Publication
Confronting penal excess
Rebecca Roberts calls for a new voice in the debate
Publication
Is penal reform working? Community sentences and reform sector strategies
Helen Mills and Rebecca Roberts consider the opportunities and challenges for progressive penal reform followed by responses from George Mair, Jamie Bennett and Mick Ryan.
Publication
Truth and lies about 'race' and 'crime'
Will McMahon and Rebecca Roberts consider ethnicity, harm and crime.
Publication
The hall of mirrors: Criminal justice myths uncovered
Gazing into the carnival mirror The 2003 Oxford English Dictionary describes a myth as ‘a widely held but false belief or idea’. The authors in this issue of cjm challenge a series of criminal justice myths including what ‘crime’ is, how much is out there, who the ‘criminals’ are, and the claimed...
News
Alternatives to Holloway
Rebecca Roberts, the Centre's Senior Policy Associate, has written about the closure of Holloway prison, drawing on the Alternatives to Holloway pamphlet published in 1972. She writes:
Some 44 years later and prison numbers have rocketed. In the 30 years leading up to
...
Comment
Cameron’s prison reform: privatisation and asset stripping?
Every so often a government minister makes a socially liberal speech that is hailed as a turning point in penal policy.
News
Cameron's reforms: Asset stripping and privatisation?
The Centre's Deputy Director, Will McMahon, and Senior Policy Associate, Rebecca Roberts, have warned that David Cameron's recent speech on prison reform signals a move towards the expansion and privatisation of criminal justice, rather than a serious attempt to address the problems in the...
Comment
Holloway: The beginning of a revolution?
At this year’s Conservative party conference, Michael Gove apparently heralded in a new era for criminal justice reform. Prisons need to be managed better, he said. People in prison need to...
Speech
Criminal justice in times of austerity
This an abridged summary of a paper presented to the 'Policing the crisis' conference organised by Defend the Right to Protest
News
Can Gove fix criminal justice?
A letter from the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies is published today in The Independent. It calls for a 'whole-society approach' to preventing and reducing harm,...
Comment
Criminal justice 'transformation': a wolf in sheep's clothing?
Following last week’s Conservative party conference a number of commentators expressed optimism about the tone and emphasis placed by David Cameron and Michael Gove on the need for ‘transformation’.
Publication
Racism and criminal justice
In February 2015 I had the privilege of participating in a conference on ‘ Police Corruption, Racism and Spying ' from which many of the papers in this issue of cjm originate. We heard powerful accounts of the shape and impact of policing activities. One of the core themes was the role that racism...