Educate, collaborate, organise
Last Month in Criminal Justice, our popular online panel discussion that we ran during lockdown, is back later this year.
On the first Wednesday of the month, starting this coming October, I will be chewing over the previous month’s developments in criminal justice with an expert panel of practitioners, policy experts and campaigners.
We’ll be sharing more information shortly on how you can watch and participate in Last Month in Criminal Justice. In the meantime, our back catalogue of Last Month in Criminal Justice content is available here.
As a charity with a public education mission, we have long-considered improved knowledge and understanding of crime and criminal justice to be an inherent good. The relaunch of Last Month in Criminal Justice forms part of this commitment. We are currently planning further educational materials – publications, events, webinars, podcasts and more – and will be announcing these in due course.
We will be complementing these general educational activities with in-depth pieces of work that focus on particular examples of injustice, and on areas of strong public interest. Two current examples of this in-depth work are our project on the dreadful Imprisonment for Public Protection sentence, and our recently-launched initiative on young adult safety.
Broad-based educational work and in-depth programmes form two pillars of our work, going forward. The third relates to our building.
When we bought our building in London over a decade ago, we saw the purchase in fairly conventional terms: as an office and place of work for our staff and partner organisations. Lockdown changed that, with more flexible, less office-based working patterns now the norm.
Earlier this year, we embarked on a major refurbishment project, with the aim of developing our building as a hub for collaborative activities: for us, for the other organisations based at our building, and for a growing network of individuals and organisations who use our facilities.
In our view, the best ideas for reform and change often come about through shared learning.
By combining broad-based educational work and in-depth programmes, with real-world creative collaboration in our building, we hope to open up new ways of thinking about, and acting on, the problems of criminal justice, and to chart new routes out of the monotony of repeated policy failure.