Call for Papers
Focus: People and the Criminal Justice System
People who have contact with the criminal justice system experience disproportionate social and health disadvantage both prior to and following their justice involvement, compared to the broader community. Achieving equity in areas such as health, housing, and education among people with justice system involvement should be a global priority. Simultaneously, the need to reduce offending and recidivism is central to improving public safety, strengthening justice system legitimacy, and reducing future victimisation.
Across jurisdictions worldwide, criminal justice policy is frequently shaped by political considerations rather than rigorous empirical evidence. Growing availability of population-based administrative data sources (including linkages across sectors) allow researchers the opportunity to generate actionable evidence that can improve not only health, wellbeing, and social outcomes for people with justice system contact, but also justice-related outcomes including recidivism, victimisation patterns, and other crime and public safety measurements.
This Focus Issue will provide a platform for high-quality research with the broad aims to:
- Reduce social and health inequities, as well as improve outcomes, for people with current, past, or potential future justice system involvement including outcomes directly related to crime, victimisation and justice system performance.
- Improve community safety, reduce recidivism, and strengthen the fairness, effectiveness, and legitimacy of criminal justice responses.
All manuscripts that align with these aims and sit within the scope of the journal are welcome. We encourage empirical and methodological research as well as reviews. We are especially interested in manuscripts which use multi-sectoral data linkage (e.g. corrections, law enforcement, courts, probation/community corrections, health, housing, education, child protection, social services, employment) to address health and social inequalities as well as key crime and justice outcomes such as reoffending, desistance, victimisation, procedural justice, diversion effectiveness, supervision outcomes, or system-level decision making.
Ensuring we showcase a diversity of perspectives is critical to appropriately achieve the aims of this issue. To do so, we encourage submissions from researchers who:
- Are, or work with, people with lived/living experience of the criminal justice system.
- Represent a broad range of disciplines including criminology, public health, psychology, epidemiology, law, economics, and other social and health science disciplines.
- Engage directly with criminal justice policy, reform, system performance, or interventions aimed at reducing crime and harm.
- Are located in low- and middle-income countries.
Submission Deadline: 30th October 2026
To Submit Your Manuscript, Click Here
Editorial Panel
Dr Darcy Coulter, Research Fellow, Curtin University, Australia (Lead Editor)
Dr Darcy Coulter is a Research Fellow with the Justice Health Group at the enAble Institute and School of Population Health, Curtin University. He conducts research focussed on healthcare use and health outcomes for justice-involved people, primarily in the context of mental and behavioural disorders. He holds honorary appointments at the Centre for Forensic Behavioural Science (Swinburne University of Technology), Centre for Adolescent Health (Murdoch Children’s Research Institute), and Melbourne Institute (University of Melbourne). He has considerable experience working with linked administrative data to understand and improve health and justice outcomes in vulnerable populations.
https://staffportal.curtin.edu.au/staff/profile/view/darcy-coulter-45a8b010/
Matt Bland, COO, British Society of Evidence Based Policing, and Senior Visiting Fellow, University of Suffolk, UK
Matt Bland is Chief Operating Officer of the British Society of Evidence Based Policing, a charity that exists to improve the use, production and communication of research evidence in policing. He is a former Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge's Institute of Criminology, a Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of Suffolk and has published articles and books on experimental criminology, domestic abuse and artificial intelligence in policing.
https://www.cambridge-ebp.co.uk/dr-matthew-bland
https://www.sebp.police.uk/about/people
Dr Rosie Cornish, Senior Research Fellow, University of Bristol, UK
Dr Rosie Cornish is a Senior Research Fellow in medical statistics and epidemiology at the University of Bristol (Population Health Sciences, Bristol Medical School). She conducts a mixture of methodological and applied research and has extensive experience of working with large, complex datasets. Her applied research focuses primarily - though not exclusively – on child and adolescent health and development and, over the past six years, has centred on criminal justice outcomes. Rosie was part of the team that established linkage between the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (a Bristol-based birth cohort) and local (Avon and Somerset) police records. She has been a principal or co-investigator of several studies using these linked data to examine different risk factors for serious violence perpetration in adolescence. She has also led or contributed to a range of projects using the MoJ-DfE data share - a linkage between the National Pupil Database and the Police National Computer database – and is currently leading a study using these data to investigate trajectories of violent offending among girls and young women.
https://www.bristol.ac.uk/people/person/Rosie-Cornish-bdbba80e-0fde-4bf1-9f6a-fb73075ba7c0/
Dr Laura Cowley, Senior Research Officer, Swansea University, UK
Dr Laura Cowley is a Senior Research Officer and Data Scientist based in the Population Data Science Department at the School of Medicine, Swansea University. Laura is involved in several data linkage projects in the field of children’s health and social care. She is currently undertaking a Social Care Fellowship examining risk factors for care entry and placement instability amongst children in Wales. In addition, Laura is a co-investigator on the ESRC-funded COMFT (Child Outcomes for Mothers Facing Trial) study examining outcomes for children of incarcerated mothers using linked Ministry of Justice and social care data, and a co-investigator on the Horizon Europe-funded SERENA project examining pathways through services for children who have experienced maltreatment. Laura was recently awarded a place on the prestigious Welsh Crucible development programme for the future leaders of interdisciplinary research in Wales.
Webpage: https://www.swansea.ac.uk/staff/l.e.cowley/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-cowley-193392aa/
X: https://x.com/LauraCowley28
Christopher Kelly, Associate Data Scientist, Measures for Justice, USA
Christopher Kelly is a Associate Data Scientist at Measures for Justice, where he analyzes administrative data, conducts evaluations, and builds infrastructure to support evidence-informed improvements in the criminal justice system. His work spans linked administrative data, causal impact evaluation, and the design of robust metrics and tools for practitioners and researchers. Prior to Measures for Justice, he worked on large-scale field experiments, quasi-experiments, and policy research at the Lab for Economic Opportunities at the University of Notre Dame, Harvard Kennedy School, Arnold Ventures, and the Vera Institute of Justice. He has also worked on developing methodological standards for studying the causal impact of access to AI across domains as a fellow with the AI Standards Lab.
https://measuresforjustice.org/our-team/chris-kelly/
Amanda Slaunwhite, Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia, Canada
Amanda Slaunwhite, PhD, is an Assistant Professor (Partner) at the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia. She is also the Scientific Director for Correctional Health Services at BC Mental Health and Substance Use Services, and Director of the Canadian Collaboration for Prison Health and Education.
https://spph.ubc.ca/faculty/assistant-professors/amanda-slaunwhite/
Professor Alex Sutherland, University of Oxford, UK
Alex Sutherland is Professor in Practice, Criminology & Public Policy, Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford. Professor Sutherland has worked on public policy evaluations for more than 25 years, mainly in criminal justice and education, but now across a range of policy areas. He is a consultant to the Metropolitan Police Service, the UK Ministry of Justice, and UK Department for Education.
https://www.spi.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-alex-sutherland
Social: Alex Sutherland (@criminologist.bsky.social) — Bluesky