after US President Trump recognised Israel’s annexation of the illegally-occupied Golan Heights in Syria on 23 March.

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Created: Friday, 19 April 2019 09:36

Written by Trevor Rayne

The US is ramping up its military spending while threatening China economically and militarily. The US ruling class wants to compensate for its waning economic power with military superiority, in order to retain its global dominance. Combining the threat of an all-out trade war with belligerent warnings and manoeuvres is intended to force China to yield to the US. Trevor Rayne reports.

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