Criminal Justice Archive

Universal Credit, Good Work and Progression


This project leverages features associated with the geomasking algorithm to estimate the effect of public crime statistics on house prices.

Read More

Estimating the effect of crime (maps) on house prices using a natural experiment


Dr. Monsuru Adepeju (PERU) worked alongside Dr. Meng Le Zhang of University of Sheffield to investigate the impact of public crime information on house prices in England and Wales, leveraging the geomasking in online crime maps as a natural experiment.

Read More

A Rapid Evidence Assessment to assess the outcomes of community and custody delivered vocational training and employment programmes on reoffending


PERU were partially funded by the Ministry of Justice to undertake a Rapid Evidence Assessment (REA) to assess the outcomes of community and custody delivered vocational training and employment programmes on reoffending.

Read More

Chance to change pilots qualitative study


In partnership with the Ministry of Justice and the Barrow Cadbury Trust, PERU researchers are undertaking a qualitative study on the views and experiences of participants in the Chance to Change pilots.

Read More

Youth Endowment Fund Evaluations


We are evaluating projects funded by the Youth Endowment Fund aimed at preventing young people from being involved in crime and violence.

Read More

Catch22 Bristol Dawes Unit Gangs Evaluation


The Bristol Dawes Unit was set up by Catch 22 in 2015 and works with young people at all stages of gang involvement: on the periphery, involved or entrenched. They receive referrals from the police, youth offending service, social services and schools.

Read More

Whole System Approach to Women Offenders in Greater Manchester Evaluation


The Whole System Approach (WSA) to women offenders across Greater Manchester aims to embed gender-responsive support for women at three points of the criminal justice system - arrest, sentencing and upon release from prison. The governance and funding of the WSA is overseen by the Justice and Rehabilitation Executive (JRE).

Read More

Intensive Community Order Evaluation (ICO)


PERU were commissioned by the Police and Crime Commissioner to evaluate the Greater Manchester Intensive Community Order (ICO) Programme.

Read More

Justice Reinvestment


Reviewing the available literature on Justice Reinvestment, interviewing key figures in the Justice Reinvestment movement in the US and looking at projects in the UK that have implemented elements of Justice Reinvestment.

Read More

Supporting Wigan Payment by Results (PbR) Substance Misuse pilot


PERU worked with Wigan Drug and Alcohol Action Team (DAAT) between July 2011 and March 2012 to support the development of a tariff system for the Wigan PbR model.

Read More

Evaluation of the London Reducing Re-offending Programmes


The study was to evaluate three of the London Mayor’s reducing re-offending programmes.

Read More

Early testing and formative evaluation of the Enablers of Change assessment and sentence planning tool for adults with convictions


The Enablers of Change assessment and sentence planning tool has been designed to assess the risks, needs, strengths and protective factors of adults with convictions.

Read More

The costs and benefits of engaging volunteers from under-represented groups


Gaining a greater understanding of the costs and benefits of engaging volunteers from under-represented groups in the work of voluntary sector organisations through a survey and face-to-face interviews.

Read More

Evaluation of Peer Courts pilot


PERU, commissioned by Nacro, undertook a process, impact and economic evaluation of the Preston Peer Court pilot.

Read More

An economic review of domestic violence services in Cheshire


PERU undertook a short review of the evidence on the impact of domestic violence services, collected data on the economic cost of delivering the particular service under review and calculated the break-even point for the service to be cost effective.

Read More

Meeting the Challenge of Complex Need – Homelessness Sector


Researcher Anton Roberts of the Policy Evaluation and Researcher Unit (PERU) is proud to release this report in collaboration with Lifeshare. This detailed piece of work explores the role of complex need in frontline homelessness services - attempting to define the challenges faced, provide examples of best practice, and a host of recommendations for improved ways of working. This detailed service guide has been informed by Anton's co-productive doctoral research, which took place over a two-year period across provisions here in Manchester. The resource also draws heavily on the lived experience of the organisations staff, volunteers and service users. This resource would be of great use to any frontline workers/volunteers in the sector, as well as any frontline provision that works with vulnerable/marginalised groups. It is a reflection of the (at times) stark difficulties faced by third sector organisations, but also provides a series of realistic and practical solutions.

Read More

Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) Administrative Data Guidance


This project leverages features associated with the geomasking algorithm to estimate the effect of public crime statistics on house prices.

Read More

Exploring the production and utilisation of the pre-sentence reports in the youth justice system


This project leverages features associated with the geomasking algorithm to estimate the effect of public crime statistics on house prices.

Read More

Supporting Girls in Care To Desist From Offending Behaviour


This project leverages features associated with the geomasking algorithm to estimate the effect of public crime statistics on house prices.

Read More

The Exploitation of Girls in Care: An Ongoing Struggle for Recognition


This project leverages features associated with the geomasking algorithm to estimate the effect of public crime statistics on house prices.

Read More

The ‘Exposed’ Population, Violent Crime in Public Space and the Night-time Economy in Manchester, UK.


This project leverages features associated with the geomasking algorithm to estimate the effect of public crime statistics on house prices.

Read More

The Influence of Intra-Daily Activities and Settings upon Weekday Violent Crime in Public Spaces in Manchester, UK. European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research.


This project leverages features associated with the geomasking algorithm to estimate the effect of public crime statistics on house prices.

Read More

Policing and Mental ill-health: Using Big Data to Assess the Scale and Severity of, and the Frontline Resources Committed to, mental ill-health-related calls-for-service


This project leverages features associated with the geomasking algorithm to estimate the effect of public crime statistics on house prices.

Read More

Understanding policing demand and deployment through the lens of the city and with the application of big data.


This project leverages features associated with the geomasking algorithm to estimate the effect of public crime statistics on house prices.

Read More

Inequality in exposure to crime, social disorganization and collective efficacy: Evidence from Greater Manchester, United Kingdom.


This project leverages features associated with the geomasking algorithm to estimate the effect of public crime statistics on house prices.

Read More

The spatial reordering of poverty and crime: A study of Glasgow and Birmingham (United Kingdom), 2001/2 to 2015/16. Cities, 130, 103874.


The Health Foundation REAL Centre is working with the University of Liverpool to build a dynamic microsimulation model of non-communicable diseases to allow analysis of future demand for healthcare.

Read More

Is the policing prioritisation of and response to crime equitable? An examination of frontline policing deployment to incidents of violence-against-the-person.


This project leverages features associated with the geomasking algorithm to estimate the effect of public crime statistics on house prices.

Read More

Estimating the effect of crime (maps) on house prices using a natural experiment


This project leverages features associated with the geomasking algorithm to estimate the effect of public crime statistics on house prices.

Read More

Chance to Change Pilot Evaluation


The scheme to defer the prosecution of low-level offenders has highlighted key benefits, including avoiding criminalisation and associated negative social impact, but has demonstrated challenges, such as addressing racial disparities.

Read More

Care Experience, Ethnicity and Youth Justice Involvement: Key Trends and Policy Implications


This briefing is based on descriptive findings from an ADR UK (Administrative Data Research UK) Research Fellowship project

Read More

‘We Need to Tackle Their Well Being First’: Understanding and Supporting Care-Experienced Girls in the Youth Justice System


This article presents novel findings from interviews with 17 girls and young women and eight Youth Offending Team (YOT) staff, highlighting how being in care can affect offending behaviour and how YOTs may provide support to care-experienced girls who have been inadequately supported elsewhere.

Read More

Confronting intergenerational harm: Care experience, motherhood and criminal justice involvement


This paper explores how criminalisation, care experience and motherhood may intersect to produce multi-faceted structural disadvantage within both systems of care and punishment.

Read More

A Difficult Balance: Challenges and Possibilities for Local Protocols to Reduce Unnecessary Criminalisation of Children in Care and Care Leavers


This article explores the challenges and possibilities of using local agreements to divert children in care and care leavers away from formal justice systems contact.

Read More

A Rapid Evidence Assessment of the impact of probation caseloads on reducing recidivism and other probation outcomes


Rapid Evidence Assessment finds a growing body of evidence that lower probation caseloads have a positive impact in terms of reducing reoffending in the USA.

Read More

Mentoring: Can you get too much of a ‘good thing’? Proposing enhancements to the ‘effectiveness framework’ of the England and Wales Prison and Probation Service


Using data from the Social Finance UK Database and focusing on SIBs in the US and UK, Olson et al. evaluate whether the SIB approach aligns with the theoretical predictions of social innovation.

Read More

A Rapid Evidence Assessment To Assess The Outcomes Of Community And Custody Delivered Vocational Training And Employment Programmes On Reoffending


Rapid Evidence Assessment finds that vocational training and employment programmes were associated with 9 percent fewer programme participants reoffending, when compared with nonparticipants. Studies conducted in the UK were associated with 6 percent fewer programme participants reoffending.

Read More

The Role of Needs Assessment in the Effective Engagement of People with Convictions


This paper argues for “the potential for needs assessment and sentence planning to transcend their core justice functions and set the tone for effective engagement between probation supervisee and supervisor.”

Read More

Process Evaluation of the Greater Manchester Integrated Police Custody Healthcare and Wider Liaison and Diversion Service


Rapid Evidence Assessment finds a growing body of evidence that lower probation caseloads have a positive impact in terms of reducing reoffending in the USA.

Read More

Using Information Science to enhance educational preventing violent extremism programmes


Educational preventing violent extremism (EPVE) programs have had (to date) little if any theoretical underpinning.

Read More

Time to reset the clock on the design of impact evaluations in criminology


This paper highlights how qualitative research can enhance causal explanation in impact evaluations and provide additional causal leverage to findings from randomised experiments.

Read More

The progress of marketisation: the prison and probation experience


Rapid Evidence Assessment finds a growing body of evidence that lower probation caseloads have a positive impact in terms of reducing reoffending in the USA.

Read More

“THE IMPACT INSIDE”


EVALUATING THE ROLE OF THE KOESTLER AWARDS IN IMPROVING PRISONS AND PRISONERS

Read More

Innovation and the Evidence Base


This report explores the concept of innovation and its application to the delivery of probation services.

Read More

Putting the community back into payback


This chapter explores how to put communities back into community payback through the use of co-operatives.

Read More

If reoffending is not the only outcome, what are the alternatives?


Probation provision is complex, with a range of providers dealing with diverse service users and performing differing functions.

Read More

Enabling change: An assessment tool for adult offenders that operationalises risk needs responsivity and desistance principles


An assessment tool for adult offenders that operationalises risk needs responsivity and desistance principles

Read More

Functional Skills in Prison (Randomised Controlled Trial) – A Pilot Study


This programme of work aims to improve understanding of ‘best’ practice in functional skills education in England and Wales.

Read More

A Rapid Evidence Assessment of the impact of probation caseloads on reducing recidivism and other probation outcomes


Rapid Evidence Assessment finds a growing body of evidence that lower probation caseloads have a positive impact in terms of reducing reoffending in the USA.

Read More

A Rapid Evidence Assessment on the effectiveness of remote supervision and new technologies in managing probation service users


Examining the effectiveness of remote supervision approaches and emerging new technologies to manage probation service users and assist with their desistance from further offending.

Read More

Whole System Approach for Women Offenders – Final Evaluation Report


The evaluation has found that the WSA provides a good example of a gendered approach to supporting women in contact with the criminal justice system or at risk of offending and has been successful in responding to a number of its key aims.

Read More

A Realist Model of Prison Education, Growth, and Desistance: A New Theory


This paper articulates the first ‘general theory’ of prison education, offering a new insight into the relevance of desistance theory and understanding of prison sociology to the lives of men engaged in education whilst in prison.

Read More

Payment by results and social impact bonds


Outcome-based payment systems in the UK and US

Read More

T2A Final Process Evaluation Report


The T2A Pathway initiative, 6 projects led by charities in partnership with statutory services, delivered services to 16-25 year olds across sites in England between 2014-2017.

Read More

Piloting different approaches to personalised offender management in the English CJS


Various approaches to personalisation are well-established in the UK social care sector and are now starting to ‘travel’ to other sectors.

Read More

Socrates & Aristotle: The Role of Ancient Philosophers in the Self-Understanding of Desisting Prisoners


The Role of Ancient Philosophers in the Self-Understanding of Desisting Prisoners

Read More

English and Welsh experience of marketisation


Payment by results and justice devolution in the probation sector

Read More

A Rapid Evidence Assessment of the effectiveness of prison education


A Rapid Evidence Assessment of the effectiveness of prison education in reducing recidivism and increasing employment

Read More

The ethical challenges of evidence-based policy research


In Research Ethics in Criminology: Dilemmas, Issues and Solutions (Edited by Cowburn, Gelsthorpe and Wahidin)

Read More

Operationalising desistance through personalisation


This article reports on the early stages of a project to develop a model of offender rehabilitation that operationalises the concept of desistance.

Read More

‘Personalisation’: Is social innovation possible under Transforming Rehabilitation?


When the Coalition government’s ‘rehabilitation revolution’ was first articulated, innovation was an important theme, encompassing innovation by frontline staff, by organisations working within a mixed economy and even social entrepreneurs.

Read More

Predictable Policing: Measuring the Crime Control Benefits of Hotspots Policing at Bus Stops


A fairly robust body of evidence suggests that hotspots policing is an effective crime prevention strategy.

Read More

The 2010-2015 Coalition and Criminal Justice: Continuities and Contradictions


The criminal justice system (CJS) in England and Wales went through extensive reform under the Coalition Government of 2010-2015.

Read More

Evaluation of the Whole System Approach for Women Offenders Executive Summary Dec 2015


Although women remain a minority group in the criminal justice system (CJS), there is increasing recognition amongst policy makers of the importance of understanding the needs of female offenders in order to better target resources and provide support that is responsive to these needs.

Read More

Personalisation: operationalizing ‘desistance’ and commissioning for justice reinvestment


Slides from Clinks 'Just and Affordable Rehabilitation' Conference, London, 1st December 2015

Read More

Markets, privatisation and law and order – some economic considerations


Kevin Albertson discusses the difficulty of aligning private incentives with the public good

Read More

ICCJ Monograph No 9: Justice, with Reason: Rethinking the Economics of Crime and Justice


Economic ideas and concepts have always influenced thinking about crime and criminal justice. Increasingly, however, criminologists, policy-makers and practitioners who draw on, or seek to critique, economic ideas take a rather narrow view of economics based on the prevailing orthodoxy: neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism, vulgarly conceived, assumes society is comprised of self-serving, instrumentally rational actors.

Read More

PERU Briefing 14/02: Social Innovation in the Criminal Justice System


In this briefing we highlight the importance of social innovation in the criminal justice system and ask whether reforms to the criminal justice system taking place as part of the Transforming Rehabilitation policy shift will encourage or deter social innovation in the future.

Read More

Personalisation in the criminal justice system: what is the potential?


The criminal justice sector has never achieved rates of re-offending with which the public and policy makers are satisfied.

Read More

Justice Reinvestment in an “Age of Austerity”: Developments in the United Kingdom


In the UK, national and local governments are struggling to cope with the economic crisis which ensued in 2008.

Read More

‘London Reducing Reoffending Programme’ Evaluation: Executive Summary


The ‘London Reducing Reoffending Programme’ (LRRP) was an innovative Payment by Results (PbR) programme that aimed to reduce youth reoffending in London.

Read More

London Reducing Reoffending Programme’ Evaluation


The ‘London Reducing Reoffending Programme’ (LRRP) was an innovative Payment by Results (PbR) programme that aimed to reduce youth reoffending in London.

Read More

Evaluation of the Intensive Alternatives to Custody pilots


This summary presents the main findings from a range of research, conducted by Sheffield Hallam University and the Greater Manchester Probation Trust, exploring the learning from the Intensive Alternatives to Custody (IAC) pilots.

Read More

PERU Briefing 13/01 : Justice Reinvestment Thinking outside the cell


In Crime and Punishment in America, Currie notes that, short of major wars, mass imprisonment has been the most thoroughly implemented USA government social programme of recent times.

Read More

Could Personalisation Reduce Reoffending?


Rising prison numbers and high rates of re-offending illustrate the need for criminal justice reform.

Read More

Analytical Chemistry


Using Isotopic Fractionation to Link Precursor to Product in the Synthesis of (±)-Mephedrone: A New Tool for Combating "Legal High" Drugs

Read More

Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis


Synthesis, full chemical characterisation and development of validated methods for the quantification of (±)-4'-methylmethcathinone (mephedrone): a new "legal high”

Read More

Justice Reinvestment: Can it Deliver More for Less?


Recent years have seen high levels of public spending on criminal justice but to relatively little effect

Read More

Using social media as a means of improving public confidence


The ‘confidence agenda’ poses important new challenges for Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships in general and the police in particular.

Read More

Crime and Economics: An Introduction


Crime and Economics provides the first comprehensive and accessible text to address the economics of crime within the study of crime and criminology.

Read More

Estimating the costs and benefits of an alcohol treatment requirement


Purpose – This paper seeks to report on a project to estimate the costs and benefits of implementing an Alcohol Treatment Requirement (ATR) in Stockport.

Read More

Community Legal Advice Centres and Networks: A Process Evaluation


This report sets out the findings of the process evaluation of Community Legal Advice Centres and Networks commissioned by the Legal Services Research Centre (LSRC).

Read More