Topic: Police Powers and Accountability

Preparatory sources read and used (OSCOLA):

• R v Couzens (Central Criminal Court, 30 September 2021) (sentencing remarks of Fulford LJ) [link]
• R v Carrick (Crown Court at Southwark, 7 February 2023) (sentencing remarks of Cheema-Grubb J) [link]
• R (W80) v Director General of the Independent Office for Police Conduct [2023] UKSC 24 [link]
• Louise Casey, Baroness Casey Review: Final Report (Metropolitan Police Service 2023) [link]
• Elish Angiolini, The Angiolini Inquiry Part 1 Report (HC 530, 2024) [link]
• Michael Shiner, ‘Caught in a Vicious Cycle: Where Are We with Stop and Search?’ (2024) The Political Quarterly [link]

Reflection:

Before this tutorial I had a fairly lazy view of police misconduct. I assumed the worst cases were rare, just a handful of bad people who slipped through, and that the system basically worked. Reading around the Couzens and Carrick cases knocked that out of me. What stayed with me was not really how awful the offending was, though it was, but how long the whole thing went unchecked. Carrick had come to police attention over a string of incidents across nearly two decades before he was finally stopped,[1] and Couzens did not snap in a single moment either, he planned a violent attack and then used the warrant card itself to coerce Sarah Everard into the car.[2] So the ‘few bad apples’ line started to feel, to me, like a way of dodging the harder question of how both men stayed in uniform for so long.

That harder question is really about culture, and this is where the Casey Review did the most to shift my thinking. Casey did not just find individual wrongdoing. She described institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia, with a default of defensiveness and denial whenever the force was challenged.[3] The bit that actually surprised me was the data on disproportionality, with black Londoners far more likely to be stopped, searched and subjected to force, and Casey suggesting that policing by consent in the capital had effectively broken down.[4] Shiner makes a related point in his work on stop and search, implying the power sits in a kind of vicious cycle where overuse damages legitimacy in exactly the communities already over-policed.[5] I had heard ‘institutional racism’ plenty of times before, mostly as a slogan. Seeing it tied to actual figures, and to a named loss of public consent, made it land very differently for me.

The accountability side is messier than I expected, and the W80 case is what made that click. An armed officer shot a man dead, and the whole dispute came down to which legal test applies when an officer holds an honest but mistaken belief that their life is in danger. The Supreme Court held that the civil law test applies in disciplinary proceedings, not the more forgiving criminal test the police stakeholders had pushed for.[6] At first this looked like dry, technical stuff. Then it struck me that the choice of test more or less decides how much scrutiny use of force gets, which in turn decides how much accountability there actually is. Put that next to Casey’s finding about a defensive culture and the worry is obvious, since a force inclined to close ranks will tend to want whichever test shields it most.[7] So a question that reads as procedural is doing a lot of moral work underneath.

Where my view genuinely changed was on the value of inquiries. I used to be cynical, assuming they produce a thick report and then nothing much happens. The Angiolini Inquiry’s first report, looking at how Couzens was ever allowed to become and then stay an officer, made sixteen recommendations and set out the red flags missed along the way.[8] I still worry about whether any of it gets acted on, and Casey herself pointed to decades of similar warnings being ignored.[9] Even so, I came round to thinking the documenting matters in its own right, basically because it makes the denial harder to sustain next time. What I take from this whole thing is that accountability cannot just mean punishing the obvious monsters once they are already exposed. It has to mean the slow, boring stuff, the vetting and the tests and the oversight, working before anyone gets hurt.

Number of words: 607

Reflective Log 2

Topic: Purpose and Effectiveness of Prisons

Preparatory sources read and used (OSCOLA):

• Howard League for Penal Reform, Sentencing Inflation: A Judicial Critique (2024) [link]
• ‘Prisoners Released Early but Some Victims Not Warned’ (BBC News, 10 September 2024) [link]
• ‘SDS40 Scheme Sees 38,000 Released from Prison Early’ (Inside Time, 2025) [link]
• Independent Sentencing Review, Final Report and Proposals for Reform (2025) [link]
• Daniel Alge, ‘Do Shorter Prison Sentences Make Society Less Safe?’ (Brunel University of London 2025) [link]
• HM Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales, Annual Report 2024–25 (HC 1030, 2025) [link]

Reflection:

I came into this topic assuming prison mostly works, in the sense that locking people up keeps the rest of us safe and that is roughly the end of it. What changed my mind was seeing how close the system came to simply running out of room. By late August 2024 there were over 88,000 people inside, several thousand above the certified normal accommodation, which is basically the standard the service itself says it ought to be providing.[10] The independent review of sentencing later put it bluntly, describing a prison system that had come dangerously close to collapse in the summer of 2024.[11] That is not a system delivering rehabilitation. It is a system trying not to fall over.

The emergency early release scheme, SDS40, brought the tension into focus. From September 2024, most people on standard determinate sentences started being let out at the 40 per cent point of their term rather than the halfway mark, purely to free up space.[12] Tens of thousands have gone out under it since then.[13] What unsettled me was the honesty of the reasoning. This was not framed as ‘these people are ready’. It was framed as ‘we have nowhere to put anyone else’. So the timing of release, this thing that is meant to track risk and desert, was being driven by the estate’s capacity instead. That feels like the purpose of prison getting quietly overruled by plumbing, and it made me wonder how much of sentencing policy is really about justice at all.

The Gauke review put a sharper point on it. Its proposals lean heavily on using fewer and shorter custodial sentences and more community options, with release earned through behaviour rather than handed over automatically.[14] Alge, writing about the evidence behind shorter sentences, suggests the assumption that more prison equals more safety does not hold up cleanly, since short custodial terms are not great at cutting reoffending.[15] I had honestly never questioned that assumption before. Sitting with it, it does seem odd to keep doing something at this scale when the evidence on whether it actually works is so shaky. It also made me reconsider what we even want prison to do, because deterrence, rehabilitation and punishment are not always pulling in the same direction.

Conditions are the other thing I underestimated. The Chief Inspector of Prisons keeps flagging overcrowding, drugs and a lack of purposeful activity in his annual reporting,[16] and when the early releases happened, some of those leaving described filthy, rat-infested wings.[17] So even on the narrow incapacitation justification, you have to ask what kind of person comes out the other side of that. If prison is supposed to reduce risk, and the place is making people worse, then the whole thing starts to look self-defeating in its own right.

I keep coming back to the Halden question we touched on, the Norwegian model with its focus on normality and rehabilitation. Part of me is sceptical, since it is expensive and the public mood here is not exactly soft on crime. But the comparison did make me realise how low our expectations have sunk.[18] We talk about prison working when really we just mean it is not literally overflowing this week, even while conditions inside keep deteriorating.[19] So my thinking shifted from ‘prison works’ to something more uncomfortable. I now think the system in England and Wales is mostly managing numbers, not delivering any of the aims we say justify it, and whether the Gauke reforms change that or just relieve the pressure for a while, I am honestly not sure, at least not yet, and the next capacity crunch may well force the whole question open again.

Number of words: 612

Reflective Log 3

Topic: Sentencing: Policy and Practice

Preparatory sources read and used (OSCOLA):

• Victims and Prisoners Act 2024 [link]
• House of Commons Library, Sentences of Imprisonment for Public Protection (Briefing Paper CBP 6086, 2025) [link]
• Prison Reform Trust, ‘Modest but Welcome Progress in the Long Journey for IPP Reform’ (2025) [link]
• Independent Sentencing Review, Final Report and Proposals for Reform (2025) [link]

Reflection:

IPP sentences were the part of this topic that genuinely shocked me, and I do not use that word lightly. The imprisonment for public protection sentence was brought in during 2005 and abolished in 2012, but the abolition was not made retrospective.[20] So thousands of people kept serving an indeterminate sentence that Parliament had already decided was wrong in principle. Before the tutorial I did not even know this existed. Finding out that people are still inside, years past their original tariff, for a sentence that no longer exists, made me question how settled I had been about sentencing being basically fair. The wider review of sentencing traces exactly this sort of slow build-up of ever harsher custody over the decades.[21]

The mechanics are what make it so harsh. An IPP carries a minimum term, but after that the person is only released when the Parole Board is satisfied they are no longer a risk, and the licence then hangs over them for years afterwards.[22] The catch is obvious once you see it. Someone deteriorating in an overcrowded prison, with little access to the courses they actually need,[23] struggles to prove they are safe, which keeps them in, which makes them worse. The Prison Reform Trust has tracked how recall under IPP licences stayed stubbornly high for years, only starting to fall recently.[24] I found that loop genuinely distressing, basically because it is the sentence creating the very risk it claims to be managing.

Some reform has come, which I did not expect. The Victims and Prisoners Act 2024 changed the licence rules, cutting the qualifying period for the Parole Board to consider terminating an IPP licence from ten years down to three.[25] The Prison Reform Trust notes this led to a real drop, with the number of people on IPP licence in the community falling sharply across late 2024.[26] So things are moving, slowly. What bothers me is that none of this really touches the people still unreleased in custody, and the campaign to resentence them has not got over the line. It feels like a half-measure, helping those already out in the community while the very hardest cases stay stuck inside.

What this did to my wider thinking was make me see how sentencing policy gets driven by fear of the rare, awful case. The Independent Sentencing Review picks up this theme, describing a long pattern of sentence inflation and a system pushed to the edge by ever-longer time in custody.[27] IPP was a response to a small number of genuinely dangerous offenders, but it swept up a huge number of people who were not in that category at all, often for fairly low tariffs.[28] That mismatch, between the few it was aimed at and the many it caught, is the thing I keep snagging on, and it is hard to unsee once you know the numbers.

I am not naive about the politics. Victims and their families have real concerns, and ‘public protection’ is not a meaningless phrase. When you read about offenders being released and then recalled for breaching their conditions, you can see why caution exists in the first place.[29] But the IPP story convinced me that indeterminate, open-ended punishment carries a moral cost we tend to ignore, since it shifts from punishing what someone did to detaining them for what they might do. My position changed from thinking sentencing is roughly proportionate to thinking it is heavily shaped by the urge to look tough, even where that produces an injustice the state itself later admits to and then struggles for over a decade to put right.[30]

Number of words: 602

Reflective Log 4

Topic: Youth Justice: Welfare v Punishment

Preparatory sources read and used (OSCOLA):

• R v Jenkinson and Ratcliffe (Manchester Crown Court, 2 February 2024) (sentencing remarks of Yip J) [link]
• R v Prosper (Crown Court at Luton, 19 March 2025) (sentencing remarks of Cheema-Grubb J) [link]
• House of Commons Library, The Age of Criminal Responsibility (Briefing Paper CBP 7687, 2025) [link]
• UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, Concluding Observations on the UK (2023) UN Doc CRC/C/GBR/CO/6-7 [link]
• Aaron Brown and Anthony Charles, ‘The Minimum Age of Criminal Responsibility: The Need for a Holistic Approach’ (2021) Youth Justice [link]

Reflection:

The thing that pulled at me most here was the age of criminal responsibility. In England and Wales it is ten, which I knew, but I had never really sat with what that means.[31] A ten year old can be arrested, charged and put on trial. Set that next to the basic fact that children’s brains, judgement and impulse control are still developing well into the late teens and beyond, and ten starts to look indefensibly low. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has repeatedly told the UK the age is too low and should be raised to at least fourteen.[32] Before this I would probably have said ‘well, kids know right from wrong’. Now I think knowing something is wrong and being fully responsible for it are not quite the same thing.

The Brianna Ghey case is what made the welfare versus punishment tension impossible to dodge. Two fifteen year olds planned and carried out a genuinely horrific murder, and were sentenced to detention with minimum terms of twenty-two and twenty years.[33] Reading the facts, my gut wanted them treated as fully culpable. They were also children, with their own histories, and the court still had to sentence them under a framework different from the adult one. The same UN Committee has gone as far as calling the UK’s child justice system draconian and punitive.[34] Holding both of those thoughts at once is uncomfortable, and I think that discomfort is sort of the whole point of this topic.

Where I landed, tentatively, is that the welfare and justice models are not as opposed as they first look. Brown and Charles argue for a more holistic approach built around diversion and rights-respecting intervention rather than early criminalisation,[35] and the evidence they draw on points to pulling children into the system early making reoffending more likely, not less.[36] That reframed it for me. Welfare is not the soft option that lets serious offending slide. It is partly about not manufacturing future offenders out of children who could have been diverted in the first place, which is a point I had honestly never considered before.

The serious cases are still the hard test, and the Prosper case sharpened that. He was eighteen, just over the line into adulthood, when he murdered three of his own family while planning a school shooting, and he received a forty-nine year minimum term.[37] Technically that is an adult sentencing case, but his youth and maturity were clearly live issues, and in the Ghey appeal one defendant’s immaturity was argued too.[38] So the line at eighteen looks more and more arbitrary the more you learn about development not stopping at any neat birthday.

I keep thinking about the Norway comparison we discussed, where the emphasis falls much more on reintegration even for young people who have done terrible things.[39] Part of me resists it for the worst cases, because something in me still wants the punishment to match the harm. But the cynic in me also notes that long detention of children, with little real rehabilitation, mostly produces damaged adults released decades later, which helps nobody, victims included.[40] When it comes to the everyday cases, that argument feels much stronger than the punitive one.

My thinking shifted overall from a fairly punitive instinct to something more divided, in a way I think is honest rather than wishy-washy. For the vast majority of young offenders, who are not Jenkinson or Prosper, the welfare approach and a higher age of responsibility seem clearly right on the evidence.[41] For the rare, severe cases I still feel the pull towards punishment, and I am not sure the system has cracked how to hold a child accountable for an atrocity without simply treating them as a small adult.[42] That tension has not resolved for me, and maybe it should not.

Number of words: 641

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[1]R v Carrick (Crown Court at Southwark, 7 February 2023) (sentencing remarks of Cheema-Grubb J).

[2]R v Couzens (Central Criminal Court, 30 September 2021) (sentencing remarks of Fulford LJ).

[3]Louise Casey, Baroness Casey Review: Final Report – An Independent Review into the Standards of Behaviour and Internal Culture of the Metropolitan Police Service (Metropolitan Police Service 2023).

[4]Casey (n 3).

[5]Michael Shiner, ‘Caught in a Vicious Cycle: Where Are We with Stop and Search?’ (2024) The Political Quarterly.

[6]R (W80) v Director General of the Independent Office for Police Conduct [2023] UKSC 24.

[7]Casey (n 3).

[8]Elish Angiolini, The Angiolini Inquiry Part 1 Report (HC 530, 2024).

[9]Casey (n 3).

[10]Howard League for Penal Reform, Sentencing Inflation: A Judicial Critique (Howard League for Penal Reform 2024).

[11]Independent Sentencing Review, Final Report and Proposals for Reform (2025).

[12]‘Prisoners Released Early but Some Victims Not Warned’ (BBC News, 10 September 2024).

[13]‘SDS40 Scheme Sees 38,000 Released from Prison Early’ (Inside Time, 13 November 2025).

[14]Independent Sentencing Review (n 11).

[15]Daniel Alge, ‘Do Shorter Prison Sentences Make Society Less Safe? What the Evidence Says’ (Brunel University of London 2025).

[16]HM Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales, Annual Report 2024–25 (HC 1030, 2025).

[17]BBC News (n 12).

[18]Independent Sentencing Review (n 11).

[19]HM Chief Inspector of Prisons (n 16).

[20]House of Commons Library, Sentences of Imprisonment for Public Protection (Briefing Paper CBP 6086, 2025).

[21]Independent Sentencing Review (n 11).

[22]House of Commons Library, Sentences of Imprisonment for Public Protection (n 20).

[23]HM Chief Inspector of Prisons (n 16).

[24]Prison Reform Trust, ‘Modest but Welcome Progress in the Long Journey for IPP Reform’ (Prison Reform Trust 2025).

[25]Victims and Prisoners Act 2024.

[26]Prison Reform Trust (n 24).

[27]Independent Sentencing Review (n 11).

[28]House of Commons Library, Sentences of Imprisonment for Public Protection (n 20).

[29]Prison Reform Trust (n 24).

[30]House of Commons Library, Sentences of Imprisonment for Public Protection (n 20).

[31]House of Commons Library, The Age of Criminal Responsibility (Briefing Paper CBP 7687, 2025).

[32]UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, Concluding Observations on the Combined Sixth and Seventh Periodic Reports of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (2023) UN Doc CRC/C/GBR/CO/6-7, para 54.

[33]R v Jenkinson and Ratcliffe (Manchester Crown Court, 2 February 2024) (sentencing remarks of Yip J).

[34]UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (n 32).

[35]Aaron Brown and Anthony Charles, ‘The Minimum Age of Criminal Responsibility: The Need for a Holistic Approach’ (2021) Youth Justice.

[36]House of Commons Library, The Age of Criminal Responsibility (n 31).

[37]R v Prosper (Crown Court at Luton, 19 March 2025) (sentencing remarks of Cheema-Grubb J).

[38]R v Jenkinson and Ratcliffe (n 33).

[39]Brown and Charles (n 35).

[40]UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (n 32).

[41]Brown and Charles (n 35).

[42]House of Commons Library, The Age of Criminal Responsibility (n 31).