Criminal justice for the 21st century

Britain has one of the most punitive criminal justice systems in the developed world. Only the US locks up a higher percentage of its population. The prison population has nearly doubled since 1993.

But prison is both costly and ineffective. Keeping a young person in prison, for example, costs the government £140,000 a year in direct and indirect costs. And reoffending rates for young people remain stubbornly high at over 40%. 

We need a new way of looking at criminal justice for young people and adults which acknowledges the factors which lead to individuals into repeat offending: social exclusion, a failure of the education system to meet the needs of some young people, a lack of opportunities for work. And we need to find ways to help people avoid entering the criminal justice system and to provide real routes out of crime into education or employment.

This ambitious project will look at innovation in criminal justice across the UK and internationally. It will draw out lessons about how we can create a criminal justice system which supports innovation that gets to the heart of the problem of crime, and create a vision for a criminal justice system fit for the 21^st century.

In 2011, the project will concentrate focus on an audit of the criminal justice system in the UK. We will explore the structures and cultures of British justice and attempt to get under the skin of the perennial question of ‘what works’ to understand what it means for justice to work and how this can be measured.

This project is supported by the Hadley Trust.

For more information contact Stephen Whitehead, Researcher, Valuing What Matters