Prison break: Mike Nellis on Friends and criminal justice

2 Sep 2021 | by Mike Nellis

‘Historically Quakers took on big penal-political issues, even if they antagonised respectable interests.’

‘It has been a long time since BYM said anything on penal matters that was remotely equal to the challenge.’ | Photo: by Hasan Almasi on Unsplash

Back in 1996 I undertook a year-long Joseph Rowntree Travelling Fellowship on ‘Revitalising penal reform in the Society of Friends’. I had been drawn to Quakers a decade or so earlier by their peace witness and their long involvement in penal reform. The latter was already an established interest of mine. But by the mid-1990s Friends seemed quite lost on penal matters, uncertain whether they were still collectively committed to them. Britain Yearly Meeting’s longstanding and once influential Penal Affairs Committee (PAC) (established in 1921) had been laid down in 1992, dissipating internal expertise and attenuating Quaker links with secular penal reform bodies.

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