eBulletin, 23 December 2023

In September we published our new strategy, the first stage of what we see as a decade-long journey to our 100th anniversary as an organisation in 2031.

The strategy sets out our purpose: fostering “lively spaces for collaboration and learning, where conventional criminal justice policy agendas are scrutinised and challenged, fresh knowledge and ideas are discussed, and transformational solutions are developed”.

Since its publication, our trustees and staff have been working on the practical implementation of our statement of purpose, and on the wider analysis and commitments the strategy sets out.

The strategy, for instance, outlines three priorities:

1. the delivery of connected and impactful programmes;
2. improving our capacity to work with our various networks of partners, collaborators, members and supporters; and
3. investing in our organisational foundations, including our building and our various mechanisms for communication and engagement.

Through our programmes, we have scored some notable successes. Over the past decade, work initially developed by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies has led to the establishment of three new organisations: Drug Science, One Small Thing, and Community Plan for Holloway.

Impact can be as much about what you give flight to, as it is about what you hold onto.

Our decade-long UK Justice Policy Review programme, and our ongoing partnership working on the significant injustices of joint enterprise prosecutions and the imprisonment for public protection sentence, are just some examples of other high-impact programmes of recent years.

While we have catalysed and achieved a number of notable programme successes, these have not necessarily been complemented by a consistent, long-term investment in our organisational foundations, and in the networks that help sustain our work and give it meaning. The risk is of solid programme successes, built on slightly wobbly foundations.

The vagaries of funding models are part of the challenge here. It is often easier to secure grant-funding for focused pieces of work, with relatively straight-forward outcome measures, than for broader-based, public educational and networking activity, the results of which sometimes appear more intangible.

But it is also about ensuring clarity of purpose, and the focus and discipline necessary to deliver on it.

Over the next few years, we will therefore commit to laying down the foundations necessary to sustain our work over the long-term, including:

• investing in our building as a hub of activities for those based in it, and those who visit and use it.
• deepening and broadening our existing networks of partners and collaborators, members and supporters.
• establishing a consistent set of publication, event and online materials, offering broad-based knowledge and ideas on criminal justice, to complement the more in-depth, focused work on particular criminal justice issues that we will continue to undertake.

We will be announcing more on our developing plans in the new year.

Richard Garside
Director

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On our website

We were very sorry to hear of the death, earlier this month, of David Ramsbotham, former Chief Inspector of Prisons and a powerful advocate for prison and criminal justice reform.

Back in 1997, we published an interview with him, in our then quarterly magazine, Criminal Justice Matters. “I don’t call it a criminal justice system”, he said in the interview, “It’s a structure with a number of different agencies going their own way”. In the same interview, he also said it was crucial that those working with children and young people in prison really had to want to work with them. “If you don’t like them and you’re not happy working with them,” he said, “don’t go near them because you’ll damage them”. And he criticised a women’s prison where 80 per cent of the staff were male. “Quite apart from the fact that there are many activities that males should not conduct, like searches and so on, how can such a women’s establishment, full of abused people, function?”.

His message, from an interview a quarter of a century ago, was full of moral clarity, urgency and sense of purpose. Qualities so often lacking in today’s discussions on our crisis-ridden prisons.

You can read the interview here.

Our Chair of Trustees, Charlie Weinberg, got to know David Ramsbotham well during her time as Executive Director of Safe Ground. In her tribute to our him on our website, she writes:

“David was, in my 12 years of knowing him, a generous, funny, compassionate, engaging, charming and committed man with a range of passions and interests, a sophisticated appreciation of absurdity and a definite affinity for sarcasm. In many ways, my kind of guy.

“He was enormously proud of and impassioned by his underrated, underused and out of fashion acronym, PANT. He would raise his voice and happily declare ‘People Are Not Things!’ over a cup of tea anywhere, be it the House of Lords or a coffee shop.”

Our director Richard Garside spoke to The Observer in late November, commenting on new findings on the police failure to investigate crime. “When the police appear unresponsive or indifferent,” he told the paper, “it corrodes public confidence and feeds cynicism”. Richard wrote up this short piece on the public's ambivalent relationship with the police, on the back of The Observer piece.

In his latest article, former probation office Mike Guilfoyle writes about his supervision of a career-criminal who went on the run. Sat in a music venue on a night out, he writes, "my attention was drawn to a... conspiratorial huddle...I was convinced that Kojo was part of this group... As the music stopped and the lights came on, I looked again. This time he was nowhere to be seen. Was it really Kojo I had seen through the smoky haze?".

You can read Mike Guilfoyle’s piece here.

Over ten years ago, our Research Director Roger Grimshaw undertook research, sponsored by the Probation Boards’ Association and the Magistrates’ Association, on public knowledge and perceptions of sentencing. The research pointed to the importance of developing accountable criminal justice policy through democratic engagement rather than using ill-designed opinion polls that fail to capture underlying perceptions.

Drawing on that experience, Roger assesses a new online survey from the Sentencing Council for England and Wales. Rather than encouraging meaningful democratic engagement, Roger argues, the Sentencing Council treats the criminal justice system “as a brand with a public image that can be improved. The question arising is whether the promotion of media messages is really sufficient to meet the aim of providing adequate platforms for democratic discussion”. Read Roger’s commentary here.

New year, new home

If you’re looking for office space, close to Westminster and with excellent transport links, we might have what just you’re looking for.

We have two self-contained, air-conditioned office spaces available from early 2023: one measuring 474 square feet, the other 650 square feet. We also have options for flexible desk space and meeting room usage in our building.

If you are interested in joining a growing community of like-minded criminal justice organisations, or just want to find out more, drop us an email.

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Support our work

In the last 12 months, around one pound in every ten we received in income came from individual donations. We are so appreciative of the vital support we receive from our donors and supporters.

If you like what we do, and can afford to make a donation to support our important work, we would be very grateful.

You can also spread the word about our work by forwarding on this bulletin to others and encouraging them to sign up.