Complexity, cherry-picking, cuts

30Oct10

I went to a couple of events this week which circled around the future for criminal justice in England and Wales, and the role of the voluntary sector. The first, a seminar organised by the Third Sector Research Centre and Auril, looked at variety of issues affecting the voluntary sector, including the personalisation agenda, the [...]

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The devil in the detail

26Oct10

Mary Riddell writes in today’s Telegraph on Labour’s response to the comprehensive spending review. You can make your own guess as to the shrewd observer quoted.

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More on the cuts

24Oct10

In the aftermath of the comprehensive spending review, The Economist has taken a look at prison reform and mentions me in passing. Meanwhile, as an addenda to that and my last post, it’s worth reading The Observer’s latest column from its anonymous ‘Diary of a Civil Servant’: The most amusing target of all – 3,000 [...]

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Cuts, with or without results

20Oct10

So the the comprehensive spending review has been announced and the Ministry of Justice, as predicted, is one of the big losers with six per cent budget cuts year on year for the four year period. £1.3 billion may be designated for maintaining the prison estate, but for the first time in many many years [...]

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Strategy versus tactics

14Oct10

There is an excellent article by former Downing Street strategist John McTernan on the New Statesman site which deftly addresses why Ed Miliband is right to embrace a penal reform agenda and seize the opportunity to take the politics out of crime. Creating the space for a rational debate on what works is certainly something [...]

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Emotion and justice

03Oct10

Ben Goldacre has a great column today on some research which shows how people can be more punitive when presented with crimes which affect less people than those crimes which affect many many people.  In essence, the emotive detail of the small-scale trumps the bewildering scope of the wide-scale. This is a useful contribution to [...]

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Going local

02Oct10

Ahead of this year’s Conservative party conference, former Cameron speechwriter Danny Kruger has this intriguing column in the Financial Times on the Big Society and forging a radical localism in criminal justice.

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