On 11March ICPS was delighted to receive a visit from Ana Maria Morales Peillard, Director of Justice and Reintegration, Fundacion Paz Ciudadana, and Alejandro Arevalo, Head of the Human Rights Unit at the Gendarmeria de Chile.
Discussions were held on issues concerning social exclusion and prisoner reintegration, followed by a meeting with ICPS Trustee Baroness Vivien Stern at the House of Lords.
ICPS has produced the nineteenth issue of its News Digest, which is a selection of news items from around the world on prison and the use of imprisonment.
We aim in the Digest to cover all regions and include new developments in policy and practice, as well as information from official and intergovernmental bodies.
Roy Walmsley, Director of the World Prison Brief, participated in a recent colloquium on female imprisonment, under the auspices of the International Penal and Penitentiary Foundation (IPPF), of which he is a member. He presented a paper on Variations and Growth in the Levels of Female Imprisonment, which will be published by IPPF, together with the other proceedings of the colloquium, in 2015. The main variations and growth to which he drew attention are these:
Variations and growth in the levels of female imprisonment
Professor Andrew Coyle has contributed a chapter to this new publication in the series Health Promotion in Prisons from the University of Oldenburg.
The first section of the book contains an overview of the importance of this topic, including a discussion of the doctor – patient relationship in a custodial setting. The second section focusses on specific clinical issues such as mental illness and infectious diseases..
Andrew Coyle’s contribution on the Right to Equivalent Care explains the relevant international standards and discusses the role of health care staff and the organisation of health care in the prison environment.
ICPS has produced the eighteenth issue of its News Digest, which is a selection of news items from around the world on prison and the use of imprisonment.
On 19th December 2013, the jury at the inquest into the death in custody of 19 year old Ashley Smith returned a verdict of homicide. Ms Smith died by self-inflicted strangulation at the Correctional Service of Canada’s Grand Valley Institution for Women in Ontario, Canada, on 19th October 2007. Correctional officers who videotaped her death testified that they did not intervene in time to save Ms Smith's life because they were under strict orders from prison management not to enter her cell. Full details of events leading up to Ms Smith’s death, and the subsequent inquests can be found on the website of the National Post http://news.nationalpost.com/tag/ashley-smith/
In June 2013 we were delighted to hear that Andy Barclay, our Projects' Director until his retirement at the end of 2012, had been awarded an MBE for his work on prison reform in Libya. Andy's contribution marks the culmination of some fifteen years working with ICPS during which he has led projects in many countries of the world, including Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Venezuela, Chile, Brazil, and other countries in Latin America, Sub Saharan Africa and South Asia. We are very proud of his achievements at ICPS, along with those dedicated associates who have enjoyed working with him over the years.
Andy received his MBE from Her Majesty the Queen on 28th November.
More than 10.2 million people are held in penal institutions throughout the world according to the latest edition of the World Prison Population List (WPPL), researched and compiled by Roy Walmsley and published on Friday 22 November by the International Centre for Prison Studies, a partner of the University of Essex. If those reported to be held in ‘detention centres’ in China and prison camps in North Korea were included the total would be more than 11 million.