Chris Grayling discribed G4S run prison HMP Oakwood as an "excellent model for the future of the prison service". But a report from the Chief Inspector of Prisons this week tells a very different story...
Celebrated Russian activist Valery Abramkin has died aged 66. Here we republish extracts from a lecture delivered in 2006, which contains many fascinating insights into the rules of behaviour, hierarchies and relationships within Soviet and Russian prisons. (With a foreword by MaryMcAuley.)
The U.S. has the highest reported incarceration rate in the world. Pro Publica has just compiled some of the best investigative journalism on U.S. prisons and the problems that plague them.
It's hard to know these days which way the proverbial worm is turning when it comes to shifts in drug policy. Election years tend to do that. Despite an historical turn of events in Central America which saw Presidents of drug trafficking nations come together to call for world wide decriminalizat
In 1987 college professor and successful San Francisco sculptor Stephen Dubov was sentenced in US Federal court to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for the possession of 13 kilos of cocaine. Dubov claimed he was innocent, and had been set up. What follows is the awe-inspiring st
Founder Nora Callahan and her husband, activist and former prisoner Chuck Armsbury, talk about a lifetime spent fighting for the rights of drug offenders everywhere.
In Part II of her interview, Amy relays the horrors of her arrest and prosecution, the 9 years she spent in prison, and her long and arduous journey to eventually win clemency in 2000 from President Clinton.
Russia imprisons a proportion of its citizens higher than any other major country except the US. And with its sky-high rates of re-offending, the penal system serves as a stark reminder of what happens when a society prioritises punishment to the exclusion of rehabilitation. Svetlana Reiter invest
In this excerpt from his interview for The Exile Nation Project, Parenti describes what has changed in the twelve years since the publication of his seminal work on police and prisons, "Lockdown America."
