On 16 May the Interagency Panel on Juvenile Justice (IPJJ), PRI and Child Rights International Network (CRIN) welcomed over 50 guests to a Seminar on Reducing Incarceration of Children: good practice from the UK and overseas. Panel guests represented leading agencies working with the UK and abroad including: Juliet Lyon, Prison Reform Trust Tabitha Kassem, […]
30th May 2013
Institutional culture in prisons was the focus of the regional forum hosted by the PRI Office in Tbilisi on 29 April. Representatives of civil society and government from all three South Caucasus republics (Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia) were attended. The existence of non-statutory, hierarchical relations between inmates was widely discussed. The hierarchy among prisoners often […]
13th May 2013
Prisons, like any closed institutions or environments, are places where large groups of inmates are often managed by small teams of staff. To keep order and safety, prison management is strictly hierarchical, regulating every aspect of the life of the detainees. In many ways, prisons turn into ‘mini societies’, with their own rules and their […]
30th April 2013
PRI’s Death Penalty Programme Manager Jacqueline Macalesher responds to the revised EU Guidelines on the Death Penalty adopted last week, which have made a number of significant improvements to the EU’s policy on the fight against the death penalty. On 22 April, the Foreign Affairs Council adopted new revised and updated EU Guidelines on the […]
30th April 2013
Last month former Guardian journalist Malcolm Dean helped to train 25 journalists in Kazakhstan on current issues in criminal justice reform, the current situation in Kazakhstan’s prisons, strategies for good journalism and successful techniques for bringing criminal justice and human rights to public attention. It came as a shock to learn that only a few […]
4th April 2013
Alison Hannah, PRI’s Executive Director, reports from Kazakhstan where PRI’s Central Asia office held their first Prison Forum event last week to discuss probation and electronic monitoring. The aim of the conference was to share experience and plans for the expansion of the probation service in Kazakhstan and the introduction of electronic monitoring for offenders. […]
4th April 2013
Jo Honeybone reports from a vist to the Sahyog De-addiction Centre in Delhi where since it was founded in 2011, 300 children from 8 to 18 years have come for rehabilitation and vocational training. On 16th April, 15 participants attending the International Colloquium on Juvenile Justice in Delhi, India, visited the ‘Sahyog De-addiction Centre’ managed […]
27th March 2013
PRI’s Executive Director, Alison Hannah, reports from a meeting in Thailand last week on the implementation of the Bangkok Rules in East Asia and the Pacific, where participants heard about a range of promising rehabilitative initiatives, as well as exchanging information and views on the many similar challenges women in conflict with the law face […]
1st March 2013
From mobile courts to review remand cases to using traditional community courts to deal with minor offences, African countries are finding innovative ways to help solve the problem of prison overcrowding. PRI’s Nikhil Roy and Becky Randel select 10 examples of good practice which emerged from a PRI training course in Mozambique last week. On […]
25th February 2013
With the 22nd session of the Human Rights Council starting in Geneva today, the importance of protecting the valuable role of NGOs in international policy-making and ensuring the safety of human rights defenders is receiving a lot of attention. PRI’s programme officer, Olivia Rope, who made her first advocacy trip for PRI to Geneva last week, […]
25th February 2013