After a period of relative calm, crime and the country’s response to it are again in the news and the inadequacy of that response, and failings in the criminal justice process, are again becoming evident.
Debates about criminal justice and penal reform usually focus, rightly, on policies, structures and the issues of the moment – the prison population, sentencing, rehabilitation, drugs, terrorism, and so on.
Governments have often had difficulty with expert advice, whether the subject (among recent examples) has been climate change, the culling of badgers, flood defences, the effects of the work programme or the conclusions to drawn from criminal statistics.
