Featured Blog
How can probation services help build a greener future? In this blog, Rob Allen and Steve Pitts propose a “Green Probation Agenda” to align rehabilitation with environmental sustainability, showcasing global promising practices.
29th April 2025
Featured Blog
Drawing on interviews with older people in California’s prisons, this blog explores end-of-life care in prison—revealing urgent challenges, patient perspectives, and lessons for humane, geriatric prison health reform.
12th April 2025
Featured Blog
Violence in European prisons is rising, driven by overcrowding, staff shortages, and organised crime. This blog explores trends, data practices, and reforms needed for humane, rehabilitative and secure prison systems.
2nd April 2025
Featured Blog
Discover how European prisons navigate overcrowding. This blog explores disparities, impacts, and innovative reforms, drawing on 2024 data and insights from PRI’s Global Prison Trends series.
11th December 2024
Figure 1: Principles of Growth Wheel In this blog written for PRI, the authors Makayla Agyemang and Dr Sarah Lewis from UK-based Penal Reform Solutions, present the “Growth Project” that they have implemented in English prisons to foster rehabilitative relationships between people detained and staff in prison facilities. The project is based on Dr […]
14th February 2024
In a context of climate crisis and rising costs, prisons, like all institutions, must take action to be more sustainable and minimise impact on the environment. In this blog, Wiep Fokker from Restorative Justice Netherlands makes the case for nature-based detention houses as an ecologically sustainable model for penal reform. The climate and biodiversity crisis […]
24th October 2023
Global Prison Trends 2022 highlighted severe staffing shortages in prisons and challenges shared across prison systems worldwide in maintaining adequate staffing levels. In the latest blog of our series examining trends identified in the report, Ella Töyrylä, a former prison officer in England, considers the importance of training provided for prison officers for staff retention, […]
23rd November 2022
On 8 – 9 September, PRI joined the International Penal and Penitentiary Foundation (IPPF) 150th anniversary celebrations in Geneva to mark IPPF’s contributions to criminal justice reform. Over the two-day event, PRI staff from Europe, Middle East and North Africa, South Caucasus and Sub-Saharan Africa took part in discussions on challenges and opportunities for supporting […]
26th September 2022
PRI has recognised that prison staff – including prison, correctional and detention officers – are key actors in the successful rehabilitation of people in prison around the world. Positive relations between people in prison and prison officers are crucial in encouraging pro-social behaviour, fostering an environment of respect, and generally creating safer conditions for the […]
18th January 2022
In this blog Olivia Rope, Executive Director of Penal Reform International, gives a summary and highlights a few key points from the recently published ‘Common position on incarceration’ from the United Nations System. For the first time, the United Nations system has issued a common position on incarceration which was unveiled at an event on […]
11th June 2021
Distribution of Covid-19 vaccines should be guided by evidence and based on the principle of harm reduction. In this blog, experts from the University of Oxford consider why prison populations and staff should be prioritised in national vaccination programmes, what is happening so far and the challenges to their inclusion in some places. Prisons have […]
18th February 2021
Prisons and other detention facilities face a whole host of emergencies from environmental and technological hazards, such as tornados or earthquakes. In this expert blog for PRI, as part of our Global Prison Trends series, J. Carlee Purdum, an expert on hazards, disasters and prisons, reflects on how plans need to be developed and adapted […]
29th September 2020
In the third blog of our series exploring trends documented in Global Prison Trends 2020, Jeanne Hirschberger – researcher for the report – explains prison budgets. Jeanne details the levels of inadequate resourcing for prisons globally and the impact of this on the human rights of those detained. Massive overcrowding, lack of access to healthcare, […]
24th July 2020
Dr. Costanza Curro, a Postdoctoral research fellow on the Gulag Echoes project, has been analysing what Georgia’s penal system responses to COVID-19 can tell us about divides between the prison and the ‘outside world’. In this post, Costanza considers how exceptional pandemic-driven measures expose the contradictions of the prison itself. While millions of people around […]
7th May 2020