Understanding the UK justice systems
Over the past few months, the Centre's trustees and staff have been working on a new strategy, to guide our work towards our 100th anniversary as an organisation in 2031.
As part of the new strategy, we will be committing to creating lively spaces for collaboration and learning, where conventional criminal justice policy agendas are scrutinised and challenged, fresh knowledge and ideas are discussed, and transformational solutions are developed.
We will be publishing the new strategy in the autumn. In the meantime, we have been a bit quieter than usual, including in the frequency of our bulletins and other activities, as we finalise our thinking and plan our work programme.
Behind the scenes, though, the work continues. Today, we publish a new report, Criminal justice systems in the UK: the essential guide to criminal justice institutions across the UK.
We started planning what became Criminal justice systems in the UK in 2019, before the world had even heard of Covid, as one of the legacy projects to emerge from our UK Justice Policy Review programme, which ran from 2010 to 2020.
At around the same time, we were approached by the Department for International Development (DfID), who were interested in understanding more about the UK criminal justice systems, to help inform their work advising governments in low- and middle-income countries on justice reforms.
A combination of the disruptions of lockdown, governmental reorganisation (DfiD became part of an expanded Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) while our work was ongoing), and the inherent complexity of the task meant the report took a lot longer to produce than originally planned.
We got there in the end. It was worth the wait.
As readers of our UK Justice Policy Review reports will know, no single criminal justice system operates across the United Kingdom. Three, distinct set of arrangements operate in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and in the combined jurisdiction of England and Wales. Criminal justice systems in the UK examines the different police, prosecution, court and prison arrangements across these three criminal justice jurisdictions.
Alongside detailed description of formal arrangements, Criminal justice systems in the UK includes case study examples, illustrating how agencies work in practice and how change happens.
No publication that we are aware of manages to do quite what Criminal justice systems in the UK seeks to do: combining breadth analysis of most of the UK's main criminal justice agencies, with depth analysis of key issues.
We could not cover everything. There is nothing, for instance, on probation or the youth justice system. We hope to return to these and other criminal justice areas and agencies in due course.
I would like to thank my colleague and co-author, Roger Grimshaw, who, as always, was a pleasure to collaborate with, and Justin Haccius, formerly of DfID and the FCDO. Justin kept us on our toes and asked all the right questions during the drafting phase.
Criminal justice systems in the UK is a much better report than it would otherwise have been, thanks to his input.