A participant at one of our recent events remarked that it left him feeling “the most hopeful I have felt in some time”.
There is much that is difficult about the current state of the justice system; about the stuckness of current criminal justice policy-making; about the narrow nature of the political debate. It is easy to end up feeling daunted and demoralised.
At the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, we aim to be realistic about the very real challenges of, and barriers to, meaningful reform. We also try to lean into those challenges, holding open a space for hopeful conversations, critical dialogue, and high-quality thinking and research on what genuine change might look like, and how it might be achieved.
This might mean doggedly pursuing specific issues: joint enterprise reform, for instance. It might also mean posing the bigger questions, such as at our recent event on the intersections of race and gender in prisons and the wider justice system.
We do not have an exclusive focus on women and the criminal justice system, but the cause of a fair deal for criminalised women, and those vulnerable to criminalisation, has been an ongoing priority for us.
We launched our latest programme – Breaking Out of the Justice Loop – earlier this week. Ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Corston Report, in March 2027, we will be working in partnership with the National Women’s Justice Coalition (NWJC), exploring how investment, joined-up delivery and effective prevention might help to nudge the women’s justice system out of the cycle of almost perpetual crisis.
This new initiative builds on a collaboration we started with NWJC, Liz Hogarth OBE and Naomi Delap, CEO of Birth Companions, last year.
It is in good part thanks to Liz, Naomi and the NWJC’s Abbi Ayers that this programme is possible. I am very grateful to all three of them, and to the JABBS Foundation for Women and Girls for giving us the start-up funding to get the Breaking out of the Justice Loop programme off the ground.
