CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson quoted: "Home Secretary: Yvette Cooper | Ian Acheson: Yvette Cooper has two enormous challenges that can’t wait for a honeymoon. The first is making her Border Command, the latest iteration in a long line of failed initiatives on controlling illegal migration, actually deliver. The second is restoring the status and importance of community policing in neighbourhoods marooned in criminal impunity with demoralised cops leaving in droves. Both require agility and energy from a Home Office with neither. Her formidable toughness needs to be turned inward. This is a hot seat on fire. "

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "With prison capacity running at 99 per cent and new jails still on the far horizon, the first priority of the new Lord Chancellor is to stop the criminal justice system grinding to a halt. Keir Starmer, aware that the shelf life of ‘inherited mess’ will be brutally short, has gone on TV to prepare public opinion for the emergency early release of prisoners to continue and go even further. The party’s tough on crime poetry pre-election will collide with the prosaic reality of full, anarchic prisons."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Prisons aren’t a new problem. Ian Acheson wrote about the decay of the high-sec estate for us last month; David Gauke painted a bleak portrait of the current spending settlement in December. A year ago, I examined the abject failure of the Government’s promise to have delivered 10,000 new jail places by 2020 (actual number delivered at that point: 206)."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Is there such a thing as an acceptable level of terrorism? You would be forgiven for thinking so. Last week, the results of yet another inquest into a terrorist attack here, all but flattened by the news cycle juggernaut, revealed yet more failures by the state’s agencies to protect citizens."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Aldous Huxley’s dystopian best seller Brave New World, published back in 1934, envisaged a society where stability was enforced by a numbing drug called ‘soma’. Constant consumption of soma, mandated by the state, dulled the senses, vanished despair and discouraged rebellion. I was reminded of this by comments made by some of the Times‘ new crime commissioners as they launch a year-long project to fix our broken criminal justice system. They were speculating as to why we weren’t seeing a national jail insurrection similar to what happened here in the spring of 1990 when multiple prisons across the country exploded in violent disorder. After all, many of the precursors that existed then are now present once again: severe overcrowding, demoralised and overwhelmed staff, endemic brutality and squalor.” 

"Professor Ian Acheson, a former prison governor and author of Screwed: Britain's Prison Crisis and How To Escape It, was shocked when he came across the figures."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson: "Every morning, men and women serving on the front line of His Majesty's Prison and Probation Service pull on a cheap uniform and go to work in what's been called the most hostile work environment in Europe.

The endemic violence in our jails means many of them are ending their shifts in hospital rather than home with their families.

A month ago, an officer went on duty on B wing in HMP Whitemoor, one of our maximum security prisons. He left in an ambulance and was put on a ventilator, unconscious, after a vicious assault."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "The high-security prison system – the specialist jails where hundreds of the worst offenders in the system such as predatory rapists, child murderers, organised crime bosses, and terrorists end up – is in trouble."