Women have a number of difficulties when they come to face to face with the legal system in Sierra Leone. Their low levels of education and literacy make seemingly simple things − understanding a charge or signing a confession − extremely problematic. Women were also among the vulnerable groups that fared worst under the state of emergency measures brought in to […]
7th August 2015
Last week, Nikhil Roy, PRI’s Director of Programme Development, visited Mayuge District in rural Eastern Uganda, to meet various players in the district’s community service programme and to attend a meeting for local stakeholders. Mayuge is one district selected as part of a pilot project supported by PRI in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. Prisons in all three countries are severely overcrowded […]
5th August 2015
PRI’s Executive Director, Alison Hannah, and Omar Khan, project co-ordinator for our ExTRA project on alternatives to custody in East Africa, attended the Second World Congress on Community Corrections held in Los Angeles from 14-16 July. The conference was attended by 360 participants from 27 countries and focused on innovations in community corrections and the […]
24th July 2015
Isolation from the rest of the prison population, whether as a disciplinary measure or for the ‘protection’ of vulnerable individuals, is used in most countries to different degrees. That solitary confinement can have a terrible impact on prisoners’ mental health, is however, now increasingly acknowledged by many people. Many are also questioning the wisdom of […]
24th July 2015
Doreen Namyalo Kyazze from the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative in Uganda joined the PRI team at the UN Crime Commission in May for the adoption of the revised Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the Mandela Rules). Here she explains some of the challenges facing prisons and prisoners in Uganda – the […]
29th June 2015
On 22 May 2015, at the UN Crime Commission in Vienna, states agreed on a new set of prison standards – a new and updated version of the well-known and well-used Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (SMR). Andrea Huber, PRI’s Policy Director, was involved in the revision process and was present in […]
15th June 2015
PRI’s ExTRA (Excellence in Training and Rehabilitation) project coordinator, Omar Khan, travelled to Meru, Kenya, last month where he took part in activities designed to inform the local community about the benefits of community service versus a prison sentence for minor offences and challenge common perceptions that community service orders are a ‘soft landing’. Consistently, one of the key […]
2nd June 2015
During a recent visit to Russia PRI London staff members, Nikhil Roy and Jenny Clarkin, together with PRI’s Moscow Regional Director Vika Sergeyeva, met Petr Posmakov, Head of ‘Vozvrascheniye’ programme at the Volnoe Delo Foundation. For the last 18 months, PRI has been part of a multi-stakeholder project funded by the Foundation to improve the rehabilitation and […]
1st June 2015
The new and revised text of the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (SMR) drafted by the intergovernmental expert group (IEG) will be submitted for consideration at the 24th session of the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (the UN Crime Commission) in Vienna this week. Professor Sir Nigel Rodley, Chair of the Human Rights Centre at […]
19th May 2015
Around the world, attempts at controlling the use and sale of drugs through criminal sanctions have resulted in extreme levels of incarceration for drug-related offences, serious overcrowding in prisons, deterioration of prison conditions, increased violence inside and outside prison, and depleted resources available for rehabilitation, education or treatment. In Latin America, for example, nearly a third of all detainees […]
24th April 2015