Crime and Punishment

This spoke started as Prison focused but is being renamed Crime and Punishment to reflect a broader focus of content in honour of Dostoyevsky's masterpiece, one of the Hub's favourite books.

This spoke started in that innocent world before Covid, with The Hub's South Bank prosecco-fueled chat with London soprano Emma Dogliano. We met to talk about Emma's charity work running a choir in a London prison. Later, Emma agreed to be interviewed on The Hub about her family heritage of prison reform and her prison choir in more detail.

Ripples in the water. That pebble led to the Prison Blues blog and Spotify playlist of prison music and famous names and their brushes with incarceration. Reading 'The Quare Fellow'  led to a blog about the play, prison song The Auld Triangle and "proud son of Ireland" author, Brendan Behan. 

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All three raised the theme of the evolution of prison reform from the campaign against the death penalty to the still-needed debate on the evidence that prison is a less-than-successful means of reducing crime and equally fails prisoners, victims and society.

Further blogs have covered Suffragette Emily Wilding Davison's force-feeding in Holloway Prison, criminal barrister Chris Daw QC's book 'Justice on Trial: Radical Solutions for a System at Breaking Point' and an interview with Rob Preece, campaigns manager at The Howard League for Prison Reform. Watch this space for a follow up podcast and blog with the barrister behind the Books for Prisoners campaign outlined in the Howard League blog.