Editorial
| Author | Kevin Wong |
As my co-editor Jean Hine observed in a past issue of our journal: ‘The Criminal Justice System, along with many public services, is in a state of flux, with numerous proposals, white papers and legislation in various stages of implementation’ (Hine 2012:1).
Certainly in England and Wales, one might be tempted to suggest that over the last decade or more the criminal justice system has been in a permanent state of flux. The part-renationalisation of probation continues in England and Wales (MoJ 2019) in the wake of the lamentable implementation of the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms (MoJ 2013) which were widely criticised by, amongst others, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation (HMIP 2019). All of us with a stake in the system and with a commitment to one that adequately serves the moral as well as functional needs of all stakeholders, from practitioners to people with convictions to society more generally, can only wait to see how the changes will unfold.
As we go to press, general election campaigning in the United Kingdom is underway. No doubt criminal justice policy will feature, as it frequently does. A wearily familiar, populist punitivism has already had a public airing, since Boris Johnson’s succession (in the summer) as Prime Minister, with calculated announcements about more police officers, more prison places and prisoners serving longer sentences (BBC 2019). Recent polling suggests that after Brexit and health, crime, immigration and the economy remain important issues (Curtice, 2019).
In the meantime, we aim to provide an alternative, much more considered examination of criminal justice policy and practice. Following our re-launch earlier this year, on behalf of the Editorial Board I am pleased to present the next issue of our journal. It includes papers that span the range of criminal justice activity, from policing through to prisons, drawing on experiences from the United Kingdom and from the Republic of Ireland. If there is a theme which runs through these papers, it is perhaps that austerity and the frequent changes in the criminal justice system have led to an increasingly homogenised view of all participants – people with convictions, staff and victims – which is leading to some of the problems highlighted in these articles. The papers in their different ways remind us of the need to adequately acknowledge and work with individuality across all these stakeholder groups.
Our first paper, the inaugural lecture by...
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