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The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of location on access to justice for vulnerable defendants seeking bail.

Qualitative interviews were conducted with legal practitioners from rural, suburban and urban areas as part of a larger study into bail support services in Victoria, Australia.

Interview participants identified a dearth of bail support resources in rural, regional and remote (RRR) areas compared to their urban counterparts. This dearth impacted negatively on some defendants’ outcomes in the justice system, particularly for young people and those experiencing homelessness.

This study helps in improving policy through greater understanding of issues with RRR service provision; adds to knowledge for service providers on access to justice; highlights specific areas of concern for vulnerable populations; and provides a more nuanced understanding of location-based issues.

This research found that resourcing issues cannot be understood simply through an RRR/urban binary and that more complex factors impacting access to justice and access to services for vulnerable people should be incorporated into future analysis and policy development. This more nuanced understanding is useful across national and international contexts when developing policies to improve bail support service provision.

The reinvigoration of restorative justice (RJ) within criminal justice has brought with it many opportunities but also significant challenges. The purpose of this paper is to explore the current considerations when providing a quality RJ service that meet the needs of victim, offender the community and the criminal justice system.

This paper is a personal viewpoint of the author obtained from working nationally in the criminal justice arena specifically advising on RJ to police forces, police and crime commissioners and others.

Findings suggest the provision of RJ in the UK is patchy, and the provision of a quality provision even more of a challenge.

Consideration given to the need for quality not to be sacrificed in the advancement of RJ and some of the implications of this.

Offers perspectives on the application of RJ in new and rapidly growing arenas.

The purpose of this paper is to make evidence-based recommendations for improving the responses of criminal justice agencies to juvenile burglary offenders.

The paper first analyzes what is known about factors relevant to young offenders’ initiation into burglary and subsequent persistence in that offense. It then evaluates research regarding juvenile justice interventions that can mitigate those factors in order to prevent youth from becoming involved in burglary or to encourage desistance in juvenile burglars.

Effective early intervention with juvenile burglars is vital, as burglars often begin committing this crime in their early teens and quickly develop expertise in the offense. Evidence supports the importance of positive mentoring, substance abuse programs, some forms of restorative justice and multi-modal interventions with education and employment components, while waiving these youth to adult court appears to offer little benefit over less punitive approaches.

This work delivers an original contribution by providing an analysis of existing burglary and juvenile justice research that may be useful to policymakers, law enforcement and other justice practitioners.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of the geography of mortgage lending in Great Britain. It uses a new mortgage dataset as a way to shed light on the spatial distribution of mortgage finance and to highlight the different lending patterns of seven major UK banks. It also examines the relationship between the distribution of mortgage finance and socio-economic status at the local level.

The methodology is based on simple quantitative techniques, including spatial analysis, location quotient analysis and socio-economic classification. Lending data for Great Britain’s 10,000 postcode sectors are the basis for analysis here.

The results suggest that some banks lend significantly less than others in poorer areas, but, owing to a lack of data, it is not possible to say why. It is possible to identify banks that appear to change their lending patterns in areas with different socio-economic characteristics. The paper concludes by reflecting on key messages and by making a small number of recommendations to improve transparency in the sector.

In the absence of demand-side metrics, it is not possible to determine which banks lend disproportionately high or low amounts in poorer areas.

This paper has implications in relation to increasing financial transparency in the residential mortgage sector. The most important implication would be to highlight the fact that this new data – whilst a welcome development – is a long way from providing proper transparency in the mortgage lending sector.

This paper fills a gap in the international literature in relation to our understanding of the geography of mortgage lending in a major world economy. It also highlights important differential lending patterns in relation to socio-economic status at the sub-national level.

Purpose – Concerns about expenditure on legal aid in England and Wales have led to greater focus on ‘value for money’ and increased strategic targeting of resources. To inform targeting, the English and Welsh Civil and Social Justice Survey has been used to investigate the relative severity of different civil justice problem types. Thus, the survey has included a range of severity indices and related questions. However, this study takes a different approach in exploring how a seeming ‘defect’ of the survey, failure of autobiographical memory, may shed some of the clearest light on not just the issue of problem severity but also problem incidence.Methodology/approach – We examine failures of autobiographical memory of civil justice problems and ask what they can tell us about problem severity.Findings – We find that failures of autobiographical memory provide a useful guide to relative severity of civil justice problems of different types. They also provide a means to more accurately estimate the prevalence of problems.Originality/value of paper – This paper is the first to examine the relative severity and incidence of civil justice problems through an analysis of recall patterns.

The purpose of the paper is twofold. First it examines the use of restorative practices in the Youth Justice System. Second the paper seeks to critically assess the benefits of Restorative Justice (RJ) at the pre-sentence stage in England and Wales, particularly in terms of its ethical and practical application.

The paper takes the form of a conceptual analysis. The authors draw principally on the experiences of a small scale pilot into the use of pre-sentence RJ and data from in-depth interviews with one of the pilot sites. A snapshot survey and discussions with a Youth Offending Team piloting pre-sentence RJ was also undertaken.

The authors find that the level of personal involvement of victims in RJ has fallen short of expectations. The authors note that if there is to be reduced stress and trauma for victims participation needs to be independent of coercion or reward. Offenders who are lacking in sincerity should not be coerced or pressured into accepting pre-sentence RJ as this could, despite benign intents, exacerbate feelings of anger and distress for victims. The authors also note the importance of practitioners being properly trained in RJ conferencing as they have a fundamental part to play in mitigating against some of the potential risks.

The paper identifies issues and ambiguities with pre-sentence RJ and examines in detail the complexities of working in such an environment. The paper will be of use to local and potentially national decision makers and commissioners of RJ programmes.

The authors explore the under researched concept and delivery of pre-sentence RJ.