To mark the 40^th edition of the Turner Prize, this year the exhibition of shortlisted artists returns to its home at Tate Britain ahead of the December prizegiving, following six peripatetic years in the regions. If this is meant to strike a positive note for the beleaguered prize, it doesn’t. The shortlist avoids previous pitfalls around gender, ethnicity, and age, but it feels as if in its craven capitulation to inclusivity, it has selected artists based on their personal identities, not their art. 

An immaculately balanced majority female shortlist, featuring a spread of cultural and ethnic backgrounds from across the country, with ages ranging from 38 to 65 means there’s precious little for anyone to get steamed up about, and where the politics of the prize is concerned that’s a good thing. But for the Prize to have value, the art needs to provoke (just imagine, back in the glory days of the YBAs, the prize was broadcast on TV and the triggered fulminating copy in the tabloid press). If the shortlist is a masterclass in diversity, the art itself is has a shocking case of tunnel vision and from Delaine Le Bas’s references to her Roma heritage to Claudette Johnson’s portraits of Black men and women, is wholly preoccupied with cultural identity, community and belonging.

It’s true that identity is a dominant theme in society at large, but in such anxious and challenging times for so many, and for so many reasons, this is a disgracefully narrow focus, that really negates the better moments here, compromising the entire presentation of Claudette Johnson, who is surely the stand-out winner.

The opening presentation by Manila-born Pio Abad (born in 1983) is a rather pompous protest against museum collections, specifically the holdings of Oxford institutions including the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Ashmolean, which hosted the exhibition for which Abad has been nominated. In an installation made by Abad in collaboration with jeweller Frances Wadsworth Jones, two bronze tiaras face each other, as if crowning the (absent) heads of a pair of sphinxes. The piece is simple – too simple, because it is entirely empty of meaning, requiring a lengthy explanatory text in which we learn that the tiaras refer to one worn by Gladys Deacon, the Duchess of Marlborough, whose likeness appears on two sphinxes at Blenheim Palace. Before Deacon, it had been confiscated from the Romanovs by the Bolsheviks; after Deacon, it found itself into the grubby hands of Imelda Marcos, the wife of the former dictator of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos.

In contrast, a series of pen and ink drawings, each one a depiction of a Benin Bronze next to an arrangement of everyday objects – plants, an anglepoise lamp, piles of books, a jar of Nutella – elegantly explores the layered significance of these notoriously looted objects, in Nigeria, in Britain, then and now. The point is subtle, precise and humorous – that the Benin Bronzes belong within a complex cultural matrix; that in being taken from their rightful place they are treated as meaningless knick-knacks, and so on, with many shades conveyed at once in trenchant images – no explanatory text required.

Like Abad, Jasleen Kaur (born 1986), from Glasgow, who makes installations from found objects leans heavily on obscure, and mundane objects, which she imbues with nuanced cultural and personal meanings impossible to fathom without a guide. While Abad’s failures are matched by moments of triumph, the same cannot be said for Kaur, whose combined south Asian and Glaswegian heritage is vaguely evident in references to Irn-Bru and a soundtrack featuring Sufi devotional music interspersed with chart-toppers. An enormous fake Axminster carpet, and some gaudily dressed tables bearing motorised wooden hands, that periodically operate little brass “jingles”, begin to summon the atmosphere of a community hall, or, we are told, the vast prayer halls of the artist’s upbringing, but it’s a job half done, that leaves the viewer feeling alienated and confused.

Perhaps this is deliberate – after all, there’s an undercurrent of violence and threat in the scattered clothes, and the photograph of men with bricks. But despite evidence of human presence – in photographs, music, and perplexingly a Ford Escort draped with a giant crocheted doily – the installation fails to spark empathy or even curiosity, its lack of visual articulacy more boring than stirring.

Making matters significantly worse for Kaur is the contrast between her inadequate offering, and the immersive epic that follows. While Kaur appears to have given scant thought to how best to communicate her ideas, Delaine Le Bas’s maximalist installation Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins the New Life/A New Life Is Beginning grabs the viewer and very nearly won’t let go, with a production of filmic proportions, that occupies every available surface across three spaces.

A ghostly figure guards the entrance, wonderfully ethereal in white cloth, the details of her hands and hair sewn in black thread as if drawn in the air. The room is an extension of her, as if her essence infuses the space and the objects in her orbit. White fabric surfaces are spattered in black paint, drawn all over with compelling, nonsensical figures, of monkeys and naked women, and feverish workings out that – if this were a film – would indicate that we’d stepped through the plastic sheeting into the den of a deranged genius.

Tents are a motif – a reference to the nomadic life that is a feature of the British Roma culture to which the artist belongs – here containing a flower, once again made like a stitched sketch, and with something like a child’s stuffed toy mouse hanging in the background. Another tent-like opening leads into a second space, its walls covered in silver paper. The soundtrack, which in the first gallery blends rather confusingly with the preceding installation, becomes more insistent here, the sense of claustrophobia increased in a space made mysterious with its passageways and openings. Incidental objects recall the artist’s grandmother – “Nan” –  with vases of flowers, the collapsed body of a hay-stuffed horse, red baby shoes, mutated into nightmarish versions of the trinkets that once sat in the old lady’s display cabinet.

It’s a journey through an underworld of grief, and death, mediated by family and tradition. But the narrative trajectory falters in the final space, where a return to fabric hangings, this time painted in bright colours, revisits motifs of tents and animal figures, with little sense of progression, so that the compelling nature of the previous spaces loses its hold.

After the excesses of Delaine Le Bas’s bizarre and fevered world, Claudette Johnson’s formally simple portraits of Black men and women offer some relief. Like Le Bas, Johnson knows how to pull in a viewer, and her portraits are irresistibly inviting, the artist herself turning to meet us in the self-portrait that greets us as we enter the space. Though selected from several important shows this year, notably at the Courtauld Gallery in London, her nomination honours a lifetime’s achievement. Though Johnson disputes the term portrait, aiming for something more experimental and unfettered by tradition, it’s hard to call them anything else, since they so vividly convey human, and specifically Black presence. It’s uncomfortable, seeing these portraits that make us acknowledge the enduring significance of skin colour, even now, and however much we might wish it were otherwise. 

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The exhibition quotes the sociologist Stuart Hall, who said “The fact is ‘Black’ has never just been there”, an idea that Johnson makes explicit in her self-portrait Protection (2024), in which she shares the canvas with a Makonde sculpture. The sculpture refers to the influences that shaped Johnson’s work as part of the Black British Art Movement in the 1980s, but it also has a broader meaning, inviting us to consider the exoticising tendencies of painters like Gauguin, for whom such a sculpture was a marker of otherness. 

The highlight here, and surely of the entire show is Johnson’s Pietà (2024), painted in pastel and oil paint on bark cloth, an ostentatiously “African” material that works to unleash a universal jolt of pain, as a mother holds the body of her dead son, presumably a victim of knife crime, that so disproportionately affects young Black men. Around the edges are words to stop your heart: “Every mother was called when he called for his mother.” There’s no question that Johnson must win, but how I wish she had some worthy competition.

Turner Prize 2024 is at Tate Britain 25 September to 16 February

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A new “women’s justice board” will be set up to cut the female prison population in England and Wales as part of a longer-term push to reduce the number of women’s jails, the justice secretary has said.

In a speech to the Labour party conference in Liverpool on Tuesday, Shabana Mahmood rejected then Conservative home secretary Michael Howard’s 1993 declaration that “prison works”, saying that “for women prison isn’t working”.

Labour has said it inherited a criminal justice system at “breaking point” when it won the general election in July, and in her first 10 weeks in office Mahmood has faced record jail overcrowding, which saw the prison estate come to within a few hundred places of capacity.

Almost 2,000 prisoners were released early this month, with several thousand more to be let out in October, under temporary emergency measures reducing the proportion of some custodial sentences from 50 per cent to 40 per cent.  

Mahmood in her speech accused “guilty men in the last government” of bringing the prison system “to the point of disaster”.

The new women’s justice board would be tasked with providing early interventions to divert women away from the criminal justice system, improving community support and looking at specific problems affecting young women in custody, she said.

The self-harm rate among female inmates is eight times higher than among men, and women between the ages of 18 and 24 account for more than one-third of incidents despite constituting less than 10 per cent of the female prison population.

Some 3,453 women were in prison in England and Wales as of last Friday, according to Ministry of Justice figures, compared with 82,953 male inmates.

There are 123 jails in England and Wales, according to HM Prison Service, of which 12 in England are for women. Mahmood described them as “desperate places” that led female offenders into a life of crime rather than helping them rehabilitate.

About two-thirds of female offenders sentenced to prison did not commit a violent crime, and more than half of female offenders were the victims of domestic abuse, the department said in a release announcing Mahmood’s planned reforms.

The MoJ said women serving short custodial sentences were “significantly more likely to reoffend” than those serving non-custodial sentences.

The new body would be led by a minister and set up in the MoJ, the department added.

Pia Sinha, chief executive of the Prison Reform Trust charity, welcomed the creation of a separate oversight board for female offenders as a “historic moment for women’s justice”.

“Many women are primary carers for children, which means prison can have a devastating impact on those left behind on the outside as well as on the women themselves,” she said.

Sinha added that for the women’s justice board to be effective it “must provide a framework for better use of liaison and diversion services and community alternatives for women”.

Mahmood also pledged to make progress on Labour’s manifesto pledge to give all rape victims access to an independent legal advocate representing them “rather than a defendant or prosecutor”.

The change is aimed at cutting the number of victims who drop out of rape cases — 60 per cent at present — before they go to trial.   

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WASHINGTON (AP) — American drivers might universally wince or brace themselves at the sight and sound of flashing red and blue lights and blaring sirens, but all drivers have constitutional rights when pulled over on the road.

The question of one’s responsibility to comply with all instructions given by a law enforcement officer recently came up following a pregame traffic stop this month involving Miami Dolphins wide receiver Tyreek Hill.

Although Hill has acknowledged he could have handled the interaction with Miami-Dade police better, the video of him being pulled out of his car, placed on the ground and handcuffed revived a national conversation about the realities of “driving while Black.” Studies show Black motorists are more likely to face the threat or use of force by police in traffic stops, like Hill did, and many Black families give a version of “the talk” to loved ones about how to interact with police officers.

“The immediate short-term goal is to get out of the encounter without being arrested, and the way to do that, again, is to communicate not just with compliance, but obedience and respect, even if you don’t think that that’s deserved,” said Georgetown University law professor Paul Butler.

Black people are disproportionately stopped, data shows

Studies show people of color are often disproportionately targeted for traffic stops in the U.S., said Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, the American Civil Liberties Union’s deputy director on policing.

“They search them more often, even as the rate at which they find evidence of some wrong is lower for Black and Latino people than white people,” she said.

In 2022, Black people accounted for nearly 13% of traffic stops in California, even though they were only 5% of the state’s population. Minneapolis, a predominantly white city, found in 2020 that Black drivers accounted for nearly 80% of police searches and routine traffic stops.

Being combative with traffic officers can invite unwanted scrutiny

Miami lawyer E.J. Hubbs said he believes both Hill and the police officers in the now-viral video of the arrest had faults in their interactions.

Body camera footage showed the officer asking Hill to roll down his window and Hill complying, Hubbs said. Hill then told the officer “to give me my ticket,” after handing him his identification, which Hubbs said was also fair.

Where things escalated was when Hill decided to roll his window back up, as the officer’s body camera footage shows.

“When Mr. Hill refused to roll down his window, that was not complying with one of his commands,” Hubbs said. “And when he was asked to exit the car, he didn’t comply with that command, at least immediately.”

Lawrence Hunter, a former Waterbury, Connecticut, police captain and law enforcement coach, added that Hill appeared confrontational when asking Miami-Dade County officers not to knock on his window.

“From that point, because of the combative nature that Tyreek Hill exposed, the officer then asked him to get out of the car,” Hunter said. “That’s an officer safety thing. He already feels that this is uncooperative. … So therefore, it is best to just get him out of the car.”

Hunter added that Hill’s refusal to keep his window down could be considered a matter of officer safety.

Drivers have rights against self-incrimination and vehicle searches

During a traffic stop, drivers have constitutional rights against incriminating themselves or permitting the search of their car.

The right to remain silent is the most widely known right, Borchetta said. Drivers also have the Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizure, and have the right to ask traffic officers questions.

“You don’t have to tell the police where you’re coming from or where you’re going,” Borchetta said. “If they ask to search you or your car, you can say no. And if you’re not sure whether they’re asking or telling, you can ask them that question. And they have to tell you honestly.”

Passengers can also ask if they can leave the scene of the traffic stop.

Police can ask drivers to step out of their vehicles

Once a driver has been pulled over, police will likely run the plates of the vehicle through a database to check whether the car has been stolen or see if any other actionable information comes up, said Hunter, the former police captain.

The officer may also take a long, hard look at the vehicle for visible contraband, weapons or drugs, he said.

The officer does have the right to ask drivers and passengers to get out of the car and can use reasonable force to make sure that happens. Officers can also pull drivers over even if they haven’t committed an infraction, as long as there’s reasonable suspicion to think the person has, according to Butler, the Georgetown University professor. This policing practice is known as a pretextual stop.

Law enforcement can sometimes take advantage of civilians’ lack of knowledge of the law, Butler added. In that case, it’s best to comply and communicate with officers, and complain later.

Drivers can also record the conversation if they feel like the interaction with the officer has been unnecessarily escalated. But they should be sure to let the officer know that they are being recorded. Asking for and writing down the officer’s badge number, time and location of the interaction is also permitted.