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
In recent decades technological innovation has provided many opportunities for supporting prison management and the rehabilitation of people in prison. As documented in Global Prison Trends 2020, video visitation systems, remote court hearings and electronic file management systems are well established in some and becoming more common in some regions’ prisons, namely in Europe, North […]
17th July 2020
In this blog, as we publish a new briefing on coronavirus and criminal justice systems, Penal Reform International’s Executive Director, Florian Irminger, reflects on measures taken in response to the pandemic and what needs to be done - now and in the longer term - to prevent harm and human rights violations.
14th July 2020
The European Prison Rules (and their Commentary) were recently revised by the Council of Europe. The most notable changes arguably concern the rules guiding prison authorities on the separation and solitary confinement of prisoners. This comes at a time where separation has become more commonplace with COVID-19 restrictions in place. The practice of solitary confinement […]
10th July 2020
In this expert blog, the President of the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, Joel Hernández, writes about alternatives to pre-trial detention in the Americas where the number of people held in remand are excessively high. Commissioner Hernández calls for the use of alternatives as an urgent measure to protect human rights – during the COVID-19 […]
15th June 2020
In this blog, Justice Imman Ali, a judge of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh and a member of PRI’s Board explains how they managed to release 20,938 adults from pre-trial detention in 10 working days and 343 children from custody in the space of 7 working days as part of the response to the COVID-19 […]
11th June 2020
En español. The coronavirus pandemic has brought a whole host of responses by prisons and wider justice systems, but the plight of women has been neglected or overtly disregarded. Without a gender-specific assessment and response to coronavirus, lives of women in criminal justice systems are at risk and human rights violations will continue. This expert […]
4th June 2020
In this external expert blog for PRI, Giorgi Burjanadze, Deputy Ombudsperson in Georgia and member of the National Preventive Mechanism (NPM) mandated to conduct the monitoring of detention facilities, shares how they adapted its methodology to continue its critical work during the Covid-19 pandemic.
1st June 2020
In this expert blog for PRI, UN Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Ilze Brands Kehris says COVID-19 has exposed the urgent need for long-term societal and institutional reform and that human rights must be front and centre of the global response to the pandemic. This blog draws on the remarks made by the Assistant-Secretary General at the launch of Global Prison Trends 2020.
11th May 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