Channel 4 News accompanied Volteface’s Head of Advocacy George McBride and Nicola Garrick of the Rehabilitation for Addicted Prisoners Trust on their research trip to see the Norwegian approach to rehabilitative incarceration. Amongst the prisons they visited was Halden Prison, “the world’s most humane maximum security prison” where prisoners have blueberry forests, state of the art facilities and well-appointed rooms.
In UK prisons, traditional drugs have been usurped by poorly-understood synthetic cannabinoid receptor antagonists (known as “Spice” and “Black Mamba”). Meanwhile, prisons are suffering from record levels of overcrowding, violence, suicide and persistently high rates of reoffending.
In the light of this increasingly troubling situation, Volteface is producing a report that analyses the causes of drug-associated harms in prisons, and presents a strategy to reduce these harms via policy reform.
Policy report out December 2016