Featured Blog
One week after International Women’s Day, a coalition of organisations and experts convened to address the rising trend of women’s criminalisation driven by poverty in a side event at the 68th Session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York on 15 March. The event highlighted the intersections of gender, […]
4th April 2024
Featured Blog
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
“It all started with a meeting…” 30 years ago, Vivien Stern, Ahmed Othmani and Hans Tulkens created Penal Reform International. They had in common the belief we still cherish, as stated by Nelson Mandela: “No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails”. In other words, the health of criminal justice […]
21st November 2019