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Reflecting on the events of 2017 and looking ahead to 2018, our Director, Richard Garside, said:
2017 has been one of the busiest years for the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies. We have published more than 20 reports, briefings and journal editions. We have held more than 20 events. We have met with ministers and government officials and our work has been cited in parliament
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Criminal justice across the UK has got smaller, but tougher, over recent years, according to a new briefing from the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies.
While recorded crime, prosecutions and convictions have all fallen over the past decade, a 'justice dividend' has yet to be realised in the number of people in prison, which have continued to rise.
The briefing –...
Holloway Prison Stories and Reclaim Holloway have released a short film making the case for a women’s building to be part of any future development of the former Holloway prison site in North London.
The film features interviews with women affected by the criminal justice system and women who provided support to those in Holloway.
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Our submission to the House of Commons Justice Committee inquiry into 'Transforming Rehabilitation' has now been published on the Committee's website.
Whatever the government's original intentions, we argue in the submission, the Transforming Rehabilitation programme 'is sabotaging, rather than transforming, probation work across England and Wales'.
Rather than 'attempting to make a badly-designed system work slightly less badly', we...
Our Director, Richard Garside, has commented on the National Audit Office report, Investigation into changes to Community Rehabilitation Company Contracts, which is published today.
Richard said:
The government admitted some months ago that it had bailed out the struggling private probation companies. Thanks to the National Audit Office, we now know that the bail-out was worth a third of a billion pounds. It is unlikely to be the last bail-out the
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Richard Garside, Director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies today commented on a damning annual report by the Chief Inspector of Probation, Dame Glenys Stacey.
'None of government’s stated aspirations for Transforming Rehabilitation have been met in any meaningful way', Dame Glenys noted. She went on to question whether the current model for probation can deliver sufficiently well'.
Speaking today, Richard said:
This really
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Our latest report, out today, reveals new evidence on the extent of unnecessary criminal record checks.
Based on Freedom of Information Act requests, Criminal record checks: is the volume of disclosures proportionate?, finds that nearly three quarters of the million or so convictions...
We've had a busy few weeks in the media, making interventions on a range of matters, from youth prisons to criminal records, knife violence, to the state of the probation service.
Last week, Richard, our Director, told The Times newspaper (£) that the government should end the 'failed' secure training centres experiment and close...
Our forthcoming briefing on criminal record checks is covered in this morning's Observer newspaper.
Out of a total of 4.2 million requests for disclosure of criminal records in 2015, the paper reports, only six percent produced any criminal record information. This involved 1,020,111 recorded convictions. Of these, some three quarters – 742,482 – dated back a decade or more.
Our...
In October, we called on the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, to bid for the now closed Holloway prison site, in a joint letter signed by several other organisations and individuals.
In the letter, we argued that a successful bid 'could set a benchmark for the disposal of prison sites and public land in London and across the country'.
On 10 November, Mr Khan announced, via...
Our latest briefing, on the challenges faced by the probation system and on the importance of robust, independent inspection, is out today.
The controversial security company G4S should be stripped of its contract to run Oakhill secure training centre, the Director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, Richard Garside, said today, following a...
