Featured Blog
In this blog, PRI’s Executive Director Olivia Rope reflects on the urgent need for meaningful prison reform, drawing on her recent participation at the United Nations General Assembly session marking ten years of the Nelson Mandela Rules.
25th June 2025
Featured Blog
In this expert blog for Penal Reform International, Dr Marion Vannier and Dr Helen Gair from the University of Manchester explore how hope is imagined, experienced and transformed within the context of life imprisonment.
5th June 2025
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
Global Prison Trends 2022 details progress and setbacks towards abolition of the death penalty over the past year. In the second expert blog of our series examining trends identified in the report, Mai Sato, Director of Eleos Justice at Monash University, considers the role of public opinion as a barrier to abolition and dispells common objections. […]
2nd August 2022
Children in many countries continue to be sentenced to the death penalty and life imprisonment, often under outdated colonial laws and in violation of their rights under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. In the fifth blog of our series for the World Congress on Justice with Children, Sarmad Ali discusses research undertaken by Legal Awareness Watch (LAW) Pakistan to understand the situation of children in prison facing these most severe penalties.
11th November 2021
Although some progress has been made towards abolition of the death penalty, several countries – including some in the OSCE area – retain the death penalty for certain offences. In the third blog of our series examining trends identified in Global Prison Trends 2021, Jennifer Roberts from OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) outlines […]
25th October 2021
In the fourth blog of our series marking the tenth anniversary of the UN Bangkok Rules, Laura Ann Douglas examines extreme sentencing of women - what is driving the increase, what impact it has on the women serving these sentences, and how the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide and its partners are working with women who have served extreme sentences to advocate for healing-centered justice.
31st March 2021
“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
To mark the 17th World Day Against the Death Penalty on 10 October 2019, this expert blog by Oliver Robertson, an expert on abolition of the death penalty and rights of children whose parents are in prison, reflects on the impacts of having a parent sentenced to death or executed. The World Day 2019 is […]
9th October 2019
Photo: Alice Nungu by Tom Short Today is World Day Against the Death Penalty. To mark the day, Delphine Lourtau and Sharon Pia Hickey of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide discuss the Center’s recent report, Judged for More Than Her Crime: A Global Study on Women Facing the Death Penalty, which found that most women are sentenced to death […]
10th October 2018
PRI has launched its annual flagship publication, Global Prison Trends 2018. Here we publish the foreword to the report, written by the Rt Hon Helen Clark, a Member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, Former Prime Minister of New Zealand, and Former Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme. Every year, Global Prison Trends by […]
15th May 2018
To mark the 15th World Day Against the Death Penalty on 10 October 2017, this expert blog by Robin Maher examines the the links between poverty and the use of the death penalty. What does poverty have to do with the death penalty? In a word, everything. There is no greater indictment of the death […]
10th October 2017
A recent Supreme Court judgment in the US is being hailed as a triumph by death penalty abolition advocates. Moore v. Texas has enforced the prohibition against the execution of intellectually disabled defendants, by ruling against the state of Texas’ outdated methods of assessing intellectual disabilities – that were based on ‘stereotypes, fears, or myths’. […]
6th April 2017