The Centre's Director, Phil Bowen, responds to the first steps being taken by the new Government to take action on prison capacity, reflecting on how what needs to follow this to shift our criminal justice system into a better working state. 

This paper is a summary of our financial analysis, ‘FDAC: The Case for Investment’, which is available in full here.

This report maps the existing alternatives to coercive sanctions for people found in possession of controlled drugs for personal use in Ireland. The report was commissioned and published by Strategic Implementation Group 5 (SIG-5), a subcommittee within the National Drugs Strategy structures, and produced by the Centre for Justice Innovation. 

Our new ten-point plan, Systems Shift, argues that a new Government needs to avoid the system overloading and collapsing— otherwise, we will never have the time, the money or the energy to set the system back onto the road to recovery.

This strategic policy paper sets out our ten-point plan to reform our criminal justice system. We call on the new Government to, first, protect the system from overloading and then fundamentally shift how our criminal justice system operates and put it on a path toward recovery.

This analysis, developed according to the Green Book guidance issued by HM Treasury, clearly demonstrates that the Family Drug and Alcohol Courts (FDAC) model provides value for money and generates significant savings to the family justice system (predominantly local authorities) in comparison to standard care proceedings. The analysis concludes that FDAC costs £18,000 per case and produces an average direct benefit saving per case of £74,068, hence making a compelling financial and economic case for investment in FDAC. 

This review of publicly held data on court fines and those who receive them is part of our research project looking at the impact of court fines on people on low incomes, summarised in our report, 'Where the hell am I going to get that money from?: The impact of court fines on people on low incomes'.

This paper is a rapid literature review on court fines and financial impositions in the criminal courts of England and Wales.