New Year message

Looking ahead to 2017, our Director Richard Garside said:

There is a growing consensus that criminal justice is not working.

Thousands of our fellow citizens are unnecessarily imprisoned each year, often in squalid conditions. Probation in England and Wales is in a mess following an ill-conceived privatisation. All too often, gaps in other services are leaving the police to act as social service of last resort.

Defendants are facing trial with inadequately funded legal representation. Victims of miscarriages of justice all too commonly lack the means to challenge their convictions. Racism and discrimination within the criminal justice process feeds off and contributes to the racism and discrimination that scars wider society.

During 2017 the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies will remain committed to expressing its positions confidently, with a willingness to speak truth to power and to make the hidden and ignored known. Through partnership and coalition-building, advocacy and research, we will work to inspire real solutions to the problems society faces, so that many responses that criminalise and punish are no longer required.