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The Lammy Review and race and bias in the criminal justice system

Document Cited authorities 1 Cited in Related
Vincent
Date01 December 2017
Published date01 December 2017
DOI10.1177/0264550517740461
Subject MatterEditorial
PRB740461 333..336
Editorial
The Journal of Community and Criminal Justice
Probation Journal
The Lammy Review and
2017, Vol. 64(4) 333–336
ª The Author(s) 2017
race and bias in the
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DOI: 10.1177/0264550517740461
criminal justice system
journals.sagepub.com/home/prb
The Lammy Review into the treatment of, and outcomes for, Black, Asian and
Minority Ethnic (BAME) individuals in the criminal justice system was published in
September, and a summary is included in our Research & Reports section. The
review was established to make recommendations for improvements to reduce the
proportion of BAME offenders within the criminal justice system. Lammy identifies a
number of key areas requiring attention, including addressing the issues that con-
tribute to entry into the system as well as broader questions of staff diversity,
legitimacy and trust. All of these are relevant to probation services also. While
probation within England and Wales has a long history of championing anti-
discriminatory practice, as previous contributions to this journal attest, this cannot
be lost sight of as service provision becomes more fragmented.
The figures on the extent to which BAME people are over-represented within the
criminal justice system in England and Wales make for stark reading. The problem
of minority over-representation is of course not unique to England and Wales. The
prison populations of many European countries contain disproportionate numbers
of people from racial and ethnic minorities; in Australia and Canada indigenous
groups are over-represented in the penal system, and in the United States race
and the phenomenon of ‘mass incarceration’ are inextricably linked (Pettit and
Western, 2004).
Despite the fact that the Criminal Justice Act, 1991, introduced a requirement to
publish data on ethnicity in the criminal justice system, there are important gaps in
our knowledge. For example, information on religion is not routinely collected
across...

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