How do we solve the many problems besetting the criminal justice system?
Is it, indeed, possible to do so? Perhaps the system is so broken, the politics so cynical, as to doom criminal justice to endless bouts of short-term crisis management, and long-term managed decline.
“Depressing” is the adjective commonly used, by a range of commentators, reformers, advocates and activists, to describe the latest policy announcement about, the latest news from, prisons, probation, the courts, the police and other criminal justice institutions.
There is a lot in criminal justice to be depressed about, some might argue. A cheerful optimism, in the face of so much that is wrong, arguably borders on the naïve, if not on outright delusion.
The recent government announcement that it intends to end the Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence “by the end of this Parliament” is a rare, recent source of hope. Yet this concession to compassion and common sense only came about because of a lengthy and herculean effort by IPP prisoners and their families, supported by those inside and outside parliament.
The House of Commons Justice Committee first recommended wholesale reform of IPP in 2022. Four years on, the current government has finally decided to initiate a process that may result in the sentence’s complete abolition in the coming years.
If it takes so long to achieve such a small, though important, reform – IPP prisoners account for around 0.1 per cent of the total number of individuals processed by the criminal justice system each year – what hope is there of our politicians tackling the big stuff?
If our politicians can’t rise to the occasion, perhaps the answer is a Royal Commission. This is the call from MPs on the Justice Unions All Party Parliamentary Group, of which the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies is one of the founding members.
Highlighting, in a recent letter to the Prime Minister, “squalid and violent prison conditions, with ineffective education and rehabilitation programmes... excessive probation workloads, severe courts backlogs and intolerable pressures facing staff throughout the criminal justice system”, they called for a Royal Commission to help guide “holistic, end-to-end reform, rather than the current piecemeal approach of narrow reviews”.
While Royal Commissions are relatively straightforward to set up, they can take years to report, delaying much-needed action in the meantime. As Harold Wilson once put it, the problem with Royal Commissions is that they “take minutes and waste years”. Wilson, by the way, established ten Royal Commissions during his two periods in office as Prime Minister.
The solutions Royal Commissions come to may also create new problems, as much as they may help to resolve old ones. The last Royal Commission on criminal justice, which reported in 1993, led to the establishment of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC). Last year, and after a string of failings, the Justice Committee concluded that CCRC had “shown a remarkable inability to learn from its own mistakes”.
Now under new, improved, management, the CCRC is starting to address the injustices of the IPP sentence, having referred 25 cases to the Court of Appeal so far this year, with more to come.
There is no guarantee that the problems of the criminal justice system will be resolved over the next few years. Indeed, there are good reasons for thinking that the problems could get worse before they get better, if they get better at all.
Given this, a cheerful optimism, a belief in the inevitable triumph of progress, is probably misplaced. At the same time, pessimism or cynicism gets us nowhere.
Better, perhaps, is Christopher Lasch’s notion of “hope without optimism”: a realism about the challenges ahead, without being overwhelmed by them. An openness to the possibility of change, without assuming its inevitability. It also means retaining a capacity to identify opportunities where they are, and act on them, whether this is short-term work on specific problems, or longer-term thinking and work to solve general and systemic challenges.
Richard Garside
Director
Event horizon
As the autumn draws in, and winter beckons, our new events programme is guaranteed to help get you through the darkest of days ahead.
All our events combine the convenience of online attendance with the pleasure of meeting in-person. Bookings are online by default. When you book your place, you will be given the option of requesting in-person attendance. We’ll do our best to fit you in.
Violence Reduction: Promise, practice and the gaps in between
Monday 22 September | 1.00pm to 4.00pm
In partnership with our friends at the University of Birmingham, we’ll be discussing the work of violence reduction units: how they operate, current delivery challenges, and future challenges.
Violence reduction units bring together a range of partners at a local level to coordinate effective action on serious violence. The government recognises the importance of violence reduction units in contributing to its commitment to cutting violence, with pressure growing to fund the units on a more consistent, long-term basis.
For more information, and to book your place, check out the event page.
We’ll be holding a further event with the University of Birmingham on youth violence prevention in due course.
Breaking out of the Justice Loop: The next generation
Wednesday 11 November | 1.00 pm to 4.00 pm
With the National Women’s Justice Coalition, and advised by Liz Hogarth OBE and Naomi Delap, CEO of Birth Companions, we’ve embarked on a 12-month thought-leadership programme on women’s justice. Breaking out of the Justice Loop aims to challenge the status quo, champion innovative solutions and unleash bold new ideas to achieve genuine systems change.
It’s a genuinely collaborative approach, rooted in agreed principles and driven by an optimism about the possibilities for change.
The first event, on Wednesday, 11 November, will be looking to the future. Every criminalised woman today was once a girl who needed help. The event will be developing a compelling case for policies and practices in the here and now that can reduce prosecutions, punishment and imprisonment in the future.
Breaking out of the Justice Loop: Public Purse and Public Health
Dates to be announced
We’re planning two further events, in 2027. One will develop a convincing case to finance the shift from crisis-driven wasteful spending on prisons to early intervention and prevention. The other event will conduct a thought-experiment on scaling up a systems-wide public health approach to women’s criminal justice.
Want to receive event notifications, and contribute to the development of this programme? The first bulletin for this new programme is going out in October. You can sign up to receive it here.
We are grateful to the JABBS Foundation for Women and Girls for their generous support of the Breaking out of the Justice Loop programme.
Running commentary
We carry ongoing commentary and analysis on our website from our staff, partners and external contributors. If you think you have something to say, check out our submission guidelines.
Vagrant disregard
The Vagrancy Act was repealed this summer, but as Rona Epstein points out, homeless people may still be sent to prison for sleeping in public spaces. The Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has launched a national drive to offer “a route off the streets” for every rough sleeper by Christmas. Going to prison should not be one of those routes.
Caledonian confinement
As the government south of the border works to abolish the Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence once and for all, Nicola Creesay reminds us that Scotland’s version of the IPP – the Order for Lifelong Restriction (OLR) – is alive and kicking, at great emotional and psychological cost to those subject to it. As she concludes: “Ultimately, the issue is not confined to whether the OLR manages risk, but whether it does so, without creating new risks and harms, in a manner consistent with human dignity and human rights.”
Cell out?
While government plans to abolish the IPP sentence are welcome, it seems intent on repeating the mistakes of the past when it comes to prison building. As Joe Sim observes, “If building more prisons is the answer, then ministers are asking the wrong questions”. Digging through the dusty archives of failed prison-building programmes of the past, Sim calls for a clean break from the past, rather than more of the same.
Off the press: Behind the decline
Our report last year – Smaller, but tougher – showed that alongside a sharp decline in the number of young adults going through the courts, those that were prosecuted faced harsher treatment. We also found that prosecutions of white young adults had fallen faster than for other groups, and that Black young adults were still most likely to be given custodial sentences.
Last month we returned to the theme, with Behind the decline: a new report that looks at what is driving these trends, and what meaningful reform might look like.
None of this is new. Government reviews have flagged these problems before. That’s exactly why Behind the decline doesn’t just restate them. It digs into how disparity gets created and kept in place, so we can work out what actually needs to change.
Analysis alone won’t fix discrimination in the justice system, but to move the dial, we need to work from the evidence, not around it. Behind the decline is a starting point, not the last word. Plenty of people across the sector are already doing important work on disparity, and we want to build on that, not duplicate it. If that’s you, we’d love to hear from you.
We are grateful to the Transition to Adulthood (T2A) Alliance, convened by the Barrow Cadbury Trust, for supporting this work.
Leave them kids alone
Could the prison capacity crisis offer the government an opportunity to end child imprisonment? Over the last two decades, the number of children in custody has decreased from about 3,000 down to just about 400. This summer, the Starmer Labour government set out its intentions to build on that reduction and transform youth custody by moving away from large custodial institutions towards a smaller, more child-centred setting.
We were pleased to sign a joint statement, published this month by the End Child Imprisonment campaign, calling on the government to use this prison capacity crisis as an opportunity to end child imprisonment.
No place like home
Our Director, Richard Garside, co-authored a chapter on breaking the link between prison and homelessness, for a book published by Policy Press. In the chapter, Richard, and his co-author Luke Arundel, delve into the current state of resettlement services, and the importance of adequate funding for prison and probation services, as well as public services more generally.
Also in the same book is an article by Andy Burnham, which may be as close as Richard is allowed to get to the Prime Minister in the next few years.
Out and about
Among the events we attended or spoke at over the past month were:
- Stop and Search: Our Research and Policy Manager Liat Tuv went to a strategy day organised by StopWatch. Among items discussed was the end-to-end review of the police accountability system, which is due to make its recommendations by the end of this year. It’s one of those reviews that’s more important than its innocuous, even boring-sounding, name suggests. It could have implications for future practice in this area and is worth keeping an eye on.
- Trew’s law: Liat also went, with our Research Director Roger Grimshaw, to an event held by APPEAL, as part of their work campaigning for automatic reviews of imprisoned police officers’ files. APPEAL are calling for an independent review of past convictions secured by serving or former police officers sentenced to immediate imprisonment. The proposed duty would be called Trew’s law, in recognition of Winston Trew’s tireless work to highlight the wrongful convictions associated with jailed police officer Derek Ridgewell.
- Not guilty: Richard spoke at an event organised by the Association of Prisoners Maintaining Innocence, which discussed a range of issues from jury decisions, prosecution decisions, and access to good quality legal representation. Richard observed that while we were all formally equal under the law, wild variations in the income and wealth of defendants meant that, in practice, some were more equal than others.
What's what in The British Journal of Criminology?
For more than sixty years, The British Journal of Criminology has published some of the most significant research in the field.
Among the open-access articles published over the past month are:
- Ludmilla Bogdan on the stories sex traffickers tell themselves to justify their trade
- Helena Machado and Susana de Noronha on the use of DNA to infer the faces of unknown suspects
- Tom Kemp and Philippa Tomczak on court cells
- Corinna Kruse on why DNA evidence is rarely straightforward
- Caterina Paternoster and Francesco Calderoni on collaboration among organised crime groups
- Tobias Kammersgaard and others on county lines
- Esin Damar on medical deviance among UK private healthcare providers
- Colin King and Hannah Quirk on compensation after Andrew Malkinson and the Post Office scandals
Prison Service Journal
The latest edition of Prison Service Journal takes a step back in time to the 18th and 19th centuries.
- Clare Anderson, Tammy Ayres, Mellissa Ifill, Kellie Moss and Kevin Pilgrim explore the colonial legacies of the British prison systems
- Articles by Anna McKay and Julie Brumby look at 18th and 19th century prison ships
- Rosalind Crone writes about prison schoolmasters and schoolmistresses
- Paul Finegan shifts to the challenges of curating a prison museum
- Alyson Brown and Michael Cawley explore the use of tobacco in prison
- Kiran Mehta writes about the day-to-day management of London’s late-Georgian prisons
- Elena Ghiggino examines the experiences of Black people with criminal convictions in the early 19th century.
Prison Service Journal archive
We are in the process of digitising and uploading the entire back catalogue of Prison Service Journal, from the first edition in 1960. A complete run from 1960 to 1995 is currently available, alongside a complete run from July 2010 to the present day.
This month, the editors have highlighted articles from editions 40, 41 and 42.
Edition 40
An article in this edition, by D. A. Godfrey, entitled The Verge of Despair: A Personal Response to the May Report, offers a sharp insider critique of the May Report, arguing that it failed to address the Prison Service’s deeper problems. It challenges calls for more resources, exposes inefficient practices, and questions whether prison expansion can ever solve overcrowding. Its critique of “positive custody”, parole and indeterminate sentences makes it a provocative read for those interested in justice, staff morale and the purpose of imprisonment.
Edition 41
Violence in a Moral Vacuum, by Harry Entwistle, was written in response to the May Report (1978–79), which investigated UK prisons amid rising overcrowding, poor conditions, and staff unrest. The article itself reflects a wider shift in thinking at the time, drawing on social psychology, to argue that overcrowding doesn’t just strain capacity, but also risks moral deterioration through routinisation and dehumanisation. In context, these warnings were of course made at relatively low population levels by today’s standards, but the sense of impending catastrophe is familiar; the prison population had just passed about 43,000 and was already seen as close to crisis. Indeed, Roy Jenkins, Home Secretary at the time, had commented that the Prison Service would collapse if the population exceeded 42,000. The article is therefore significant as an exemplar of longstanding concerns about overcrowding’s deeper institutional and ethical effects.
Edition 42
An article by N.C.P., a serving lifer, presents violence in prison as something experienced and interpreted from within the system rather than as an abstract issue. It argues that while some violence reflects patterns brought in from wider society, much of it is generated by the prison itself – through power imbalances, poor conditions, and limited avenues for justice – leading prisoners to view violence as a rational or even necessary response to frustration, inequality, and perceived hypocrisy in authority.
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What is more, you also get free use of a separate board meeting room at no additional cost.
All this from just £34 per sq ft—hard to beat in central London.
Find out more here or contact Jeanie Reid at info@crimeandjustice.org.uk.
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