Our latest eBulletin, sent out to subscribers on Friday, 30 May
An editorial I came across recently captures well the crisis currently engulfing the prison and wider criminal justice system.
Prison population levels are “unacceptable”, with “no signs that a ceiling has been reached”. Given the difficult economic times, there is “no money available for the construction of expensive new prisons”. Indeed, “many worthwhile schemes to improve the lot of both staff and inmate have had to be postponed or cancelled”.
Perhaps if we rethought our priorities, the editorial suggests, we might develop better solutions to social problems, “without spending vast sums of money” on prisons.
The editorial, written at a time when “unacceptable” meant 42,000 in prison in England and Wales – less than half the current number of around 88,000 – was published in the January 1977 edition of Prison Service Journal.
An echo from a bygone age, it could have been written yesterday.
History may not repeat itself in the literal sense of the same events recurring. Yet prisons policy does appear locked in something of a doom loop.
Two years after the Prison Service Journal editorial, the 1979 report of the May committee inquiry into prisons across the United Kingdom recommended that effective policies “to reduce the populations should receive urgent examination”.
Twelve years after May, the 1991 Woolf report recommended diversion from custody, to reduce the unnecessary use of prison. Twelve years after Woolf, the Carter report in 2003 found “no convincing evidence that further increases in the custody rate or sentence length will significantly reduce crime”.
In 2010 the House of Commons Justice Committee warned of a “crisis of sustainability” in the criminal justice system, and criticised an “unthinking acceptance… of punishment… for its own sake”. In 2019, the Committee observed that “a series of political and policy choices by successive governments and parliaments” has been “a significant contributor” to the rising prison population.
And now the Gauke review into sentencing, published last week, proposes a series of reforms intended to reduce the current prison population by around 10 per cent.
While welcoming Gauke’s report, the Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, also recommitted the government to building an additional 14,000 prison places by 2031, “the largest expansion since the Victorian era”.
How do we get out of this doom loop?
I don’t think it is as simple as saying that politicians just need to be ‘brave’, or ‘do the right thing’, or follow the evidence, or spend now to save later. Perhaps if there was a simple solution, it would have been found by now.
Today’s politicians are, though, dealing with the weight of the decisions of all the previous generations: the physical infrastructure of our prisons, courts and other buildings; the institutional arrangements, which are often highly resistant to change; the inherited common sense of how to do policy in this area.
They are also, though, haunted by imagined futures: the judgment of history, or, more prosaically, the judgment of the voters at the next election.
Even if there were an ambition to try something different – and it is far from clear to me that there is – the fear of future failure weighs heavily. Far easier to stick with tried and tested policies, even if no one really believes they will be successful.
History may not repeat itself mechanically. But today’s politicians are making decisions burdened by the past, fearful of a future they appear unwilling to shape for the better.
Far from building a better future, they risk rebuilding a dismal past.
I am going to be exploring the way that past, present and future combine in the making of criminal justice policy at our event – Echoes of tomorrow – on 24 June.
I hope to see you there.
Richard Garside
Director
Upcoming event: Echoes of tomorrow
As mentioned above, on 24 June, three leading criminologists – Michael Fiddler, Travis Linnemann and Theo Kindynis – will discuss the influence of the past and the future on the present of criminal justice policy with our Director, Richard Garside.
Using the metaphor of ‘ghosts’ to capture the way that present-day policy-making is ‘haunted’ by past decisions and future expectations, Fiddler, Linnemann and Kindynis offer fresh ways of understanding current policy dilemmas, and why our current approaches to crime and punishment seem to rely so much on older, failed experiments.
In recognition of the originality of their work, their article – ‘Ghost Criminology’ – was awarded this year’s prestigious Radzinowicz Price for the best article in The British Journal of Criminology.
For more information, and to register, please visit the event page here.
Parliamentary briefing highlights research on knife crime and domestic abuse interventions
This month, the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, in collaboration with the University of Birmingham, hosted a Breakfast Briefing at the Palace of Westminster.
Sponsored by Preet Gill MP, the well-attended briefing brought together parliamentarians, academics, and policymakers to explore the evidence behind interventions targeting knife crime and domestic abuse.
In light of the Labour Government's commitment to halving knife crime and Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) within a decade, the briefing focused on the evaluation findings of research from knife crime and domestic abuse interventions. A summary of the research can be found here.
New Working Paper — Reimagining youth safety
In the fifth paper of our Working Paper series, Njilan Morris-Jarra examines how youth practitioners navigate the challenges of multi-agency work, specifically in their interactions with police while supporting young people in proximity to serious violence and crime.
For over 15 years, various holistic, multi-agency and public health approaches to youth in proximity to violence have centred partnerships between police and community services.
Drawing on interviews with 13 youth practitioners, as well as her own research and experience, Morris-Jarra outlines the conflicting priorities and logics underlying these partnerships with the police. She identifies three central themes from the interviews: punitive vs. welfare-driven approaches, racial discrimination, and a victim-perpetrator overlap. Morris-Jarra also outlines the strategies that youth practitioners employ to address the challenges that conflicting logics and priorities create.
Interested in writing a Working Paper? Have a look at the guidelines here.
Commentary and analysis
This month, Dr Simone Deegan suggests how recent research from Australia can inform UK thinking on murder sentencing in joint enterprise cases.
Meanwhile, Melanie Jameson proposes that autism needs to be taken into account when considering provisions for people serving an IPP sentence.
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 number of open-access advance articles have been published this month:
- Vania Ceccato, Yuhao Kang, Jonatan Abraham, Per Näsman, Fábio Duarte, Song Gao, Lukas Ljungqvist, Fan Zhang and Carlo Ratti assess what causes an urban environment to be perceived as safe
- Carlos Ponce and Martin Bouchard investigate how illicit organizations anticipate and prepare for disturbances
- Cait Jobson, Nikki Rutter and Josie Phillips explore how creative resources can support and promote children’s help-seeking practices when they are victims of domestic abuse.
- Clare Gunby, Khatidja Chantler, Vicky Baker and Kim Heyes identify how gendered intersectional dynamics are framed in Domestic Homicide Reviews
- David Buil-Gil examines the association of unstructured spare time with individual differences in crime and crime trends
- Paolo Campana, Cecilia Meneghini and Alyssa Knisley investigate the impact of organized crime on community-level violence outside settings traditionally associated with organized crime
- Caroline Miles, Rosemary Broad and Meg Oldham explore the abuse of women who run, and how women negotiate and respond to this form of gender-based violence
- Tim Head, Emmanuel Onapa, Dawud Smith and Infinity Agbetu explore the nature, impact, and forms of resistance to, police racial profiling
- Anne-Marie Livingstone examines police violence towards Black youth and other youth of colour in a neighbourhood of Montreal
Prison Service Journal
This month’s issue (number 278) focuses on developments in youth justice across Europe.
Articles in this edition include a survey of youth justice in Europe by Frieder Dünkel, an examination of youth courts in UK and Europe by Stewart Field and Stefan Machura, and Colin Webster on poverty, ethnicity and youth justice in Europe.
The whole issue is available to download here.
The Prison Service Journal (PSJ) was first published in July 1960 and archival issues offer a fascinating insight into topics of concern at the time, which also have resonances today. This month the editorial team have highlighted three archival articles of interest:
- The Prison Service since the War in edition 1 of the PSJ (1960) — based on the reflections of the then Chairman of the Prison commission — discusses a series of of initiatives that stem from the Criminal Justice Bill 1938, and the challenges in the progressing the 5-year plan of 1945.
- Give us the tools in edition 2 of the PSJ (1961) pleas for a clearer sense of direction in the Prison Service.
- Work of a Psychiatric Team in an Institution for Young Offenders in edition 3 of the PSJ (1961) describes the work of a psychiatric team working within the borstal system in Scotland.
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 1985 is currently available, alongside a complete run from September 2010 to the present day.
News from our partners
This month, the National Women’s Justice Coalition and the Women’s Budget Group have published a joint briefing that pulls together key data, evidence and arguments to support the financial case for the Women’s Centre Model and investment in women’s specialist services. The briefing is intended to inform and support women’s justice policy development, and specifically the strategy of the Women’s Justice Board.
Next month, APPEAL will be holding an event to launch a new report, Joint Enterprise on Trial, which looks at how joint enterprise is being used in serious criminal trials at London’s Old Bailey Crown Court. The report is based on six months of court observation conducted by APPEAL researchers including Dr Nisha Waller (author of the legal dragnet). These observations revealed how young, mostly Black men and teenagers are being placed at risk of wrongful conviction due to the overuse and misuse of joint enterprise. Limited tickets are available for the launch event on 26 June. For more information on the event, and to register, visit this eventbrite page.
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