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University of Leeds
Centre for Criminal Justice Studies
CrimRxiv Consortium, Member
The University of Leeds’ Centre for Criminal Justice Studies advances independent, theoretically informed and methodologically rigorous research on key issues in crime and criminal justice. The Centre promotes empirically rich research, which harnesses robust methods to analyse qualitative and quantitative data relating to crime and criminal justice. It is committed to fostering sustained and meaningful collaborations with policy-makers and practitioners to investigate shared concerns and it has a proud and distinguished record of using research to make a positive impact on criminal justice and public policy. Its researchers are internationally leading scholars in their respective fields of expertise, who work closely and extensively with partners across policy, practice and civil society to make a difference to wider society. The Centre’s research programme is oriented to four longstanding areas of excellence: criminal law and criminal justice processes; policing, security and governance; transformations in crime and patterns of offending; innovative approaches to criminology and criminal justice. Follow them on Twitter @CCJSLeeds.
Published: Sep 10, 2024
The rate of vehicle theft in the United States declined 80% between 1990 and 2020. This study examines historical documents to show that legislation incentivised security improvements fitted to high-risk vehicles from 1986 onwards.
Published: Sep 09, 2024
The role of street networks in shaping the spatial distribution of crime has become a foundational component within environmental criminology. Most studies, however, have focused on opportunistic crime types, such as property offenses. In this study, we instead research a ...
Published: Aug 14, 2024
The last two decades have seen an increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, placing complex demands on police and emergency services in the UK. Despite the growing recognition of the cascading and multidimensional threats, there is limited ...
Published: Aug 06, 2024
The CrimRxiv Consortium, a network of open criminology’s leading institutions, has announced its newest Member: the University of Leeds’ Centre for Criminal Justice Studies. Housed in the School of Law, the Centre serves as an interdisciplinary research institute providing ...
Published: Aug 01, 2024
This study uses data from Operation Snap (OpSnap), the UK police’s national system to receive road users’ video evidence of road traffic offences. Data from one police force area for 39 months (January 2021 to March 2024) (N = 20,364 records) is analysed. Half were submitted ...
Published: Jul 26, 2024
Guiney, T., & Yeomans, H. (2023). Explaining penal momentum: Path dependence, prison population forecasting and the persistence of high incarceration rates in England and Wales. The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, 62(1), 29-45. https://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12507
Published: Jul 25, 2024
Numerous studies emphasise the importance of adopting an intersectional perspective to examine unwarranted disparities in the criminal justice system. However, traditional methods, such as interaction effects, often result in overfitted models. Consequently, most studies ...
Published: Jul 22, 2024
Researchers have studied criminal specialisation at the offenders’ level to understand criminal careers. Despite criminal careers comprising events in which offenders co-offend with others, we know less about the extent of co-offending groups showing signs of becoming ...
Published: Jun 27, 2024
Over the past 15 years, environmental criminologists have explored the application of agent-based models (ABMs) of crime events and various theoretical frameworks applied to understand them. Models have supported criminological theorising and, in some cases, been applied to ...
Published: Jun 26, 2024
Police are increasingly called upon to manage a host of social ills and vulnerable people, often filling gaps left by the withdrawal of other public and third sector services. Yet, there remains a distinct lack of critical assessment of what problems the police are expected ...
Published: Jun 05, 2024
Analyses of crime based upon aggregate counts of different crime types have restricted value, because they count all crime types equally irrespective of the harm caused. In response to this problem, a series of weighted measures of crime harm have been proposed. In this short ...
Published: May 30, 2024
This is a preregistration of a study that will investigate the degree of (in)consistency in remand decisions between police forces and between courts in England and Wales. It will do so using new criminal court datasets made available by the Data First project from the ...
Published: May 20, 2024
Controversial transport policies, such as the proposed ban on non-electric motorbikes in Hanoi, Vietnam, often challenge the status quo and spur resistance among road users. This paper aims to unpack the causal implications of the motorbike ban, with an emphasis on ...
Published: Apr 12, 2024
Confidence in the justice system relies on it being both impartial and being seen to be impartial. It is therefore troubling that there are well-documented disparities between men and women and between ethnic groups at various stages of the criminal justice process. We report ...
Published: Apr 08, 2024
Large Language Models (LLMs) could be a useful tool for lawyers. However, empirical research on their effectiveness in conducting legal tasks is scant. We study securities cases involving cryptocurrencies as one of numerous contexts where AI could support the legal process, ...
Published: Mar 31, 2024
Background: The academic impact agenda and evidence-informed policy movement have formed dynamic incentives for engagement between universities and local authorities. Yet, in the competitive higher education landscape, research-intensive universities frequently gravitate ...
Published: Mar 21, 2024
This is a short talk at the event: Three Decades of Quantitative Criminology at Manchester, University of Manchester, 20 March 2024.
Published: Feb 24, 2024
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is a system of financial products and services built and delivered through smart contracts on various blockchains. In recent years, DeFi has gained popularity and market capitalization. However, it has also been connected to crime, particularly ...
Published: Feb 15, 2024
A discourse of professionalism has proved crucial to driving recent organizational restructurings of the probation service in England and Wales. The Coalition Government argued that bureaucratic, state provision of services had stifled probation practice—for which the ...
Published: Feb 09, 2024
Large research efforts have been directed at the exploration of ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system, documenting harsher treatment of minority ethnic defendants, across offence types, criminal justice decisions, and jurisdictions. However, most studies on the ...
Published: Jan 17, 2024
This article reflects on the learning, developmental trends and research evidence accumulated over the last 30 years in relation to crime prevention and urban safety in Europe, with a particular focus on urban policies and city-level strategies delivered through ...
Published: Jan 02, 2024
Crime data is essential to the running of a safe society. But are we measuring crime in the best way? Ian Brunton-Smith, Alexandru Cernat, David Buil-Gil and Jose Pina-Sánchez explore how the current system could be improved.
Published: Jan 02, 2024
Training materials for short course ‘Adjustment Methods for Data Quality Problems: Missing Data, Measurement Error, and Misclassification.’
Published: Dec 22, 2023
Training materials for short course ‘Adjustment Methods for Data Quality Problems: Missing Data, Measurement Error, and Misclassification.’
Published: Dec 22, 2023
Training materials for short course ‘Adjustment Methods for Data Quality Problems: Missing Data, Measurement Error, and Misclassification.’
Published: Dec 11, 2023
This perspective considers the forensic examination of deceased bodies via the medico-legal autopsy. It is argued that the decisions we make about what we do with, and to, deceased bodies and body parts is, and should be, limited by the need to treat bodies with dignity and ...
Published: Dec 10, 2023
This is a study of recorded crime trends in England & Wales. It covers the two years of the covid pandemic from March 2020 plus 18 ‘post-pandemic’ months following cessation of all covid restrictions on 24 February 2022. Observed crime rates are compared to expected (based on ...
Published: Dec 10, 2023
Understanding the role of external actors is essential to understanding the United Kingdom’s (UK) securitization agenda in the field of asylum. Whilst the internal dynamics of securitization in migration and asylum and its links to the Brexit referendum have been extensively ...
Published: Nov 24, 2023
The full report from the Women and Girls' Safety in Parks symposium held in Leeds on the 10-11 May 2023. This national conference, organised by the University of Leeds and partners, brought together researchers, parks and built environment practitioners, women’s ...
Published: Oct 09, 2023
The latest population estimates suggest that in mid-2020 almost half a million people lived in Cumbria (ONS 2021b), which is described by the Office for National Statistics (2016) as a ‘predominantly rural’ county. Although Cumbria’s landscape is dominated by rural towns and ...
Published: Sep 28, 2023
Police activity on social media has emerged as a significant and expanding area of research. However, the existing body of research has predominantly adopted qualitative methods or focused on small-scale samples for quantitative analysis. This study presents a novel approach ...
Published: Sep 09, 2023
Fraud across the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem is growing, with victims losing billions to DeFi scams every year. However, there is a disconnect between the reported value of these scams and associated legal prosecutions. We use open-source investigative tools to ...
Published: Sep 01, 2023
Tasked with enforcing criminal law, public prosecutors worldwide enjoy broad discretion. Existing literature on prosecutorial discretion and accountability tends to discuss the regulation of prosecutorial discretion or analyse the influence of the procedural environment in ...
Published: Aug 03, 2023
This paper connects the problem of artificial intelligence (AI)-facilitated academic misconduct with crime-prevention based recommendations about the prevention of academic misconduct in more traditional forms. Given that academic misconduct is not a new phenomenon, there are ...
Published: Jun 28, 2023
Purpose: To assess the quality of police recorded crime and survey estimates of crime in a unified framework that does not treat either as a ‘gold standard’. Understanding the quality of crime estimates has implications for all empirical studies assessing the geographic ...
Published: Jun 13, 2023
Research on pandemic domestic abuse trends has produced inconsistent findings reflecting differences in definitions, data and method. This study analyses 43,488 domestic abuse crimes recorded by a UK police force. Metrics and analytic approaches are tailored to address key ...
Published: Jun 12, 2023
Drawing on research on women and girls’ views on parks and safety, Anna Barker, HelenForman, Carl McClean, Susannah Walker and Sibylla Warrington Brown look at the needfor public space design and policy to fully consider green space—a vital element of any 20-minute ...
Published: Jun 08, 2023
By navigating global policing mobilities through the Atlantic archipelago of Cape Verde, this chapter sheds new light on how colonial legacies intersect with contemporary policing of global insecurities. It articulates evolving subaltern roles within transnational policing to ...
Published: Apr 27, 2023
This article uses the example of alcohol regulation in England and Wales to explore how historical change can be understood within criminology. Pivoting away from criminology’s tendency to understand historical change as occurring in rapid, radical bursts (usually followed by ...
Published: Mar 24, 2023
It is widely known that police recorded crime data provides only a partial picture of the true extent of crimes, with surveys identifying a large number of ‘hidden’ victims. Often referred to as the dark figure of crime, this gap between police records and ‘true’ level of ...
Published: Feb 02, 2023
In recent years, internet connectivity and the ubiquitous use of digital devices have afforded a landscape of expanding opportunity for the proliferation of scams involving attempts to deceive individuals into giving away money or personal information. The impacts of these ...
Published: Jan 27, 2023
Recent years have seen increasing interest in, and scholarly discussion of, historical criminology. Yet there remains at present no clear, settled view as to what historical criminology entails, how it is best pursued, and what its future might hold. This article explores the ...
Published: Nov 17, 2022
This article considers the balance between security and fundamental rights that characterises EU criminal law and examines how processes of rule of law backsliding have re-shaped it. Traditionally, EU criminal law has been characterised by its securitisation, which ...
Published: Apr 25, 2022
The classical western sociological view of lawyers rested on claims to ‘political neutrality and social detachment’ (Sommerlad and Hammerslev 2020: 1). Building on the pioneering work of Abel and Lewis (1988a; 1988b; 1989b) this chapter employs an explicitly engaged variant ...
Published: Mar 01, 2022
This paper explores how in the United Kingdom, traffic regulatory systems, cars, and our culture of automobility have been subsumed within a security agenda. Scholars have begun to examine the overlaps between mobilities and security studies, particularly in the context of ...
Published: Feb 22, 2022
The book that the reader is now holding in her hands has its origins in the event, ‘The Limits of Criminalization: Precursor Crimes of Terrorism. Towards an Orwellian society throughout precursor and communication offenses? A conceptual and legislative analysis’. The event ...
Published: Sep 01, 2020
This article discusses two examples of higher education teaching interventions with evidence of high levels of student engagement resulting from experiential authenticity – the Prison: Learning Together module and an intergenerational module about ageing (NUAGE). The article ...
Published: Jan 14, 2020
When a death takes place in suspicious circumstances, the body transitions from being somebody to an object which is of legal as well as social value. A key investigatory process is that of the forensic autopsy, carried out by a Home Office Registered Forensic Pathologist ...
Published: Sep 07, 2019
The policy and practice of confiscating criminal assets to control crime and recover illicit wealth has come to occupy a central position in national and international policing and security agendas. However, this practice has raised many questions about agencies’ abilities to ...
