UK Justice Policy Review

UK Justice Policy Review 8: From the 2017 General Election to the summer recess

This edition takes the story forward from the June 2017 General Election to the parliamentary recess of summer 2018. Just over a year, in which there were many opportunities for reflection on current criminal justice performance and priorities, but minds began to become preoccupied with the increasingly imminent prospect of the UK leaving the EU in 2019.

The year saw further signs of a simmering crisis in criminal justice, as fundamental police structures and priorities began to be questioned, the prison and probation services received even more ‘bad notices’, and a new relationship with international criminal justice partners in Europe following Brexit remained to be negotiated.

The coalition years examines criminal justice developments across the United Kingdom over the five years between 2010 and 2015.

It also considers the challenges facing an incoming United Kingdom government after the May 2015 General Election.

All three United Kingdom criminal justice jurisdictions are covered: England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The process of criminal justice reform is, at heart, a political project, shaped by, and shaping in its turn, an array of economic, cultural, historical and ideological influences.

It is this articulation of the political and the criminal justice, during the period 2010 to 2015, that this report seeks to draw out.