Our latest eBulletin, sent out to subscribers on Friday, 26 September
Are the police part of the problem of unnecessary criminalisation, or can they be part of the solution?
Some years ago, when Labour was last in power, the Home Office set targets for the police. Called ‘Offences Brought to Justice’, the idea was to drive up police performance by increasing the number of offences that resulted in a formal sanction, such as a caution or penalty notice.
The police responded by “picking low-hanging fruit”, the former Chair of the Youth Justice Board, Rod Morgan, argued several years later; arresting young people in their thousands and setting them on the path of unnecessary criminalisation.
When the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition took office in 2010, the then Home Secretary Theresa May scrapped the targets, on the grounds of cutting bureaucracy. One (probably unanticipated) effect was to reduce the number of criminalised young people. In the decade to 2010, the youth custody population hovered around 3,000. It currently sits at around 500.
This episode is something of a case study in how the police can contribute to unnecessary criminalisation (though it is worth pointing out that they were only doing what the elected politicians were demanding that they do).
The police can, though, also help to prevent unnecessary criminalisation. Indeed, given that they are generally the first responders to a range of crime and disorder challenges, they can make a disproportionate contribution to this.
This month we have been exploring the role the police can play in diverting suspects from unnecessary prosecution. First, we published an interesting working paper by former Assistant Police and Crime Commissioner for the West Midlands, Dr Tom McNeil. He highlights some of the potential opportunities for effective police diversion work, as well as examining why effective diversion practice can prove so difficult to bed in.
Earlier this week we collaborated with colleagues at the universities of Birmingham, Leeds and York on a roundtable discussion on police diversion practices.
There’s more about these initiatives, and more, below.
Richard Garside
Director
Diversion in Practice: Implications for police reform and culture change
This week we live-streamed a roundtable discussion on diversion and out of court resolutions.
Diversion and out of court resolutions are both key to the Labour government’s aim to reduce knife crime and violence against women and girls, as part of the Safer Streets mission, and are a focus of the Leveson review of the Criminal Courts as a way to ease pressure on this part of the system. They also raise challenges for public trust and confidence in policing and criminal justice.
The roundtable panel presented current data on specific initiatives, shared practitioner perspectives, and reflected on the challenges of implementation.
A video-recording of the event will be made available on the event page soon.
The event was hosted in partnership with the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Crime, Justice and Policing and Professor Adam Crawford (Universities of Leeds and York).
Diversion in the West Midlands: A critical case study
Keeping with the theme of diversion, in the seventh paper of our Working Paper series, Dr Tom McNeil reflects on the key challenges to organisational change and cultural reform in policing, using community rehabilitation initiatives in the West Midlands as a case study.
In Diversion in the West Midlands: A critical case study, McNeil draws on his experience as Assistant Police and Crime Commissioner for the West Midlands from 2021-2024 to outline some challenges and successes that he observed from local initiatives in diversion and out of court resolutions.
Based on these observations, he outlines 11 policy recommendations for implementing a fuller programme of community rehabilitation.
As McNeil notes in his introduction, the Government plans to publish a White Paper on policing reform later this year. In this working paper, McNeil aims to contribute to the thinking around policing and effective alternatives to custody at a time of considerable national reflection on the justice system, including our approach to sentencing, criminal courts and violence against women and girls.
In this context, McNeil notes the potential impact of getting community rehabilitation right:
"Prison can break up families, cause homelessness, be the start of long-term unemployment, and end up being a carousel of long-term reoffending. Conversely, evidence-led community solutions can go towards tackling the drivers of crime, thereby reducing victimisation, pressures on law enforcement and the economic impact of a failing justice system."
Our Working Paper series publishes research and analysis of an exploratory nature. Working papers are not formally peer-reviewed, but are intended to stimulate reflection and discussion on current and relevant areas. For more information on the series, and how to propose a paper, please visit our guidelines page.
Commentary and analysis
This month, Keir Monteith KC critiques the Leveson review's recommendation that judges should take over some jury trials. Monteith points to a number of issues that could be addressed in the criminal justice system instead: "there’s nothing wrong with the jury system," he argues, "but there’s a hell of a lot wrong with the justice system."
Also this month, our Research Director Dr Roger Grimshaw reflects on a new discussion paper by the Scottish Human Rights Commission (SCHR) on the Order for Lifelong Restriction (OLR). An OLR is an indeterminate sentence, which can be made once a court has ruled that an offender poses a risk of serious harm to the public. Grimshaw highlights the SCHR finding that some OLR prisoners are at risk of violations of their rights to liberty and to private and family life under the European Convention on Human Rights. He notes several questions raised by the SCHR paper and draws parallels with IPP.
Interested in submitting a comment piece? Drop us a line.
What’s what in The British Journal of Criminology?
For more than sixty years, The British Journal of Criminology has published some of the most significant research in the field.
A couple of open-access advance articles have been published since our last eBulletin:
- Allison Kurpiel and Susan McVie assess the potential association between four measures of household poverty and youth offending
- Clare Wiper and Jenn Glinski demonstrate the role of banks in addressing and preventing coerced debt in the context of intimate partner abuse
New edition of Prison Service Journal
September's issue of the PSJ (Edition 280) is focused on neurodiversity and guest edited by Dr Helen Wakeling and Rachael Mason. It features articles by Usman Anwar and others on the experience of prison by those with neurodivergence, Dr Luke Vinter on drawing on lived experience, and Laura Ramsay and Dr Karen Thorne on how prisons should respond to neurodiversity.
Prison Service Journal Archive
We are in the process of digitising and uploading the entire back catalogue of Prison Service Journal, from the first edition in 1960. A complete run from 1960 to 1991 is currently available, alongside a complete run from September 2010 to the present day.
This month the PSJ editors have highlighted articles from editions 7 through 9.
Edition 7
School for scoundrels by Godfrey Heaven explores the role of education in prison, its potential as a method to rehabilitate prisoners, and the precarious position of the teacher as outsider, serving “two masters: the education authority and the Prison Commission".
Edition 8
This edition of the PSJ (1963) includes reflections on the place and work of prison Chaplains:
“…the Chaplain needs, on the part of the prison staff from the Governor downwards, to be consciously and deliberately integrated into the prison scene and working day, as a relevant partner, not only with other specialist officers, but with the discipline staff.”
“There lies the challenge; that we all, according to our several insights and capacities, are called, in the exercise of our particular functions, to show respect for, and to give expression to, the highest assessment of human worth of which we are capable. In that we share the responsibility of a human relationship: we are interdependent: together we can present a system which is coherent and positive.”
Edition 9
Prison Reform and Society by Richard Hauser describes the interconnections between a range of social problems at the time (e.g. education, mental health, social isolation) and the penal system.
Book launch October 28th
This month our Chair Professor Elaine Player, has published a book together with Elaine Genders (UCL) entitled Therapeutic Community for Women Prisoners Re-imagining Rehabilitation and the Loss of Liberty.
Most research and policy debates on women’s imprisonment have rightly emphasised the need to divert women from short sentences, but relatively little attention has been paid to the needs of women serving medium and long sentences for serious offences. Feminist criminology has revealed an invidious history of women’s treatment in prison, demonstrating how reformist and rehabilitative interventions have reproduced and exacerbated existing states of inequality and oppression. This book draws on empirical research conducted in a democratic therapeutic community for women prisoners and questions whether a sentence that imposes a loss of liberty is inevitably destined to this fate. It discusses how progressive and widely supported policies have been undermined by often unspoken and unfounded assumptions. It aims to contribute to more constructive thought about the replacement of women’s prisons and how the loss of liberty can be reimagined to facilitate a reparative and reintegrative process of rehabilitation, informed by principles of social justice.
A book launch will be held at 6.00pm at Moot Court, The Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College, Strand, London WC2R 4LS
Speakers
- Elaine Player Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, The Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London
- Anastasia Chamberlen, Professor of Sociology, Warwick University
- Vera Baird KC, Member of Women's Justice Board
Our Director, Richard Garside, will be chairing the discussion.
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