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What Are Prisons For? by Hindpal Singh Bhui
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What Are Prisons For?

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Narrator Adrian Paul Jeyasingham

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Length 3 hours 55 minutes
Language English
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What does a good prison look like? Over eleven million people are currently locked up in prisons across the world, but does that mean that prison actually works?


Hindpal Singh Bhui, with 25 yearsโ€™ experience of visiting and working in prisons worldwide, argues that we need to look at who is sent there and why, to disentangle reality from ideology and myth. Introducing the competing histories of prisons and allowing the voices of prisoners, prison staff and victims to be heard, he asks whether there is a better way to achieve what society wants from its prisons.

Dr Hindpal Singh Bhui OBE is an Inspection Team Leader at HM Inspectorate of Prisons and a Visiting Law Professor at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford. He has worked in prisons for over 20 years undertaking hundreds of visits to places of detention around the world. He has also led various thematic reviews on custody in England and Wales, including on foreign prisoners, minority ethnic prisoners, rehabilitative work and immigration detention. He has given evidence to numerous UK parliamentary committees, public inquiries and the European Parliament, and is a regular speaker at international conferences.

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