Justice Reinvestment: “Motherhood and Apple Pie?”—Matching Ambition to Capacity and Capability

The idea of '“Justice Reinvestment'” (JR), has been proposed by United Kingdom (UK) policy makers and criminal justice campaigners as a way of responding to the problems arising from the economic crisis in 2007 and 2008. Despite the interest in JR from policy makers, a systematic approach to JR in the UK has yet to be adopted. Instead, the implementation of JR in the UK has been limited to a somewhat piecemeal approach with an uncoordinated set of initiatives, including Payment by Results (PbR) pilots in England. Featured among these have been criminal justice system re-design and social justice models of JR. While this may have failed to achieve the coherent vision that JR offers, this mixed economy of JR implementation provides learning for the future development of JR in the UK and other jurisdictions contemplating or trialling JR initiatives. Comparing the implementation of JR in the UK with the United States, this paper advances the knowledge base around JR by proposing a universal framework to enable effectiveness comparisons to be made between initiatives, both within and across jurisdictions.