Funding the UK criminal justice system since 1850: a scoping and pilot study

Start date: 1 October 2024
End date: 30 September 2025
Funding: Economic History Society
Value: £3,955
Primary investigator: Dr David Churchill
Co-investigators: Professor Jose Pina-Sánchez
External co-investigators: Thomas Guiney, University of Nottingham (https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/sociology/people/thomas.guiney), Oriol Sabaté Domingo (https://www.ub.edu/school-economics/researchers/sabate-domingo-oriol/)

The small project is the first to examine public spending and UK criminal justice in long-term perspective. It will assess available data on public spending and criminal justice since 1850, using official publications to map available data on criminal justice spending (including estimates, commitments and actual expenditure), criminal justice performance (e.g. sentencing data, police ‘clear-up’ rates, prisoner sickness/death data) and key contextual variables (including economic output, government revenue and expenditure, crime rates). It will explore key central government archives – including papers of the Treasury, Home Office, Metropolitan Police, Prison Commission, Scottish Home and Health Department, and Northern Ireland Office – to evaluate what they reveal about the political and administrative processes that informed criminal justice spending. And it will undertake a focused study of the relationship between prison spending, crime rates, sentencing and penal capacity in the 1920s and 1930s. In these ways, the project will lay the foundations for a larger research programme, which explores in detail how UK criminal justice spending fluctuated over time, how decisions about spending were made within central and local government, and what effects shifts in spending had on the performance and social effects of criminal justice institutions. This research promises to produce a systematic analysis of modern criminal justice across the UK and to develop an evidence base that is crucial for informing public debate and public policy pertaining to criminal justice and public spending.

Impact

The project aims to engage with a range to stakeholders in assessing the role of public spending in shaping criminal justice. It will forge connections with stakeholders in government and public institutions, relevant professional bodies and policy-focused organisations. These relationships will be harnessed to design an impact plan for a wider research programme on public spending and UK criminal justice.