Reconceptualising multisectoral prison regulation: voluntary organisations and bereaved families as regulators

Prison health, prisoner safety and imprisonment rates matter: intrinsically and for health and safety outside. Existing prison regulation apparatuses (e.g. OPCAT) are extensive and hold unrealised potential to shape imprisonment. However, criminologists have not yet engaged much with this potential. In this article, I reconceptualise prison regulation by exploring the work of a broad range of multisectoral regulators who operate across stakeholder groups. I illustrate that voluntary organisations and families bereaved by prison suicide act as regulators, although their substantive actions have been erased from official narratives. Mobilising (threats of) litigation, these actors have responsibilised the state and brought qualitative changes across the prison estate

Highlighting “Risky Remands” Through Prisoner Death Investigations: People With Very Severe Mental Illness Transitioning From Police and Court Custody Into Prison on Remand

Prison suicide/self-inflicted death is an international public health crisis, harming stakeholders including bereaved families, prisoners, prison staff and death investigators. England and Wales' record prison suicide numbers in 2016 cost at least £400 million. Death rates are an indicator of prison safety, and unsafe prisons mean unsafe societies. I present four case studies of people with very severe mental illness who were remanded to prison from police and/or court custody and went on to take their own lives in prison. I use publicly available data from Ombudsman and Coronial death investigations in England and Wales, highlighting that these accessible sources could be more widely mobilized to reduce the substantial harms and costs of prisoner deaths. Case studies include three men (Lewis Francis, Jason Basalat and Dean Saunders) and one woman (Sarah Reed) who took their own lives between January 2016 and April 2017. All four people were clearly very mentally unwell at the time of their alleged offense and remand to prison. I develop the concept of “risky remands” to highlight that people with very severe mental illness being remanded to prison is a particularly problematic practice. I highlight the implications of people with very severe mental illness transitioning into prison in the first place, arguing that being remanded to prison is not an acceptable or safe pathway into healthcare. I illustrate that police custody suites and courts may lack awareness of mechanisms and/ or the practical ability to transfer ill detainees charged with a serious crime to mental health facilities for assessment and/ or treatment. My analysis amplifies and extends recent Criminal Justice Joint Inspection findings that it is unacceptable to use prisons as a “place of safety,” and that the Department of Health and Social Care, NHS England and the Welsh Government must increase the supply of medium and high secure beds. Moreover, Ombudsman investigations did not engage with the remand transition, effectively legitimizing this risky practice for very ill people. As such, my analysis also counters the apparent “problem of implementation” in prison oversight, instead questioning what reviewers recommend, based on which evidence

The penal voluntary sector: a hybrid sociology

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in British Journal of Criminology following peer review. The version of record Tomczak, P. & Buck, G. (2019). The Penal Voluntary Sector: A Hybrid Sociology. The British Journal of Criminology, is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azy070The penal voluntary sector (PVS) is an important, complex, under-theorised area. Its non-profit, non-statutory organisations are highly significant in the operation of punishment around the world, yet ill-understood. Burgeoning scholarship has begun to examine specific parts of the sector, particularly individualised service delivery. We offer a five paradigm framework which more fully conceptualises the PVS, including different types of service delivery and important campaigning work. Our hybrid framework applies and extends Burrell and Morgan’s (1979) influential four paradigm model of social theory, which maps the theoretical diversity underpinning varying organisational activities. Our framework i) provides ideal-types which illustrate the range, fluidity and hybridity of PVS programmes and practices, and ii) highlights the (potential) roles of brokers in (re)directing activity

Making prisoner deaths visible: Towards a new epistemological approach

In custodial contexts, the duty of states to protect the most fundamental right-to life-is heightened. Nevertheless, prisoner deaths are a universal and frequent concern. The mortality rate among the 11.5 million prisoners globally is up to 50% higher than amongst non-imprisoned persons , forming a human rights and health equity concern. It is therefore peculiar that prisoner deaths have attracted only piecemeal scholarly attention. In this article, we problematize epistem-ologies of prisoner death, highlighting obfuscations and agglomerations in existing datasets based on poor definitions, reductive statistics and constrained medico-legal categorizations. We provide a springboard towards a new epistemological approach that makes the scale and breadth of prisoner deaths and deceased prisoner characteristics more visible to facilitate prevention. We advance three tenets: count prisoners who die rather than deaths in prison, disaggregate prisoner death data through rights-informed dimensions and adopt explicitly defined, mutually exclusive categorizations

Prisoners regulating prisons: Voice, action, participation and riot

From SAGE Publishing via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: epub 2022-06-16Peer reviewed: TruePublication status: PublishedFunder: UK Research and Innovation; FundRef: https://doi.org/10.13039/100014013; Grant(s): MR/T019085/1 (2020-2024)Prisoners are a critical source of prison regulation around the world, but regulation by (rather than of) prisoners remains little analysed. In this article, we utilise the 1990 riots at HMP Strangeways (England), as a case study of prisoners (re)shaping imprisonment. We examine prisoners’ roles in these riots and subsequent cross-sectoral regulatory activities. We innovatively use the four-phase process of translation from actor-network theory to guide document analysis of (1) Lord Woolf’s official inquiry into the riots and (2) the voluntary organisation Prison Reform Trust’s follow-up report. We explore how participatory approaches could inform prison regulation through (former) prisoners partnering with external regulators throughout the processes of identifying problems and solutions to establish broader alliances seeking social change