Abstract
Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, criminal justice in England and Wales finds itself at a crossroads. The pandemic has generated severe backlogs in how quickly criminal justice responds to crime, and the structural inequality often displayed by criminal justice has been met with large-scale social protest. Despite these developments, the current Conservative government has continued with a punitive and harsh criminal law and criminal justice policy. This chapter takes a utopian view of how criminal justice could be reformed in a far more inclusionary and humane way. It then develops seven principles which could be used to effect positive criminal justice change, using concepts such as social and economic harm reduction, a public health approach to criminal justice and principled criminal law reform to construct a reform blueprint. The chapter concludes by evaluating the prospects of achieving criminal justice reform of this kind.
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