Introduction

When New Labour took office in 1997 few could have guessed that criminal justice policy would become a site of such frenetic activity. Of course Labour's slogan, ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’, was one of the most prominent features of Labour's election campaign when in opposition, signalling as it did a sea change in the approach taken by the Labour Party to the law and order question – the strategy being that no longer could Labour be labelled as ‘soft on crime’, something which, in the febrile political atmosphere of Britain in the mid-1990s, could spell electoral disaster. However, not even the sternest critics of New Labour could have predicted that what was to follow in policy terms would include attempts to provide the police with the power to detain suspects for 90 days without charge (in cases of suspected terrorism), that a Labour Prime Minister would be talking about ‘rebalancing’ the criminal justice system in favour of the ‘law-abiding majority’, that the prison population would reach record heights, or that Labour would create over 3,000 new criminal offences within 10 years. Accounting for such a scenario consequently presents interesting challenges.

As in other areas of policy, criminal justice policy operates according to a range of policy drivers. Political imperatives, particularly given the steady rise of crime as an electoral issue in public sentiment, is perhaps the most obvious, as will shortly become apparent. Policy transfer, most notably in relation to North American influences over British crime policy in areas such as policing and sentencing, has also played a part (Jones and Newburn, 2007). System failure, a constant driver for change in areas such as policing (Savage, 2007a, pp 23-45), has also left its mark. Most significantly this was found in response to the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, which ultimately became the subject of the Lawrence Inquiry, which reported in 1999. This was an inquiry that Labour pledged to the Lawrence family while in opposition and which generated far-reaching reforms in the police and other public services. Finally, the rise and rise of the performance culture, so evident across the public sector, was to continue to shape criminal justice policy in a range of ways.