How can a country as sophisticated as the United States botch executions with such monotonous regularity? On 17 November 2022, the State of Alabama tried and failed to kill Kenneth Eugene Smith, who had spent 34 years on death row …
What prisons teach us about democracy
Andrea Albutt has been a dedicated public servant for almost four decades who worked as a military nurse and ran four prisons. But after eight years as president of the Prison Governors Association, she despairs of the crumbling institutions, overwhelmed …
The new snobbery towards feminist activism
In 2017, Gina Martin was the victim of a sexual offence that was not, at the time, a sexual offence. Martin was attending a festival when a stranger took a photograph up her skirt without her consent. For her, this …
Inside America’s prison rodeo
As the Pink Panther theme tune stretches the limits of the loudspeakers, four prison inmates wearing bulletproof vests and baseball catchers’ masks make their way into the muddy rodeo arena. Carrying a red wooden table and plastic folded chairs, they’re …
The Shamima Begum delusion
Our national conversation on Shamima Begum, which ebbs and flows according to the imperatives of Begum’s legal team and a simultaneously cynical and naïve mass media, is saturated in bullshit. For her detractors, the 23-year-old East-London runaway is a danger …
The rise of Jihadi prison gangs
By the last count, there were more than 200 convicted terrorists — most Islamist, but some far-Right — currently housed at Her Majesty’s pleasure in British prisons, with a further 200 or so convicted of other offences but deemed similarly …
How gender self-ID is being abused
I assumed Harvey Marcelin was an elderly woman guilty of some sort of financial crime when I first read the charge sheet. The Department of Corrections website describes a six-foot, black female, born in 1938, charged with defrauding the government.…
Violence has returned to Corsica
Yvan Colonna, a Corsican terrorist and shepherd, was once regarded by the French state as its Public Enemy Number One. Paris is now praying that he will stay alive.
Colonna, 61, has been in a coma for a fortnight after …
Inside the Tory trans civil war
During Lisa Townsend’s campaign to become Surrey’s Police and Crime Commissioner last year, the subject that most frequently came up on the doorstep wasn’t gang crime, burglaries, or car theft. It was Stonewall, and the lobby group’s influence on policing …
