Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
You are looking at 1 - 10 of 128 items for :
- Type: Book x
- Criminal Justice x
- Access: All content x
Traffickers are ever more sophisticated in their recruitment and control of victims, their seizure of new opportunities and ability to adapt to changing social conditions and efforts to prevent the trade in human beings.
This book presents a unique model to assist professionals, researchers and policy makers by providing a new theory that describes and explains how patterns of trafficking and exploitation emerge and are sustained over time.
It critically evaluates the international development of current legal, policy and practice developments in the field of anti-trafficking and argues that these are based on overly simplistic and reductive analyses of the problem. As such they are inadequate in addressing the complex, non-linear and adaptive nature of the phenomenon.
Focusing on factors that influence the relationships and interactions between the victim, offender and environment, this innovative model equips professionals to consider prevention, protection, intervention and disruption activity rather than limiting action to criminal justice-related outcomes.
Each point is illustrated with case study examples from the author’s own practice experience and research and from the work of his colleagues involved in investigating, disrupting and prosecuting traffickers and identifying and supporting victims towards safety and recovery.
The ultimate expression of power is the ability to act beyond the confines of law, with contemporary society enabling elite groups to wield “panoramic power”. From the murderous crimes of the corporate giants that provide us with life’s luxuries and necessities to the data gathering activities of media and educational institutions, the authors offer new thinking on damaging structures of power and privilege.
This accessible book provides a comprehensive understanding of elite corporate wrongdoing, and the late capitalist society that enables harm, considering both how we got into this mess and how we get out of it.
Policy development and implementation has a pivotal role in the youth justice system, profoundly impacting professionals and the children they work with. This imaginative book challenges limited explanations of policy-making as linear and government-dominated through original research into the practices, identities and relationships of a wide range of stakeholders working in multiple policy- making contexts in England and Wales.
The result is a detailed expert analysis of the contexts and mechanisms of youth justice policy-making. This book is key reading for researchers, professionals and students seeking effective understandings and responses to the long term social problem of youth offending.
In our pursuit of efficiency in the lower criminal courts, have we lost sight of quality justice? Through the critical examination of original stenographic data, this book demonstrates how an English Magistrates’ courthouse often pursued managerial efficiency to the detriment of social justice and procedural due process values.
Given that these courts process more than 95% of all criminal cases, this ‘over-efficiency’ problem has the capacity to cause significant social harm. Yates’s work concludes by providing socio-legal and criminological readers with ways to fix this over-efficiency problem. This accessible work is of value to policy makers and post-graduate students alike.
Available open access digitally under CC BY-NC-ND licence.
‘Desistance’ – understanding how people move away from offending – has become a significant policy focus in recent years, with desistance thinking transplanted from the adult to the youth justice system in England and Wales. This book is the first to critique this approach to justice-involved children, many of whom are yet to fully develop an identity (criminal or otherwise) from which to ‘desist’.
Featuring voices from academia, policy and practice, this book explores practical approaches to desistance with children in the ‘Child First’ context. It gives new insights into how children can be supported to move away from offending and proposes reforms to make a meaningful difference to children’s lives.
Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence
This book examines what happens when states and other authorities use detention to abuse their power, deter dissent and maintain social hierarchies.
Written by an author with decades of practical experience in the human rights field, the book examines a variety of scenarios where individuals are unlawfully detained in violation of their most basic rights to personal liberty and exposes the many fallacies associated with arbitrary detention.
Proposing solutions for future policy to scrutinise processes, this is a call for greater respect for the rule of law and human rights.
Convict criminology (CC) is based on the belief that the convict’s voice has been traditionally ignored or marginalized in scholarship and policy debates, and that its inclusion can positively impact the fields of corrections, criminology, criminal justice, and policy making.
Designed for students, scholars, and activists worldwide this is the first sole-authored book to comprehensively explain the CC approach to scholarship, teaching, mentorship, and prison and criminal justice activism. It reviews the history and scholarship on this engaging field and the challenges that the approach has encountered. It features:
• exhibit boxes;
• end-of-chapter keywords;
• test questions - including multiple choice, short answer and essay format.
This thought-provoking collection brings together academics from a range of disciplines to examine modern slavery.
It illustrates how different disciplinary positions, methodologies and perspectives form and clash together through a kaleidoscopic view and forms a unique insight into critical modern slavery studies. Providing a platform to critique the legal, ideological and political responses to the issue, experts interrogate the construct of modern slavery and the anti-trafficking discourse which have dominated contemporary responses to and understandings of exploitation.
Drawing from real-world examples across the world, this is a vital contribution to the study of modern slavery.
The ‘spycops’ scandal has laid bare the existence of secretive police units that sent undercover police officers to infiltrate and undermine hundreds of political campaigns and activist groups.
This is the first academic analysis of the activists’ experiences and their attempts to find answers and accountability in the Undercover Policing Inquiry. Written from the perspective of the ‘policed’, the author draws on extensive fieldwork and his first-hand experience of police infiltration through his participation in climate campaigns.
Making a unique contribution to the scholarship on democratic policing, this book adapts the concept of epistocracy to explore the role of knowledge and expertise in police governance and accountability.
A rigorous empirical analysis of the Scottish police governance arrangements following reform in 2013 is complemented with examples from other liberal democracies, situating the Scottish context in wider debates on democratic policing, localism, and the operational independence doctrine. The book provides a framework for knowledge-based working practices, showing how principles of democratic policing, such as equity and responsiveness, may be achieved in practice.
