First published in 1978, Crime and Penal Policy is primarily addressed to non-professional people interested in criminal law and the penal system, such as magistrates, prison visitors, and anyone accused or convicted of criminal offences. At the same time, many of the topics discussed will be of central interest to practising professionals and academic specialists in law, criminology and penal policy. Barbara Wootton was appointed to the Bench before she was old enough to vote, and served for forty-four years as a Justice of the Peace in London, including many years as a chairman in the Metropolitan Juvenile Courts and Deputy-Chairman of the South Westminster Bench. In this book she has brought together personal reflections on her exceptionally wide experience, and on her contacts with the development of penal policy as a member of the House of Lords, the Government Advisory Council on the Penal System and many other official Committees.

Comparisons of prison in the United States and Great Britain are used to formulate central issues that relate to the adjudication of offenses committed within prisons and the imposition of punishments for them.

Originally published in 1976, A Taste of Prison deals with a very sensitive area of concern in the system of trial and imprisonment in Britain at the time. It describes the conditions at Winchester Prison and Winchester Remand Centre for both adults and young persons who were held in custody before trial or who were awaiting sentence. Despite the fact that many of these persons would not subsequently be sent to prison by the courts, the conditions they experienced were in many respects no better and in some respects worse than those for persons sentenced to imprisonment. Moreover, as this study shows, the special provisions for these persons embodied in the Prison Rules and Standing Orders of the Prison Department often meant little in practice – either because they remained unaware of their rights or because they were unable to take them up for various reasons. The authors discuss the function of remands in custody within a changing prison system, analyse recent trends in the numbers of persons received into the prison system on remand, and assess their contribution to the prison population. The implications of the findings are discussed in the context of the prison building programme and the uses to which existing buildings could be put. Finally, the authors make a number of proposals for the improvement of the regime for remand prisoners.

In this fascinating new work, Karen Duke explores the conflicts and contradictory pressures in the development of prison drugs policy in Britain from 1980 to the present. Based on interviews with key policy actors and documentary analysis, it explores how policy networks around drug issues in prisons have attempted to contain the contradictions between treatment and punishment and how their activities have been shaped by the ways in which the drugs issue is framed, the roles of research, evidence and knowledge, and the impact of wider social, political, policy and institutional contexts.