What if the police and prosecution were told to ‘believe all victims of false allegations’?

By Dr Michael Naughton, Reader in Sociology and Law (University of Bristol Law School and  School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS)).

I have written previously about why language matters. Put simply, language matters because it is the words or phrases that we use that shapes and reflects how we think, feel and act as individuals in response to social and/or legal issues such as alleged sexual offences or alleged false allegations, which is the subject of this article. With this in mind, in evaluating the intended provocation in the title, ‘What the police and prosecution were told to believe all victims of false allegations?’, it is crucial that the key terms are clearly defined at the start of any analysis. (more…)

Why the current DPP must be replaced with immediate effect and a royal commission on disclosure is urgently needed [with postscript]

By Dr Michael Naughton, Reader in Sociology and Law (University of Bristol Law School and  School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS)).

Last Thursday (18 January 2018), the Director of Public Prosecutors (DDP), Alison Saunders, made the remarkable statement on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme that ‘no innocent people are in prison because of failures to disclose vital evidence, despite admitting there is a “systemic issue”.

Whatever her precise intentions, there is little doubt that the most senior prosecutor in England and Wales’s wilful refusal to acknowledge the reality of miscarriages of justice and that innocent people can be and are wrongly convicted and imprisoned only stoked the burgeoning crisis in the existing disclosure regime that governs alleged criminal investigations and prosecutions.

Variously described as ‘ill informed’, ‘complacent’ and ‘part of the current problem’, in this blog I critically evaluate the DPP’s statement in the context of her duties under the terms of the Code for Crown Prosecutors and the perennial problem of miscarriages of justice and wrongful imprisonment in England and Wales.

Moreover, in the context of a growing lack of confidence in the DPP and the disclosure regime in alleged criminal investigations and prosecutions, I will make the case that the DPP should be immediately replaced and for governmental intervention in the form of a royal commission to get to the heart of the apparent problems and devise solutions to fix a system that is clearly broken and in urgent need of repair. (more…)

Panorama: Behind Bars: Prison Undercover

By Dr Michael Naughton, Reader in Sociology and Law (University of Bristol Law School).

The BBC Panorama programme, Behind Bars: Prison Undercover, aired on Monday 13 February 2017. Culled from footage from an undercover reporter in HMP Northumberland, it claimed to “reveal the reality of life behind bars in Britain’s crisis-hit prison system.”

Leaving aside the obvious methodological issues with such a claim, i.e. that such a generalisation cannot be made from a few insights in a single, adult, male, category C, private prison, what we got, instead, was an entirely biased, one-sided view. On this occasion, it was the fears of clearly overworked and overwhelmed prison staff that was the central focus of concern. The narrative depicted was simplistic: prisoners are both out of control and in control of the day to day running of prisons, supported by images of drug taking, drunken and abusive prisoners. A strong case was being made for more prison officers, which is totally justified in the context of overcrowded prisons and savage cuts to prison staff.

A major problem was that this was at the expense of a more balanced programme that took account, also, of the prisoner side of the story – the desolation, monotony and periods of sheer terror of everyday life behind prison bars. This is well documented in the research and it might, also, go some way, at least, to contextualising and/or explaining the images of the relatively small handful of misbehaving prisoners that were selected to persuade viewers to accept the underpinning narrative without question. (more…)