Funding the UK Criminal Justice System: Towards an Historical Perspective
Home > Funding the UK Criminal Justice System: Towards an Historical Perspective
This blog is based upon research by David Churchill of the University of Leeds, Thomas Guiney of the University of Nottingham, Jose Pina-Sánchez of the University of Leeds and Oriol Sabaté Domingo of the University of Barcelona, which was funded by a grant awarded by the Economic History Society through its Carnevali Small Research Grants Scheme.
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Upon entering government in July 2024, among the first matters facing the new Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, was a crisis in prison capacity in England and Wales. ‘Our prisons are on the point of collapse’, she said, as she introduced a new early release scheme designed to ease the pressure on a system that has been running at 99 per cent capacity since early 2023 (Ministry of Justice, 2024). The current crisis in the penal system exposes the effects of severe and inflexible sentencing policies and a broader failure of political leadership in penal policy. Yet it also provides a vivid illustration of the fundamental importance of resources and institutional capacity for the functioning of the criminal justice system.
Like any area of public services, the criminal justice system requires a considerable outlay of public resources, and growth or constraint in spending can have profound impact on how the criminal justice system operates. In the UK, combined annual expenditure of the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office Public Safety Group, the Scottish Government’s justice and home affairs budget and criminal justice agencies in Northern Ireland exceeds £31 billion. Recent years have seen dramatic shifts in criminal justice spending, with the ‘boom’ of public investment in the 1990s and 2000s followed by the ‘bust’ of austerity after 2010. Real-terms police spending in England and Wales, for example, increased by 4% annually in the early 2000s, sustaining a 15% increase in the police workforce; yet spending fell by 14% in real terms between 2010-11 and 2014-15, reducing the police workforce below levels seen in the 1990s (Disney and Simpson 2017). After a similar record of growth in the New Labour years, the budget of HM Prisons and Probation Service fell by 20% between 2010-11 and 2014-15, resulting in a reduction of over 25% in the number of frontline prison officers. Despite increases in recent years, both the prisons budget and prisoner officer numbers remain below levels found before the onset of austerity (Prison Reform Trust 2024).
Our new research project aims to situate such shifts in public spending and criminal justice capacity in historical perspective. Exploring the UK from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the project will scope available spending and criminal justice data, explore what archival records reveal about the politics and administration of criminal justice spending, and conduct a pilot study of prison closures and the political economy of punishment in the 1920s and 1930s.
The connection between public finance and criminal justice remains a neglected theme in the historical literature. We know much about criminal justice institutions and how policing and punishment operated in practice – yet we know far less about the funding frameworks, decisions and allocations that sustained such institutions and made such judicial practices possible. Howard Taylor argued that a cost-sensitive Treasury and a politically adroit class of chief constables effectively rationed crime statistics from the 1850s onwards, producing stability in crime figures up to the 1920s and a sustained rise thereafter (Taylor 1998a; Taylor 1998b). While Taylor’s argument has long been subject to convincing critique (Morris 2001), historians have yet to propose an alternative, a more robust understanding of the determinants and effects of criminal justice spending across the modern era.
Our new project will lay the foundations for a new interpretation of public spending and the political economy of modern criminal justice in the UK. First, we will assess available data on public spending and criminal justice since c. 1850. We will examine a wide range of 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). We will also 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 we will undertake a focused study of the relationship between prison spending, crime rates, sentencing and penal capacity in the 1920s and 1930s. This period of relatively low crime rates, declining prison expenditures and widespread prison closure presents a striking contrast with the challenges of our own time, offering insight into historical variability in the political economy of criminal justice.
In these ways, we hope to lay the foundations for a larger research project, 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.
To contact the authors:
David Churchill
D.Churchill@leeds.ac.uk
University of Leeds
Thomas Guiney
Thomas.Guiney@nottingham.ac.uk
University of Nottingham
Jose Pina-Sánchez
J.PinaSanchez@leeds.ac.uk
University of Leeds
Oriol Sabaté Domingo
University of Barcelona
References:
Disney, Richard and Simpson, Polly. 2017. Police workforce and funding in England and Wales. London: Institute for Fiscal Studies.
Ministry of Justice. 2024. Lord Chancellor sets out immediate action to defuse ticking prison ‘time-bomb’. Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/lord-chancellor-sets-out-immediate-action-to-defuse-ticking-prison-time-bomb
Morris, Robert M. 2001. ‘Lies, damned lies and criminal statistics’: reinterpreting the criminal statistics in England and Wales. Crime, histoire & sociétés 5(1): 111-27.
Prison Reform Trust. 2024. Bromley briefings prison factfile. London: Prison Reform Trust.
Taylor, Howard. 1998a. Rationing crime: the political economy of criminal statistics since the 1850s. The Economic History Review 51(3): 569-90.
Taylor, Howard. 1998b. The politics of the rising crime statistics of England and Wales, 1914-1960. Crime, histoire & sociétés 2(1): 5-28.
