Olivia Rope delivers keynote address at ICPA Annual Conference 2023
The International Corrections and Prisons Association (ICPA) Annual Conference 2023 is taking place this week in Antwerp, Belgium, from 22-27 October 2023, hosted by the Belgian Prison Service. The theme of the conference is “Humane Corrections: What more can we do“, reflecting the need for a more humane approach to corrections and to identify new and innovative ways to improve systems worldwide.
The conference brings together 900 experts from 80 countries, including heads of service, policy-makers, researchers, practitioners, academics, lawyers, and other stakeholders, to share their experiences and discuss the latest developments, challenges, and opportunities to create more humane and human rights-based criminal justice systems.
On 23 October, PRI’s Executive Director, Olivia Rope, delivered a keynote address, providing an overview of the current state of prisons worldwide, emphasising the importance of adopting a global perspective.
Key challenges to ensuring humane responses:
Crises: the increasing frequency and scale of natural hazards and extreme weather events; the COVID-19 pandemic and other health-related crises; and armed conflicts pose significant challenges to prison systems, many of which are also operating in contexts of economic downturn and rising costs.
Technologies: while technology offers various and valuable benefits from education to healthcare and contact with the outside world, its rapid introduction and scaling up in prisons requires careful consideration to prevent harm and human rights violations.
Discrimination: penal codes, criminal procedures, and policing are often discriminatory as a result of colonial legacies, economic and social disparities, and entrenched discriminatory norms against certain groups. Laws that effectively criminalise poverty and status result in the disproportionate representation in criminal justice systems of people who are poor or homeless, migrants, LGBTIQ+ persons, people with disabilities, informal traders, people who use drugs, ethnic minorities and racialised groups.
Corruption and organised crime: criminal subcultures and prison gangs are one of the biggest challenges to prison administrations, especially where they self-govern or share governance with authorities, often linked to corruption, weak security systems, poor infrastructure, overcrowding, and insufficient and undertrained prison staff.
Recommendations for transformative change:
Holistic approach: Advocate for criminal justice systems to be humane as a whole, with a focus on reducing the number of individuals within the system. Ensure that prison is used legitimately in line with international standards and avoid sending people to overcrowded, under-resourced, under-staffed prisons unless it is absolutely necessary.
Openness and transparency: Emphasise transparency and data as crucial elements in the quest for humane corrections. Accurate data on prison and criminal justice systems is essential for law and policy-makers and other actors at all levels to identify gaps and make change. Improved transparency leads to evidence-based decision making, fewer human rights violations, increased understanding and empathy from the public for people in the system, and respect for prison and probation services.
Centering lived experience: Put individuals with lived experience at the forefront of decision-making, ensuring their voices are heard. After all, they know best how policy and practice impacts them. Their input can often be the difference between an ill-thought through intervention – or one that is truly impactful and sustainable.