Prisoners' Advice Service

Prisoners' Advice Service PAS is a London-based registered charity in England and Wales that provides free, confidential legal advice and representation to prisoners regarding their rights, the application of prison rules and conditions of imprisonment. PAS takes up prisoners’ complaints about their treatment inside prison by providing free advice and taking legal action where appropriate. PAS provides assistance on an individual and confidential basis, taking legal action where appropriate. PAS runs the Prisoners’ Legal Rights group, which produces a quarterly bulletin entitled ‘Prisoners’ Rights’. Membership of the group includes prisoners, solicitors, barristers, academics and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).^[1]

PAS was set up in 1991 by organisations working with prisoners, including Liberty, the Howard League for Penal Reform and Nacro. PAS was set up because some people from these organisations felt, due to increasing demand for legal advice, a new charitable organisation was required to deal with the large number of requests for legal advice that they were receiving from prisoners. This has had an impact on Criminal justice.^[2]

The Chair of the Prisoners' Advice Service Management Committee, Rikki Garg, is a specialist in prison and mental health law. He has been a member of the Law Society’s Mental Health Panel since 1995. He is currently Chair of the Prisoners’ Advice Service and is a founding member of the Association of Prison Lawyers (APL) and the current Treasurer.^[3] Also on the Committee is Simon Creighton, co-author with Hamish Arnott of Prisoners: Law and Practice ^[4]

Erwin James, a former prisoner, wrote a regular column for The Guardian, and continues to write as well as do charity work after his release. While in prison he did not receive fees for his articles instead these were paid to the charity, Prisoners' Advice Service who had helped him.^[5]

In July 2008 Matthew Evans, managing solicitor for Prisoners' Advice Service wrote an article in Inside Time arguing that Local authorities and health bodies have in fact the same housing, community care and health care powers and duties in relation to released prisoners as they do to any other individual and that all statutory duties may be enforced in public law judicial review proceedings. Public funding is available for such proceedings, which can be very effective in obtaining emergency injunctive relief, compelling the authority to assess for services. ^[6]

Law changing legal action

In June 2010, Deborah Russo, a solicitor at PAS instructed barristers in a case about Home Detention Curfew and Electronic tagging. The judgment in this case of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom means that hundreds of low risk prisoners will have to have their release dates urgently re-calculated and they will be released on Home Detention Curfew where appropriate.^[7]

Encouraging political change in Her Majesty's Prison Service

In the New Statesman Crime Report of June 2010 Matthew Evans writes that the opinion of PAS is that the Parole Board for England and Wales is now so risk averse that it seriously raises questions about its perceived independence from the state and its institutions. PAS say that the system is at breaking point, with prisoners suffering endless delays in getting a hearing, spending far longer in prisons that have no facilities or courses for them to complete in order to show a reduction in risk and far longer in open conditions before they are considered suitable for release. PAS also argues that the taking of politics and political partisan competition out of law and order would be a major step to resolving and escaping from the cell of penal populism.^[8]

Matthew Evans also wrote a warning in July 2010 in the Solicitors Journal about prisoners' vulnerability and the impact of Kenneth Clarke's review of legal aid. He argued that a lawyer often needs to say that the prisoner has the entitlement, for example as a disabled person, for the prison to consider reasonable adjustments to their accommodation, or that prison service policy based on a fixed expectation that a child be taken from their imprisoned mother at 18 months should be subject to some degree of flexibility.^[9]

Prisoners' voting rights

PAS supports the repeal of the absolute ban of convicted prisoners voting, Matthew Evans wrote in the Legal Action Group Journal in December 2010 that as things stand, the UK’s 85,393-strong prison population that he ironically says are (all avowed Conservative Party voters, according to some media reports) are barred from voting in elections under Representation of the People Act 1983 s3. In Hirst v UK (No 2) App No 74025/01, 30 March 2004, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled unanimously that the maintenance of an absolute bar on convicted prisoners voting was in breach of article 3 of Protocol No 1 to the European Convention on Human Rights (right to free and fair elections).^[10]

References

External links

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