Reflections on 10 Years of the British Journal of Community Justice
| Author | Mike Nellis, Paul Senior |
| Pages | 41-55 |
41
REFLECTIONS ON 10 YEARS OF THE BRITISH
JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY JUSTICE
Dialogue between Professor Paul Senior, co-editor of the BJCJ since its inception in 2002
and Mike Nellis, emeritus professor at Strathclyde University and BJCJ Advisory Board
member
Mike Thanks for the opportunity to discuss the 10th anniversary of the British Journal
of Community Justice. The first and obvious thing I’d like to ask you is, why did
you start this journal in the first place? Where was the space in the market for
yet another criminology journal? Who was your target audience?
Paul I think th e discussion started probably about four years before we actually
produced the first issue and grew from a conversation b etween Dave Ward
and myself ab out trying to create a journal which mirrored the British Journ al of
Social Work but was focussed much more exclusively on community justice,
probation practice, and restorative justice. We felt it just did not exist in the
market, the Howard Journ al was slightly more to do with penal affairs, Probation
Journal tended to produce much shorter articles and at that time before its re -
badging, was much less of a peer r eviewed journal and there was nothing there
at a time of major change for probation, a time of developments in training and
so on, that we felt there could well be a distinctive spot in the market. So Dave
and I put some ideas together, spent a couple of years debating it and considered
submitting it to a commercial publisher but for various reasons we just didn’t get
off the ground, mainly being just too busy. Then Dave had an idea that we
actually engaged our collective staff groups at Sheffield Hallam and De Montfort,
and at that point we got support from both the two staff groups and Brian
Williams came forward to co-edit with me and that’s how the journal started.
Mike Did it have something to do with the fact that both Sheffield Hallam and De
Montfort were deeply involved in probation training?
Paul Indeed, the first issues of the journal were in 2002 and that was four years into
the new arrangements for training so certainly both of us were delivering training
contracts around different parts of the country, so both of us had a continued
investment in probation practi ce in this new post-social work world. De Montfort
were running programmes in the East of England and later in the Mid lands, we
British Journal of Community Justice
©2013 Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield
ISSN 1475-0279
Vol. 10(3): 41-55
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