Prison Law

Our barristers are well equipped to provide prisoners’ legal services, representing a prisoner’s rights to early release, parole, and access to training courses, ensuring the discretionary power of the state is not unlawfully exercised to breach said rights.

What is Prison Law?

Prison law pertains to the rights, lives and expectations of prisoners throughout their incarceration. With an ever-increasing prison population and the variety of existing sentence types, clients can often have complex prison law needs.

Prison Law and St Pauls Chambers

St Pauls has a strong team of Juniors who are highly experienced in all areas of prisoner legal services and are prepared to travel across England and Wales. Areas of experience include:

• Parole Board Hearings.
• Adjudications.
• Complaints.
• Re-Categorisation.
• Inquests arising in the prison, custody or detention.
• Compensation for miscarriages of justice and related civil litigation.
• Applications for habeas corpus.
• Representation on disciplinary matters.
• Appeal convictions and appeal sentence.

Our members regularly undertake parole board hearings at prisons in respect of life sentences, parole hearings, recall panels, and re-categorisation of prisoners. Members have a strong record in securing moves to open conditions and directions for release.

For all aspects of prisoners’ legal services, St Pauls are proficient in dealing with complex cases which require oral questioning of experts and those which involve “deniers”.

We also have significant expertise in undertaking judicial reviews in this area and appearing in adjudication / disciplinary proceedings. The team often provide written advice across a broad spectrum of prison law issues involving adjudication procedure, novel criminal charges, sentence calculation, eligibility for compassionate release, home detention curfew and delay in the provision of an oral hearing.