Transformative solutions to criminal justice problems

The Centre's Senior Policy Associate, Rebecca Roberts, has co-authored an article published in the first volume of Justice, Power and Resistance. The article was published in 2016 and has now been made available for free download.

The article, titled 'What lies beyond criminal justice? Developing transformative solutions' is co-authored with JM Moore of Newman University and draws on the Centre's learning from the first three years of our Justice Matters project.

The introduction to the article reads:

Criminal justice failure has been well-documented. The traditional response to this failure has been to seek out alternatives. However, by their very nature, alternatives are usually conceived and positioned in relation to the failed criminal justice interventions they seek to replace. In this paper we focus on an initiative, Justice Matters, which seeks to provide a model, not for developing alternatives to criminal justice failure, but instead the creation of transformative solutions to a range of social problems. To illustrate the potential of this approach we explore two examples: drugs and violence against women.

Central to our argument is that for nearly all social problems, solutions already exist. But they exist beyond the boundaries of criminal justice and its experts. By drawing on appropriate knowledge – health for drugs; and feminism for gendered violence; – aligned to a political commitment to social justice, we argue it is possible to develop transformative solutions which can provide the foundation for a society that lies beyond criminal justice.

Justice, Power and Resistance, is the new the journal of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control. 

Click here to see the full list of contributors and articles on the topic of 'Non-penal real utopias' and to find out more about how you can subscribe to the journal or purchase an individual volume.