Category: Blog posts
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What would a Reform UK government mean for criminal justice?
With Reform riding high in the polls, it’s worth examining what a Farage-led government might actually mean in practice. In particular, readers of Inside Time will be interested in what the consequences would be for criminal justice and prisons. Although Reform likes to present itself as the party of change, in reality its proposed policies…
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If you want to understand the prison crisis, look at the Sycamore tree case
There are around 3 billion trees in Britain. Had the two most hated men in the country decided to fell any of 2,999,999,999 of them, they’d be going about their daily life today and we wouldn’t even know who they are. But because they decided to chop down a very specific tree, they are now…
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The environmental impact of AI
If you’re environmentally conscious there’s a good chance you use ChatGPT with a guilty conscience. Even though you don’t know the exact numbers, you instinctively feel that the large language models (LLMs such as Open AI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude) must be energy intensive and therefore bad for the environment.And you’re not wrong, although it’s…
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I spent 3 years in prison for a horrible mistake – these are the 5 things I’ve learnt
When we think about criminal justice, we tend to identify with the victims. Never could we imagine that we’d end up being the perpetrator. Criminals are other people, not us. I had been working in the film industry for over ten years when I made the irresponsible and stupid decision to drive whilst being drunk…
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There’s only one way to solve the drug problem in prisons: offer purpose and structure
The newest annual report by the Prison Service shows that there were over 21,000 drug seizures in UK prisons in the year 2024 – one for every four prisoners.That is an extraordinary number, considering that large amounts of drugs are likely to remain undetected. It is also an increase of 44% compared to the year…
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My dad’s death & the end of America
One brilliant person in a small town in Germany and the richest country in the world both died in early 2025 Although it has never been as obvious as now, the USA has been on a downward trajectory for a long time. The moment when it all started going wrong can be pinpointed to Reagan’s…
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How to make your kids feel less anxious about the future
A Child & Adolescent Psychotherapist explores how a world in turmoil heightens adolescents’ sense of instability and shares ways how parents can offer security and hope We live in a world in transition and face existential threats to which we don’t have any clear solutions. We’ve known the danger global warming poses to our survival…
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The false economy of prison food – cheap nutrition at a huge cost
There has been a lot of recent media coverage of the broken and overcrowded UK prison system. What is discussed a lot less is why it is broken. As someone who has spent three years in prison from 2020 to 2023 for a severe driving offence that I will forever be remorseful about, I can…
Words without waffle 