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
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
Children in many countries continue to be sentenced to the death penalty and life imprisonment, often under outdated colonial laws and in violation of their rights under the Convention on the Rights of the Child.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
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
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
In this blog, Olivia Rope, Executive Director for Penal Reform International and Vice-Chair of the Alliance of NGOs on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice gives her top five takeaways from the Kyoto Declaration which was adopted as the outcome of the 14th UN Crime Congress.
30th March 2021
Sentencing people who are convicted of a criminal offence is complex business. The sentencing policy and practice of any given country has a significant impact on prison population and overcrowding rates, and is closely linked with the ability to provide safe, humane prison conditions in line with international standards like the UN Nelson Mandela Rules. […]
5th August 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
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights published a report in September 2019 on the administration of justice and human rights analysing violence, death, and serious injury in situations of deprivation of liberty. In this blog, Aldyen Krieger, PRI’s Policy Intern, evaluates the primary drivers behind the high exposure to violence and increased mortality […]
18th November 2019
In this blog, PRI’s Vicki Prais, looks at the challenges faced by elderly people in prison, sentenced to life imprisonment. Vicki notes that the ‘greying’ of the prison population has seen an upward trend and warrants attention as it is a group that will certainly grow given the rise in life sentences handed down globally. […]
23rd August 2019
At the UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice in May 2018, Olivia Rope, PRI’s Policy and Programme Manager, called on the UN and its member states to address the global increase in life sentences and their implementation. In this blog, based on Olivia’s speech, Katie Reade summarises the causes of the current crisis, […]
11th June 2018