Date & Time: 20th January 2026 7:30pm
Venue: The Wardrobe Theatre, 25 West St, Bristol BS2 0DF
The inside of a prison is a place that most of us will never see, yet we rely on it to “fix” as well as punish the people we send there. Almost everyone who goes to prison will return to the community, and we hope they are rehabilitated when they leave.
Over the past few decades, sentences have grown longer and longer, while recent headlines paint a picture of a system on the brink: overcrowding, emergency early releases, mistaken releases, and courts backed up for years. In an environment like this, can we seriously talk about rehabilitation? And if not, what are we doing?
In this talk, prison law solicitor Emma McClure takes a critical tour through the modern prison system: the realities of serving long sentences, the myths we tell ourselves about punishment, and what genuine, evidence-based rehabilitation might look like.
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Emma McClure is a solicitor specialising in prison and public law and skeptic. She regularly represents prisoners before the Parole Board with a particular focus on complex and indeterminate cases and was a finalist for Legal Aid Lawyer of the year in 2025. In her limited spare time she enjoys running and boring other people with how much she enjoys running.
Bristol Skeptics Society is dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking, combating misinformation, and pursuing a better, more compassionate world, through skeptical exploration and inquiry. ❤️
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