Dear EuroPris Members ,

Every new beginning is exciting and full of expectations about what this new start will bring; I want to wish you all the best for 2020 ! 

May this new year be full of positive energy for your personal and professional life. Achieving goals or quitting bad habits are often part of new year resolutions. But whatever you have on your list, most important is to not stand alone. Similar to that we want as EuroPris to continue to stand next to you in 2020, connecting European penitentiary professionals. 

Since its establishment by and for its members in 2012, EuroPris has functioned as the central contact point on penitentiary issues in Europe, contributing to increased awareness among the public, policy-makers and policy-takers trough the many contributions of European professionals to the different expert groups, summer courses or conferences. In 2019, this central role was further strengthened by taking over the role of the Secretariat for the European Penitentiary Training Academies. 

2020 will be the year that EuroPris is drafting a new strategic plan for the years 2021 to 2024, following the path developed in the past eight years.  In all our plans it is most important for us to listen to our members and shape our plans in line with your needs. So, let me use this opportunity for thanking you for your responses to the questionnaire that we asked you to complete at the end of 2019.  

For 2020 we have planned some interesting events, such as the Correctional Research Symposium on Staff Motivation and Wellbeing, a summer course on Responses to sexual Violence, workshops on ICT and Juvenile Justice, the European Prison Regime Forum and a conference on Violent Extremist Offenders in cooperation with the European Commission. 



I hope that our 2020 program will be interesting for you and that you will be able to join one or more of our events. 

With my best wishes,

Romain Peray

EuroPris President

Book review on Prisoner Resettlement in Europe (edited by Frieder Dünkel, Ineke Pruin, Anette Storgaard und Jonas Weber) written by Dominik Lehner. Dominik Lehner has been President of the Committee for risk assessment of dangerous offenders of Northwest and Central Switzerland since 2009 . Before that, he was member of the PC CP Working Group of the Council of Europe, including two years as chair of the group.

The book delivers a clear and broad overview over different European systems of early release and after care.

Read the full article here .

In the last newsletter we announced that a conference on foreign national prisoners would take place in the foreign nationals only prison in Ter Apel, Netherlands in the beginning of April this year. Due to unforeseen circumstances the prison in Ter Apel has decided to postpone the conference until spring 2021. More news will follow later this year in this newsletter.

The Criminal Justice Platform Europe (CJPE) will organise its 4th International Criminal Justice Summer Course in Barcelona ( 7-10 July 2020 ). The Summer Course will be a combination of workshops, plenary sessions and study visits bringing together participants with a background in prison, probation and restorative justice from a variety of European countries. Registrations will open in February.

For further information click here.

This year the Irish Prison Service will host the EuroPris Annual General Meeting and Conference. The 34 EuroPris members will meet on the  8  ^th of June in Dublin, Ireland. As in previous years, the EuroPris events precedes the 2-day Council of Europe Conference CDPPS starting 9th of June. An official invitation will be sent to EuroPris members in the beginning of February. Registrations for the event will be opened also in February.   

For more information click here.

Friederycke Haijer joined the EuroPris secretariat in December 2019 as a policy officer. She has an education in international and European law and has worked for NGOs, the judiciary and most recently in academia. At the secretariat, she will work on a broad range of activities, including expert groups, workshops and conferences, as well as the strategic development of the organisation. Friederycke: “I already had the opportunity to participate in the interagency cooperation workshop in Barcelona in November, where I met several representatives of members from all over Europe. I look forward to our cooperation and to learning more about ongoing developments in prison practice.”

On the 12th and 13th of November participants from prison, probation, municipalities and NGO’s gathered in Barcelona, Catalonia for the joint CEP and EuroPris Workshop on Interagency Cooperation. 

Delegates from the Netherlands and Germany presented recent developments in cooperation practice and legal provisions. Other presentations dealt with the needs of specific groups, such as sex offenders, radicalized offenders, juveniles, vulnerable and high risk offenders.

To read more and download the report click here.

Mary Corcoran , Associate Professor in Criminology, Keele University, UK, moderated the workshop. This article contains her presentation titled ‘Building statutory, private sector and civil society partnerships in penal resettlement: some insights from research’.

To read the full article, please click here.

EuroPris and the Slovenian Prison Administration together organised the first Workshop on Real Estate, in Ljubljana from   14 - 16 October   2019 . At the workshop presentations were made on designing for rehabilitation, designing for women, age appropriate solutions, sustainable and humane prisons and on how to deliver major prison construction projects.

The Workshop was attended by 66 participants from 23 different countries.

To read the report, click here .

As part of the project  Tackling Gaps in Cross-Border Cooperation for Penitentiary Training Academies ,  EuroPris created a new website for the EPTA Network. The website includes information on latest activities of the European Penitentiary Training Academies, a Knowledge Management System with responses from the EPTA Network, a database of training modules, and much more!

Check out the website here:  www.epta.info  

EuroPris receives queries from member countries every week, and in this section we will highlight several KMS reports from the last months. Click on the link to view each KMS report:



This is an invitation to take part in the first global survey of the digital maturity of prison services,

to explore the working practices, decision-making and investment on the digitization of our prisons.  

The survey aims to offer guidance for decisions about digital initiatives and for developing digital strategies.

If you are interested to participate please click here.

A recent initiative by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) was the development of an e-learning platform on the Nelson Mandela Rules.  While national prison legislation, regulations and standing orders are typically covered, international standards, such as the Nelson Mandela Rules, are rarely addressed in-depth. UNODC’s e-learning course, which is tailored to the needs of prison and corrections officers, is intended to contribute to filling this gap.

To read more and access the course click here .

During the Finnish Presidency the EU Council adopted conclusions on alternative measures to detention at the beginning of December. Now the Presidency Report on this theme with a list of relevant tools and documents relating to detention and its alternatives has now been published.

To download the Presidency report and the Council Conclusions, click here.

Violent extremists and terrorists are perceived as a very problematic group within prisons. The RAN Prison and Probation (P&P) and EuroPris November meeting in Lisbon focused on security issues arising from the presence of violent extremist and terrorist offenders (VETOs) in the EU Member States’ prisons, but also in more general terms on the necessity (or not) of special provisions required for this group of prisoners. This paper presents the main findings from the discussions.

Click here to read the paper.

On 30-31 March 2020 , a 2-day workshop will be organised at the University of Birmingham, UK , addressing the question ‘What Works in Custodial Design?’. Day 1 of the event will feature leading international researchers (from US, Europe and Australia) presenting outcomes of their research into ways of measuring and assessing ‘success’ in prison design, as well as evidence of the effectiveness of design for delivering intended outcomes. Day 2 will focus on identifying knowledge needs to inform future research.

 

To find out more about the worshop click here.