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The prison population in England and Wales has risen dramatically in recent years and rates of reoffending following release are, at best, disappointing. This article considers some of the evidence in relation to what is going wrong and how resettlement for prisoners might be made more effective. Ultimately, however, the expansion in the custodial population mitigates the potential to reduce recidivism. An argument is made for a justice reinvestment approach similar to that advocated by the House of Commons Justice Committee.

The purpose of this paper is to draw to the attention of parliamentarians and policy-makers the specific vulnerabilities of applicants for bail that need to be addressed if there are to be any answers to the current malaise.

Almost a quarter of the adult prison population in Australia is made up of persons imprisoned awaiting trial. By looking at current data and recent research findings, the paper reveals that there persists in Australia great unevenness in remand distributions by jurisdiction.

The paper explains why there are differences in remand rates across Australia and why they are rising and draws from more recent snapshots that complement these findings from comprehensive studies conducted a decade ago.

Furthermore it examines ideas floated in the last decade by academics and practitioners keen to lower remand rates and to bring some uniformity to the process while keeping intact the two key (yet potentially contradictory) aims of the remand in custody system: the safety of the community and the presumption of innocence.

The paper’s findings will appeal to parliamentarians and policy-makers tasked with bringing about law reform in the field, as well as police leaders, correctional advisors and students of the legal process.

John Pitts reports on recent developments in youth justice policy in the US. A task force is charged with transforming juvenile justice by looking at ways to strengthen alternatives to custody, improve residential care and enhance re‐entry programmes. Pitts looks forward to a more rational approach to policy‐making in the US.

In this chapter, I analyse the implementation of the reform to the regimen of alternatives to prison in Chile which occurred in 2013 and how the reform affected how punishment is conceived and translated into practice by professionals supervising probation and community services. The findings suggest the reform that led to the new ‘substitutive sanctions’ also introduced a new risk-oriented-managerial culture that has permeated how punishment is currently enforced and envisaged by supervision professionals; a situation that has been deepening over the years, not only through practice, but also via on-going training that has helped to generate the emergence of ‘cultural’ capital that distinguishes supervision professionals from the larger organisation. This has been combined with a rapid expansion in the use of substitutive sanctions, especially probation and ‘partial reclusion’ that can aptly be analysed under the ‘mass supervision’ premise.

This paper seeks to consider the youth justice system from a custody perspective.

This paper presents the recent history of the secure estate and youth justice in England and Wales, arguing that the present system is far too large, complex and costly and contains perverse incentives to place vulnerable young people in low‐cost but dangerously inappropriate settings.

The paper argues that the present, labyrinthine arrangements, which are in large part, a product of political posturing and administrative and fiscal expediency, have produced a system that is too large and in which most institutional regimes are unresponsive to the needs of these children and, as a result, fail to achieve their rehabilitative objectives.

It is contended that if existing child care and criminal justice legislation were fully implemented, and policy and practice were aligned with international children's rights conventions, we would see a greater emphasis on prevention and diversion at the “front end” of the system and “regime change” at the “back end”.

This paper scrutinizes the scholarship on community archives' information work. Community archives and archiving projects represent unprecedentedly democratic venues for information work centering on essential documentary concepts such as custody, collection development and appraisal, processing, arrangement and description, organization, representation and naming, collaboration, resource generation and allocation, activism and social justice, preservation, reuse, and sustainability.

Unearthed through databases searches, citation chaining, and browsing, sources examined include peer-reviewed journal articles, books, and book chapters published in the English language between 1985 and 2018.

The literature on community archives’ information work shows considerable geographical (six continents), topical, and (inter)disciplinary variety. This paper first explores scholars' efforts to define both community and community archives. Second, it unpacks the ways in which community archives include new stakeholders and new record types and formats even as they leverage alternative archival principles and practices. Third, it discusses community archives as political venues for empowerment, activism, and social justice work. Fourth, this paper delves into the benefits and challenges of partnerships and collaborations with mainstream institutions. Fifth, it documents the obstacles community archives face: not only tensions within and among communities, but also sustainability concerns. Finally, it sets forth six directions for future research.

This paper is the first systematic review of the community archives literature.

Research suggests that individuals with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) are inconsistently supported throughout the criminal justice system (CJS) in the UK. Bradley (2009) recommended the introduction of criminal justice liaison and diversion (L&D) teams to bridge the gap between the CJS and mental health services and provide a more consistent and improved quality of support for individuals with vulnerabilities, including those with autism. This study aims to explore the experiences of staff working in L&D teams who encounter individuals with ASD.

Interviews were conducted with ten L&D team members. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to gain insight into their lived experiences of working with autism in the CJS.

Interpretation of individual transcripts resulted in three super-ordinate themes: “feeling helpless and helpful in the system”, “transition to knowing” and “impact on self”. Each theme encapsulated a number of sub-themes depicting the limitations of services, difficult environments, making a difference, lack of understanding, developing understanding and the impact of these experiences on staff’s confidence, attitudes and well-being.

Criminal justice services are limited for people with autism. There is a lack of autism awareness by staff. Lack of awareness impacts staff attitudes and confidence. Training in autism should be provided to criminal justice staff.

This research highlights the limitations of services available for individuals with autism and the widespread lack of autism awareness. These concerns directly impacted participants’ confidence, attitudes and well-being. Recommendations are proposed to guide future practice and research including increasing availability of access to ASD services, enforcing mandatory autism-specific training for staff and routinely collecting service-user feedback.

The purpose of this research is to identify novel ways of tackling health inequalities of underserved populations. It explores the opportunities presented by the changes in health and social care legislation to employ historically underused services, such as police custody healthcare providers, in addressing health inequalities.

This research analyses the policy approaches to tackling health inequalities in the UK in the past 40 years with an emphasis on those experienced by the people detained in English police custodies. It analyses the current model of healthcare in police custody and proposes a novel integrated model of care and joint commissioning opportunities in funding it.

Policies to tackle health inequalities have largely failed, as they became entrenched. But recent changes in the health and social care legislation in England offer opportunities to address them by employing historically underused healthcare services, such as those operating in police custodies.

The research does not touch upon ethical considerations related to the patient privacy aspect of integrated care. Interventions by and interactions with police custody healthcare providers would be visible to all professionals with access to the patient’s health record. As with all novel interventions or innovative models of care, the effectiveness of such clinical interventions remains to be established by further research. It opens a new line of research on quality improvement through integration of care and explores understudied aspects of joint commissioning of integrated care.

It offers health commissioners and public health leaders the opportunity to employ police custody healthcare services in reaching their population health management objectives and meeting their health inequalities objectives at local level. It also gives police and crime commissioners the opportunity to address the health drivers of criminal behaviour that overlap with health inequalities. It offers funding opportunities presented by jointly commissioning services at lower costs to both police and health commissioners alike. It improves the health outcomes of historically underserved populations by facilitating access to health and social care services and facilities.

Reducing health inequalities and disparities in health outcomes can decrease the costs of the healthcare services over the long term and might contribute to reducing criminality by addressing inequities and some health drivers of criminal behaviour.

The paper explores understudied opportunities offered by the recent changes in health and social care legislation in England and includes underused resources to tackle health inequalities.

This study aims to critically evaluate the trajectory of the “Child First” guiding principle for youth justice in England and Wales, which challenges adult-centric constructions of children (when they offend) as “threatening” and asserts a range of theoretical and principled assumptions about the nature of childhood and children’s evolving capacity.

Focussing on how Child First seeks to transcend the socio-historically bifurcated (polarised/dichotomised) thinking and models/strategies/frameworks of youth justice, this study examines the extent and nature of this binary thinking and its historical and contemporary influence on responses to children’s offending, latterly manifested as more hybridised (yet still discernibly bifurcated) approaches.

Analyses identified an historical and contemporary influence on bifurcated responses to offending by children in the United Kingdom/England and Wales, subsequently manifested as more hybridised (yet still discernibly bifurcated) approaches. Analyses also identified a contemporary, progressive challenge to bifurcated youth justice thinking, policy and practice through the “Child First” guiding principle.

By tracing the trajectory of Child First as an explicit, progressive challenge to previous youth justice thinking and formal “approaches”, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, they are the first to question whether, in taking this approach, Child First represents a clean break with the past, or is just the latest in a series of strategic realignments in youth justice seeking to resolve inherent tensions between competing constructions of children and their behaviour.