Book review: The Honest Politician’s Guide to Prisons and Probation
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02645505231198495 |
| Author | Emeritus Professor Mike Nellis |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
Book reviews
The Honest Politician’s Guide to Prisons and Probation
R King and L Willmott
Routledge, 2021, pp. 274; £31.19; pbk
ISBN: 9780367773069
Reviewed by: Emeritus Professor Mike Nellis, University of
Strathclyde, Glasgow
A short, casual conversation with Emeritus Professor Roy King in the corridors of
the Cambridge Institute of Criminology, not quite a decade ago, turned out, for
me, to have quite fateful consequences for my own thinking on penal matters. ‘I
honestly thought’, he said wistfully (forgive me, Roy, if I don’t get your words
exactly right), ‘that when I first started getting involved in prison reform, that
we would be further along than we have actually got’.Metoo.Hisresponseto
his sense of a lost future has been to research, co-author and publish an impres-
sive book built around lengthy interviews (sometimes more than one) with almost
all senior and junior ministers and civil servants in the Home Office, Ministry of
Justice, the Judiciary, the Inspectorates, heads of NOMS and HMPPS, the
Parole Board and Independent Monitoring Boards, authors of relevant reports
or policy reviews, and civil society organisations operating in the field. Not
everyone approached agreed to be interviewed, and some junior ministers
were inadvertently overlooked, but the task was huge, and the accomplishment
is monumental.
Without minimising penal-political problems in the early post-WW2 years, King
and Willmott focus on the 30-year period, from the 1990 Woolf Report onwards,
‘during which prisons and probation were reduced to a level of crisis never previ-
ously seen’(p1, my italics), culminating with the immediate penal impacts of corona-
virus disease 2019. They pitch their book to the informed general reader and at
Book reviewsThe Journal of Communit
y
and Criminal Justice
Probation Journal
2023, Vol. 70(3) 320–324
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/02645505231198495
journals.sagepub.com/home/prb
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