This week is International Restorative Justice Week. It’s an opportunity to reflect on the progress made in the restorative practice field in the last year, to look forward to what’s coming up in the future, and to celebrate the great restorative work going on around the country.
If there’s one thing that almost everybody can agree on at the moment, it’s that the prison system is in a mess. The Justice Secretary recently described a “toxic cocktail of drugs, drones and mobile phones that are flooding our prisons, imperilling the safety of staff and offenders and thwarting reform”.
The criminal justice world was dominated last week by the publication of Prison Safety and Reform, the long-awaited Ministry of Justice White Paper. After the promise of the Gove era, these proposals are intended to set out how his successor, Liz Truss, will deliver what the then Prime Minister David Cameron described earlier this year as “the biggest shake-up in the way our prisons are run since the Victorian times”.
