My life’s work, my mission, has been at the Howard League
I have been at the helm of the Howard League for Penal Reform for more than three decades. I was once on Radio 4’s Today programme when they joked that I was destined to do this job, as my name means ‘free the prisoners’. And it feels exactly like that.
My working life has been spent in working for social justice. I started teaching children in Liverpool who faced challenges, did five years campaigning at Amnesty International for people who were tortured and imprisoned for their beliefs and am now working for less crime, safer communities and fewer people in prison. Along the way I have had some non-executive roles helping to sort out school food, being part of the governing body of Greenwich University and overseeing the NHS in Barnet, my local borough. I was elected twice as a local councillor.
But my life’s work, my mission, has been at the Howard League.
I want to pay tribute to the many people who have worked and volunteered with me at the Howard League. They are the most talented, hard-working and joyful people I have ever met.
The Howard League is a special organisation; it has always held a central place in the political and justice landscape of the country. We contribute to the public discourse on the most important issues facing a government – how to keep people safe and how to respond to challenges to public order.
Since Socrates, the question ‘What is Justice?’ has characterised the nature of the state. A country at ease with itself, with economic and social equality tends to use prison less. Sadly, that is not the case with the UK with its central focus on punishment.
In the face of challenges, the Howard League has an amazing track record of success.
During my tenure we have worked with the police to reduce child arrests by two thirds. This means that hundreds of thousands – yes, I do mean that huge number – of children have not suffered the trauma and life damage of arrest.
Contact with the police is a route into crime for children, so the reduction in arrests has reduced crime and prevented people becoming victims – as well as saving the public purse from unnecessary expense.
We set up an in-house legal service for children and young people some 20 years ago. Hundreds have been helped with support on release from prison and getting justice inside prison in the face of systemic abuse.
We have taken test cases that achieved reform, forcing the government to recognise that children in prison should have the same legal protections as all children and we are currently challenging the use of solitary confinement on children.
We have run successful campaigns that have changed public attitudes. When the government tried to ban prisoners’ access to books, we mobilised writers and actors to publicise our campaign.
In the last few weeks, hundreds of our members and supporters have contacted their MPs to oppose the building of more prison cells for women.
We use mainstream and social media to talk about prison use and conditions, community responses to crime and better sanctions.
The charity’s mission is primarily to achieve system reform and contribute to public education on penal issues, and we achieve this with a mixed toolkit of research, policy development, campaigns and legal help for individuals whose lived experience informs our work.
On a personal note, when I took over, although the charity was well respected, it was almost bankrupt. I am grateful to the trusts and individuals who allow me to celebrate the fact that the Howard League is financially stable, owns a headquarters building and has a range of funding streams that means we are not beholden to one source of funding.
People sometimes say that fundraising is problematic, but I have not found it so, as I have enjoyed working with donors who have been supportive and creative.
I have taken an organisation that was on the brink of being wound up, to one that is vibrant, benefits from an amazing staff team and is facing the future with energy and vision.
I am proud of what I have achieved and thankful to the many people who I have worked with. It has been an honour and a joy.
Thank you, it’s been a blast, and I will miss you all.
Frances Crook
She leaves a very big pair of boots to fill in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteI have no idea who might fill her position, or if its already been decided, but I do hope it's a walker and not a talker that fills the post.
Frances Crook has been a phenomenal campaigner for justice and human rights, and its sad to see her go.
She will be a hard act to follow.
'Getafix
Well done Frances - Its sad to see you go at a time when the fight for justice needs an even stronger voice to take on the authoritarian bullies who are encouraged & rewarded by this Etonian govt.
ReplyDeleteAs we know, that fight for justice is spread wider than the penal system:
"Hundreds of British Gas engineers will lose their jobs by midday on Wednesday after refusing to sign up to tougher employment terms imposed by the company’s controversial “fire and rehire” scheme.
On 1 April Britain’s biggest energy supplier handed dismissal notices to close to 1,000 of its engineers, who install and repair boilers and heating systems for the company’snine million service customers.
The engineers were granted a grace period of two weeks in which to change their minds and sign up to contracts that call for longer hours together with shifts over weekends and bank holidays – or lose their jobs.
In the last two weeks hundreds of engineers are understood to have signed up to the contracts, leaving 500 having refused to sign by the end of Tuesday. The company expects a final wave of 11th-hour contract signings on Wednesday morning, to leave between 300 and 400 engineers without a job."
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/apr/14/hundreds-british-gas-engineers-lose-jobs-fire-and-rehire-scheme-tougher-employment-terms
She will indeed. I am feeling bereaved. A solid week of coverage of her career and achievements on the beeb would be in order.
ReplyDeletePearly Gates
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/14/priv-a14.html
ReplyDeleteUK government accelerates National Health Service privatisation under the cover of the pandemic
US health insurance company, Centene, has silently seized hold of 37 General Practitioner (GP) surgeries, adding to their takeover of 21 National Health Service (NHS) primary care services in the United Kingdom (UK).
The lie that American corporations would not be able to reap profits from the NHS has been stripped bare. While Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson denied the NHS was “on the table” during UK-US trade talks, granting contracts to private healthcare firms to both provide advice on NHS services and deliver them proves otherwise.
The UK division of Centene, Operose Health Ltd., acquired this backdoor handout last February when it merged with AT Medics and became the UK’s largest private supplier of GP practices. The rewards are substantial, with AT Medics revelling in profits of £35 million in the five years prior to the transfer.
Operose confirmed the change in ownership by declaring that it had “followed all the required regulatory procedures, including obtaining consent from our CCGs [clinical commissioning groups]. ”
These are the CCGs created under the 2012 Health and Social Care Act of David Cameron’s Conservative-Liberal coalition government. The act allowed clinical commissioners to award public health services to any “qualified” provider, paving the way for the wholesale outsourcing of services to the private sector.
Looking at Operose’s history reveals how qualified it is—at closing down GP surgeries. An Operose associate company pulled the plug on Camden Road Surgery in London in 2012, giving the 4,700 patients just four weeks to register elsewhere. The care of a further 11,400 patients was left in doubt after contracts for five surgeries in Brighton and Hove were ended.
In the United States, Centene faces allegations of fraud, for which it is currently being sued in Ohio. The Attorney General of Ohio stated, “Corporate greed has led Centene and its wholly-owned subsidiaries to fleece taxpayers out of millions.”
Despite this record, the provider was approved by the CCGs for the care of 530,000 patients in the UK, who were given no say. The change in ownership was nodded through with no public meetings, no questions and no mention of Centene itself. Only after the decision was made was Centene mentioned in the public domain.
The deliberate secrecy cannot conceal the reality. Decades of underfunding, outsourcing and erosion of services by successive governments have prepared the National Health Service for easy pickings, with corporations searching out new sources of profit from its £150 annual billion budget.
The greedy private companies are not content with just making profits from primary care. The American-based healthcare group Cleveland Clinic is now in pole position for the takeover of NHS staff too. It plans to open a six-storey outpatient centre in September and a 184-bed general hospital next spring.
The company is recruiting for 1,250 roles, including, in a significant shift, the employment of salaried doctors. Ordinarily, medics are employed by the NHS but can conduct private work outside their normal working hours. Gaining a lucrative yearly salary in private practice, however, will pull them out of the NHS permanently, despite tax-payers having funded their long years of training. Having endured precarious conditions on the frontline, staff shortages—and now a derisory offer of a 1 percent pay rise—the lure of the private sector is likely to attract a section of desperate health workers. Experts warn that Cleveland Clinic’s move will set off a recruitment drive in the private sector for top medical talent.
DeleteThe relentless integration of the public and “independent” sector has only accelerated during the pandemic. The government, following the motto of the ruling elite that a good crisis should not go to waste, has plundered millions of pounds and used it towards the upkeep of private hospitals, amid a public health crisis.
Staff in private hospitals returned to NHS roles to cope with demand following the first national lockdown, putting a halt to the majority of private treatments being offered. The private health operators had nothing to worry about though, as the Tory government dished out unprecedented block contracts to keep their hospitals open, supposedly to treat an influx of coronavirus patients.
But the extra beds went unused. An estimated £125 million was awarded every week, with two-thirds of private hospital capacity being left untouched!
According to an NHS source involved in the implementation of these arrangements, “The national contract for private sector capacity was for the company shareholders, not for NHS patients.”
This process was part of an even broader swathe of deals lining the pockets of private contractors. In March 2020, ministers used emergency powers to fast-track deals directly benefiting private firms, “without competing or advertising requirement”, bypassing previous laws meant to ensure transparency and value for money for the taxpayer. As a result, deals to manage healthcare staff, provide personal protective equipment, and run test and trace were ripe for picking, particularly by Tory party donors. By February this year, £24.4 billion had been “streamlined” into the private corporation giants.
With the recent release of the Health and Care White Paper, “ Integration and innovation: working together to improve health and social care for all ”, the so-called “competitive tendering” process has been buried once and for all. While the government claims the prospective legislation moves away from privatisation, in fact, it accelerates it. NHS chiefs will be able to hand out contracts as they see fit, without the need to put services up for competitive bids.
The proposals will also hand more powers to the Secretary of State for Health, including the authority to direct the NHS Commissioning Board, create new NHS Trusts and abolish professional regulators without needing legislation in parliament. In effect, as Health Secretary Matt Hancock stated, he “will be empowered to set direction for the NHS and intervene where necessary”. He will also be the one continuing to open the doors of the NHS to the financial oligarchy and their cronies, as he has done throughout the pandemic already.
Just think about the position the Eton boys are now in - enrichment with impunity, just as they were always taught it would be.
DeleteThey can keep the public sector NHS wages suppressed, thereby guaranteeing that the medical talent - of all grades - will migrate to the lucrative public sector in which, no doubt, those Eton boys will have shares, chums & directorships etc waiting for them... unless, like Scothers, they're already acting for their new paymasters while taking the public for a few generous quids as well.
But as hancock, jenrick & others have continued to reassure us about the stench: "its all perfectly normal".
Typo slip of the tongue there I think:-
Delete"will migrate to the lucrative public sector" should read:-
"will migrate to the lucrative private sector" I suspect.
Thank you for that important correction JB - although a handful of favoured 'chums' no doubt find the public sector very lucrative; & we don't have to look beyond NPS/HMPPS/MoJ to find some examples of palatial comfort within the public sector.
DeleteWe are in an overwhelmingly bizarre place in time.
Much of the world is struggling with acute poverty & widespread starvation; quite a lot of the world is still entrenched in vicious conflicts; there is a global pandemic exacerbated by an evolving virus...
... and here in the UK we have a tiny group of self-defined 'elite' who are seizing power, consolidating wealth & overtly excluding the tax-paying public from any benefit that should be realised through the paying of taxes. The media protect them & encourage the public to support them while demonising any alternative view.
Probation, a long-standing & proud profession, has been all but eradicated from the lexicon of justice. The 'probation union' is silent & useless. Her Majesty's Opposition are faux Tories led by an Oxbridge flautist.
Sexual offending will never be properly addressed in the UK because, as noted in previous posts (pearly gates/getafix), there's no appetite for a grown-up discussion about a subject that people can barely bring themselves to discuss in a non-criminal context. Sex & sexuality - subjects distorted by generations of 'moral' & religious terrorism, by political imperative & by war.
History Channel: "Nearly as long as people have been recording history, they have documented sexual assaults. From the writings of ancient Greece to the Bible to the letters of early explorers, sexual violence has long been a brutal part of the human story. Some assaults have even changed the course of history. And, like all history, what we know about sexual assaults of the past is generally what was told by the victors—mostly men.
“Women are erased,” says Sharon Block, professor of history at University of California, Irvine and the author of Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America. “The historic rapes that ‘mattered’ are the only ones where men saw themselves damaged.”"
Other reading:
https://www.resourcesharingproject.org/brief-history-anti-rape-movement
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09612029300200016
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/214970/sexual-offending-overview-jan-2013.pdf
It's the talk of Etonians, all those lads going to "public" school, which throws us off balance
DeleteThe Revolving Door of Fortune
Delete04 October 2016 - The former director of public sector prisons Ian Mulholland has joined Interserve as the company’s director of justice. Ian began his career as a prison officer 26 years ago before working his way up to the top prisons’ job at the National Offender Management Service (NOMS). Before he left to join the company, Ian had responsibility for 110 public prisons across England and Wales
Sept 2017 - Interserve has signed a £12 million contract with the Ministry of Justice to run six employment workshops at HMP Berwyn, a large new prison in Wrexham for five years.
March 2018 - According to Ian Mulholland, former Director of Public Sector Prisons at the National Offender Management Service, “very often prison governors know almost nothing of the person remanded in custody.”
July 2019 - Interserve Group Limited, the international support services, construction and equipment services group, has been awarded a place on the Ministry of Justice’s £4 billion Prison Operator Services Framework agreement.
Dec 2020 - Alan Lovell, Chairman of Interserve Group, commented: “Ian was an excellent leader of the Group’s Covid-19 Taskforce"
4 January 2021 - Ian Mulholland has been appointed as new Managing Director for MTC.
Ian has most recently been Managing Director of Interserve Citizen Services (a division of Interserve Group Ltd) and has worked at Interserve for the past four years. In his time there, Ian has overseen services including healthcare, education, prison industries at HMP Berwyn and the Purple Futures Community Rehabilitation Companies.
https://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/sites/crimeandjustice.org.uk/files/PSJ%20211%20January%202014.pdf
DeletePage 14 - Perrie Lectures 2013 - Contraction in an Age of Expansion:an Operational Perspective - Ian Mulholland is Deputy Director of Public Sector Prisons.
"The outcomes show we can make efficiencies without retrenching regimes. We can actually do better. We achieve this because benchmarking is a pragmatic and principled not a Procrustan approach. Procrustes, you will recall, was the tyrant in Ancient Greece who ensured his guests fitted the bed he offered them either by stretching them if they were too small or chopping off parts of their limbs if they were too large. Unlike Procrustes benchmarking adjusts the bed."
(we all remember Procrustes don't we?)
"Benchmarking contributes to the ‘new ways of managing, working and delivering’ which Michael Spurr, Chief Executive of NOMS, has promoted."
‘Every contact matters’ - so make sure you have good contacts, eh Ian? For example, after you've drawn up the benchmarking for the bid competition someone might find it useful to encourage you to join a private sector bidder - your inside knowledge of the benchmarking could come in handy for winning bids, perhaps?
"In working up our bids in the prisons competition we needed to identify what was the irreducible core of our work, the essence without which we would no longer be a public sector Prison Service."
Integrity? Honesty? Loyalty?
These articles from today alone would suggest in any 'normal' country that the govt is fucked, and yet the UK continues to celebrate Borisism:
ReplyDelete1. Covid-status certificates may cause unlawful discrimination, warns EHRC
2. Court finds home secretary accountable for failures to ensure that deaths in immigration detention centres are investigated properly
3. Tories close ranks to block broader inquiry into Greensill scandal
4. Holdings of more than 40,000 hectares in London, Scotland and Newmarket make Dubai ruler one of UK’s biggest landowners
I have to admit I don't understand the 'benefit of the doubt' the nation is handing these Etonian bullies. I ache to the marrow for an uprising by the 99%; but 99% of the 99% seem to harbour wet dreams of becoming Boris, or Carrie, or Jacob, or Rishi, or Matthew.
"Hi, Will here from Best Of The Rest - K8Lyn, you've just won this week's jackpot prize of Evesham AND you've also won a bonus of Hinton-on-the-Green stuffed with several Coronavirus Restart Grants [NB: Grants under these allowances can be combined for a potential total allowance of up to £10,935,000 (subject to exchange rates)]."