RUSSIA’S NEWEST NUCLEAR SUBMARINE ARRIVES IN PACIFIC OCEAN

The Vladimir Monomakh will be permanently deployed in Russia's far east.

TOO MANY BRITISH CONVICTS ARE CARRIED OUT OF PRISON IN COFFINS

The penal system in Britain is in desperate need of reform, says Frances Crook OBE.

Reports of unacceptable conditions in U.K. prisons are not new. In 1773, the High Sheriff of Bedfordshire inspected the local jail in Bedford and was so horrified at what he found that it set him on course to be the first ever prison reformer. Yet, only a week ago we learned that Her Majesty’s Inspector of Prisons went into Bedford prison and found it to be rife with violence, filthy and indecent . Men used to die in Bedford jail from typhoid and cholera—today they die by suicide.

This is not to say that things have not changed. We no longer hang people and we no longer flog people, instead we take time from their lives as a punishment. In past centuries, punishments were either brutally physical or detention for debt and most of the people subjected to these were the poor, the sick and the mentally ill. Today, it is still the same people who are imprisoned.

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Prisons are in a terrible state. This matters because the state is actively causing harm to inmates and to staff so that when prisoners emerge they are more likely to commit further crimes. There is not an even chance of further crime; it is nearer a certainty. The majority of people who experience prison go on to do more terrible things, sometimes far worse than before.

Staff are also imprisoned, in that they work in this toxic environment day after day. The air is fetid, there is little natural light and they are in fear of being assaulted, insulted and disparaged. Prison officers are paid a derisory wage without the travel perks accorded to police officers.

In order to save money, the coalition government, when Chris Grayling was justice secretary, closed prisons and cut staff but did not cut the number of prisoners. This meant that prisoners were crammed into fewer jails with fewer staff. Suicides soared and violence increased. In a panic, the ministry of justice has been desperate to recruit new staff and ministers have told parliament that lots of people have been recruited. This is true, so far as it goes. The problem is that they do not stay.

There are too many prisoners, in too few prisons with not enough staff. Bedford prison is a good example of everything that is going wrong in prisons. It is unsafe, overcrowded and understaffed, drugs are easy to get, basic essentials like clean underpants or bedding are not, lots of men do nothing all day and are then released straight onto the streets with little help, nowhere to sleep and nothing to do all day. Four men have taken their own lives this year.

HM Inspector ate of Prisons has published report after report lambasting the failing system. It is worth looking at the reports published just in the last six months tounderstand the depth of the problem.

Last month Chelmsford prison was revealed as having high levels of violence as men are caged for most of the time with nothing to do. Bullying, assaults and fights are common and are linked to drugs and debt.

Swaleside prison on the Isle of Sheppey is meant to be a training prison for men serving longer sentences but almost half are locked up all day, every day, for years on end. Again violence is rife and parts of the prison are filthy, with the staff demotivated and overwhelmed.

Moorland prison in South Yorkshire was found to be operating a deliberately restricted regime due to staff shortages. One in eight men said they had developed a drug habit in the prison.

Parc prison, run by G4S, is one of the biggest in the country and holds 1,600 men as well as having a separate unit for young boys. Reports have shown drugs as readily available, violence as rife and the inmates reported feeling unsafe. Four men have died in the prison this year: two were suicides and one was unexplained and is still being investigated.

In Nottingham prison, inspectors revealed there had been 229 assaults on staff in six months. Staff were responding with high levels of force. There have been five governors in four years.

Inspectors found that Leeds prison was designed for 669 men, but was holding 1,149. It was overcrowded, under-staffed and wracked with violence.

Wormwood Scrubs was found to have a significant rat problem. Men were locked up all day and again, violence was rife. The chaos in the newly privatised probation service had led to an increase in homelessness from 5 percent of men being released to almost 40 percent.

Doncaster prison is relatively new and run by Serco, but inspectors still found prisoners can get drugs more easily than bedding. Too few staff meant that suicidal prisoners lacked support and violence levels were high.

These prisons are feeding the crime problem, they are not solving it. Crime is rife inside the establishments and spills out into the community as the majority of men—and of the 85,321 people in prison in September, 81,479 were men—commit more crimes on release.

Everyone knows that prisons are an expensive failure yet we do nothing about it. David Cameron gave a keynote speech in February signaling major reform and Michael Gove was working on a program of change. We have yet to hear the plans of the new Lord Chancellor.

Meanwhile, a prisoner takes their own life every four days. The prisons are deteriorating and the taxpayer is being fleeced. A system that costs billions is simply making us all less safe.

The politics of crime and justice have been exploited by recent generations of politicians for cheap electoral gain. This is rotten politics as the U.K. needs a justice system that responds effectively to wrongdoing and protects victims.

Prison could be a place of change, but it needs to be a place of work and activity. Prison should have a purpose and give meaning to the lives of men, and the handful of women, who may spend years incarcerated. If we are to spend half a million pounds on locking someone up for 20 years, they should spend that time productively. The Howard League has pioneered the principle of real work for prisoners whereby they would pay tax and help to keep their families.

In order to reform prisons we need to reduce the number of people incarcerated. This can be done safely and quickly. Nearly three quarters of the men, women and children sent to prison on remand by magistrates do not subsequently get a prison sentence, so we could easily cut this population. Sentence inflation has led England and Wales to have more life sentence prisoners than all the other 46 countries in the Council of Europe combined (except Turkey which has recently increased its life population dramatically). We could cut long sentences and ease people through the system more quickly and safely.

Prisons need reform. Too many dead young men are being carried out in coffins after hanging themselves. Too many staff beaten up. Too much crime is committed by embittered and unemployable ex-prisoners. Too much of taxpayers’ money is being wasted.

Russia Warns Against US Attack on Syrian Forces

In this photo provided by the Syrian Civil Defense group known as the White Helmets, Syrians inspect damaged buildings after airstrikes by government helicopters on the rebel-held Aleppo neighborhood of Mashhad, Syria, Tuesday Sept. 27, 2016. A year after Russia waded into the war in Syria, aiming to flex its national security muscles and prop up beleaguered Syrian President Bashar Assad, Moscow appears no closer to one of its military goals: getting the U.S. to coordinate combat operations in the civil war. And prospects of a diplomatic resolution seem dim. (Syrian Civil Defense White Helmets via AP)

Russia warned the United States Saturday against carrying out any attacks on Syrian government forces, saying it would have repercussions across the Middle East as government forces captured a hill on the edge of the northern city of Aleppo under the cover of airstrikes.

Meanwhile, airstrikes on Aleppo struck a hospital in the eastern rebel-held neighborhood of Sakhour on Saturday, putting it out of service, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Local Coordination Committees. They said at least one person was killed in the airstrike.

Russian news agencies quoted Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova as saying that a U.S. intervention against the Syrian army "will lead to terrible, tectonic consequences not only on the territory of this country but also in the region on the whole."

She said regime change in Syria would create a vacuum that would be "quickly filled" by "terrorists of all stripes."

U.S.-Russian tensions over Syria have escalated since the breakdown of a cease-fire last month, with each side blaming the other for its failure. Syrian government forces backed by Russian warplanes have launched a major onslaught on rebel-held parts of Aleppo.

Syrian troops pushed ahead in their offensive in Aleppo on Saturday capturing the strategic Um al-Shuqeef hill near the Palestinian refugee camp of Handarat that government forces captured from rebels earlier this week, according to state TV. The hill is on the northern edge of the Aleppo, Syria's largest city and former commercial center.

The powerful ultraconservative Ahrar al-Sham militant group said rebels regained control Saturday of several positions they lost in Aleppo in the Bustan al-Basha neighborhood.

State media said 13 people were wounded when rebels shelled the central government-held neighborhood of Midan.

In the rebel-held portion of Aleppo, opposition activist Ahmad Alkhatib described the hospital, known as M10, as one of the largest in Aleppo. He posted photographs on his Twitter account showing the damage including beds covered with dust, a hole in its roof and debris covering the street outside.

A doctor at the hospital told the Aleppo Media Center, an activist collective, that thousands of people were treated in the compound in the past adding that two people were killed in Saturday's airstrikes and several were wounded.

"A real catastrophe will hit medical institutions in Aleppo if the direct shelling continues to target hospitals and clinics," said the doctor whose name was not given. He said the whole hospital is out of service.

Opposition activists have blamed the President Bashar Assad's forces and Russia for airstrikes that hit Civil Defense units and clinics in the city where eastern rebel-held neighborhoods are besieged by government forces and pro-government militiamen.

On Friday, the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Bordersdemanded that the Syrian government and its allies "halt the indiscriminate bombing that has killed and wounded hundreds of civilians—many of them children," over the past week in Aleppo.

"Bombs are raining from Syria-led coalition planes and the whole of east Aleppo has become a giant kill box," said Xisco Villalonga, director of operations for the group. "The Syrian government must stop the indiscriminate bombing, and Russia as an indispensable political and military ally of Syria has the responsibility to exert the pressure to stop this."

It said from Sept. 21 to 26, hospitals still functioning in Aleppo reported receiving more than 822 wounded, including at least 221 children, and more than 278 dead bodies—including 96 children—according to the Directorate of Health in east Aleppo.

Sweden's Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom criticized attacks on civilian targets writing on her Twitter account: "Unacceptable to bomb civilians, children and hospitals in #Aleppo. No humanity. Assad & Russia moving further away from peace."

In the eastern province of Deir el-Zour, warplanes of the U.S.-led coalition destroyed several bridges on the Euphrates river, according to Syrian state news agency SANA and Deir el-Zour 24, an activist media collective. The province is a stronghold of the Islamic State group.

SANA said that among the bridges destroyed was the Tarif Bridge that links Deir el-Zour with the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, the extremists' de-facto capital.

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Associated Press writers Nataliya Vasilyeva in Moscow, Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria and Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, contributed to this report.