Pat Salmon, who was sentenced for the repeated sexual assault of a five-year-old girl, died in the Mater Hospital after serving only four months of his three-year sentence.
The Irish Prison Service confirmed that the inmate died in custody on April 1. All deaths in custody are investigated by the Irish Prison Service, the Inspector of Prisons and An Garda Síochána, where circumstances warrant.
Listeners were hypnotised by its patchwork of grime, Afrobeats, dancehall and more, or as music journalist Flashy Sillah puts it: This felt like [fellow British rapper] J Hus but on steroids.
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground.
In response to Joshua Bay's recently published Inside Higher Ed article, the Consortium for Catholic Higher Education in Prison, a coalition of partnerships between Catholic universities and departments of corrections in 15 states across the country, is adding its voice to those of other leaders in the field alarmed by the piece's misleading framing: a framing that flies in the face not just of decades of established literature on the subject, but of the study (as yet unpublished and unreviewed) itself.
RDAP is a voluntary program that lasts between nine and 12 months (ordinarily, it requires roughly 38 weeks to complete in five-day workweeks, three-hour-a-day segments). The 500-hour program strives to educate inmates on the dangers of addiction. Most importantly, relapse prevention is stressed with the goal of helping inmates during post-release stay clean and sober to avoid reoffending. Congress appropriates more than $100 million annually for RDAP.
Metropolitan Police/PA Wire Justice Secretary David Lammy has intervened to block the transfer of a killer to an open prison after it emerged he had released drill music with lyrics referencing the murder, under a pseudonym. Jake Fahri was sentenced to life in 2009 for killing 16-year-old Jimmy Mizen by throwing an oven dish at him that shattered and severed the arteries in his neck.
There is an "epidemic of everyday crime", the Home Secretary says, such as shoplifting and phone theft. It reminds Shabana Mahmood of the years when she worked on the till in her parents' corner shop, with a cricket bat under the counter ready to deter shoplifters who stole, time and again. While overall crime has been going down in recent years those types of offences have been going up, matched by rising public anxiety.
Metropolitan Police A convicted sex offender who was accidentally released from prison has pleaded guilty to burglary and carrying a knife. Brahim Kaddour-Cherif, 24, became the centre of a manhunt in November after he was mistakenly set free from HMP Wandsworth while on remand awaiting trial for the offences. On Tuesday, Kaddour-Cherif appeared at Snaresbrook Crown Court and admitted breaking into a garage in Walthamstow, east London and stealing bikes in January 2024.
Sheldon Coore, 47, says Huddersfield is all he has ever known since his mother brought him to the UK in 1988 at just 16 months old to join his grandparents, who settled during Windrush. He was handed an Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) jail term in 2005 after he put a man in a headlock and stole 20 from his pocket, having already racked up a string of previous convictions to fund his drug addiction.
Judge Anthony Cartin remarked that Pinckard's offending was "only discovered because of a clumsy mistake," adding: "An officer gathering evidence found evidence from your camera." He noted that her camera "had been activated during the intimate encounter." Judge Cartin further stated: "The offence wasn't a one-off it went on for a number of months and the card was sent." In jailing Pinckard, he concluded that her "conduct diminishes the public confidence in the criminal justice system."
The open-ended sentences, which were scrapped in 2012 and have been described as psychological torture by the UN, have left thousands trapped in jail for up to 22 times longer than their original tariff. This includes many who were children at the time of their offence and handed a type of IPP sentence for under-18s called a Detention for Public Protection (DPP) jail term.
Child killer Jon Venables is set to have his latest bid for freedom heard by the Parole Board. The 43-year-old, who tortured and murdered two-year-old James Bulger in 1993, will have his case heard by parole chiefs at an oral hearing more than two years after his last appeal. In 2023, the Parole Board rejected the bid and found he still posed a danger to children and could go on to offend again.
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