Richard Norrie, August 2021

Following the Home Affairs select committee’s recent report, The Macpherson Report: Twenty-two years on and its inquiry into the impact of the 1999 Macpherson report, this recent response by the Director of the Statistics and Policy Research Programme at Civitas, Richard Norrie, finds the committee’s report ‘strikes a downbeat and pessimistic tone’. Richard Norrie’s response presents a critique of the report… [Full Details]

Joanna Williams, December 2020

Attempts to criminalise speech that some consider to be hateful have a long history, dating back to blasphemy laws passed in the medieval period and which were not fully rescinded until earlier this century. The Race Relations Act (1965) prohibited ‘incitement to racial hatred’ and since this time, a myriad of new offences have been created, primarily through amendments to Public Order and Criminal Justice… [Full Details]

Richard Norrie, December 2020

A government-appointed Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities has been set up to address disparity between ethnic or racial groups in outcomes relating to health, education, employment and other areas. This follows numerous reviews conducted by various governments since 2010. Drawing on the full array of existing reviews, this report by the Director of the Statistics and Policy Research Programme at Civitas, Richard Norrie… [Full Details]

Tim Knox and Jim McConalogue, December 2020

As the UK government publishes its cost-benefit analysis of lockdown, Tim Knox and Jim McConalogue attempt to quantify the estimated costs that have been incurred in a new Working Paper, The cost of the cure. Their estimates can be used as a benchmark against which the government analysis can be measured. They find that the cost per year of life saved (QALY) ranges from… [Full Details]

Edited by Emma Webb, September 2020

Following the recent terror attacks on London Bridge and Streatham by Islamist terror offenders – who had been released from prison half-way through their sentences via the automatic release scheme – there has been increasing concern amongst many people in Britain that the prison system is not working in this crucial area. Police forces are reported to face a future jihadist threat in which more dangerous… [Full Details]

Emma Webb, August 2020

A significant number of Muslim women in the United Kingdom are in unregistered religious-only marriages, many of whom will be unaware that they lack legal protections and access to marital rights. In this report, Emma Webb examines how the asymmetric nature of those sometimes polygamous marriages and Islamic divorce – which allows a man to instantaneously divorce his wife but makes it much harder for… [Full Details]

Joanna Williams, June 2020

In less than two decades ‘transgender’ has gone from a term representing individuals and little used outside of specialist communities, to signifying a powerful political ideology driving significant social change. At the level of the individual, this shift has occurred through the separation of gender from sex, before reclaiming biology through an innate sense of ‘gender-identity’. In this report, Joanna Williams argues that this… [Full Details]

David G. Green, September 2019

Identity politics has been creeping into public discourse for many years. When the first edition of this book was published in 2006, it was already obvious that the politics of victimhood had taken hold. This second, updated edition takes stock of how it has developed since then, particularly in the  preoccupation with ‘hate crime’ in recent years. Hate crimes were initially created under the 1998… [Full Details]

Rodger Patrick, December 2014

Crime is going down – officially. The trouble is that most people don’t believe it: they feel that society is becoming more crime-ridden. So what could explain the discrepancy between the claims made by politicians and the everyday experience of citizens? In this hard-hitting exposé, Rodger Patrick, former Chief Inspector of West Midlands Police, shows how this has come about. He unpacks the… [Full Details]

Josie Appleton, October 2014

Since 2002, more than 40 million criminal records checks have been carried out at a cost of nearly two billion pounds, yet there has never been any significant research showing the effectiveness of mass vetting in child protection terms. In June 2010, the Coalition government promised to 'scale back' criminal records checks to 'common-sense proportions', predicting that its reforms would lead to a halving… [Full Details]

Jon Gower Davies, August 2012

Institutional racism is an unfair allegation to level at British police forces and its universal acceptance by public officials has led to harmful policymaking, according to a new Civitas report. In Mind Forg'd Manacles, Jon Gower Davies outlines the history and influence of 'institutional racism' since the Macpherson inquiry, following the murder of Stephen Lawrence. He finds the evidence for institutional racism within British… [Full Details]

Lawrence W. Sherman and Peter W. Neyroud, June 2012

As the criminal justice system faces unprecedented cuts in the wake of the financial crisis, many members of the public fear for their safety. Criminals will face fewer police on the streets and a prison system that will struggle to contain convicts. But is an increase in crime inevitable? In this report, world-renowned criminologist Lawrence W. Sherman and former Chief Constable Peter W. Neyroud… [Full Details]

Jon Davies, July 2010

Open societies in which we try to settle our differences without violence have been a great human achievement. However, because freedom of speech is the prevailing view in Britain, we are not as alert to the risk of its overthrow as we should be. In A New Inquisition, Jon Gower Davies, former Head of the Religious Studies Department at the University of Newcastle, examines the… [Full Details]

June 2009

Sharia law is a distillation of rulings that purport to represent the divine diktat in all worldly affairs. It provides injunctions for the conduct of criminal, public and even international law. Marriage and divorce, the custody of children, alimony, sexual impropriety and much else come within its remit. Sharia courts are operating in Britain, handing down rulings that may be inappropriate to this country, being… [Full Details]

Harriet Sergeant, June 2008

Expenditure on the police force is at record levels but there is widespread public dissatisfaction, while the police complain of being short of resources. They are not intended to be servants of the state, but of the communities they serve. Their powers are personal and derived from the crown, but this essential feature of British policing - policing by consent - is now in jeopardy… [Full Details]

Charles Murray, June 2005

For over half a century violent crime has been rising in this country while the penalties for it have been falling. These two trends throw current sentencing practices into the spotlight of public policy concern. Charles Murray argues that criminal offenders deserve penalties of which the degree of severity matches the seriousness of their crimes… [Full Details]

David Green, Emma Grove, Nadia Martin, February 2005

An 18-month study of the British Government's policies for crime reduction found that it has failed to learn even the simplest lessons from overseas experience. Crime and Civil Society found that the most basic measures necessary to encourage a law-abiding life on release are not being taken: particularly getting prisoners off drugs and providing basic and vocational skills… [Full Details]

Norman Dennis and George Erdos, January 2005

There are few issues which raise more concern than the increase in crime and anti-social behaviour. In spite of attempts by criminologists to dismiss these concerns as "moral panic", and in spite of attempts by the government to massage the statistics, citizens feel increasingly threatened. Cultures and Crimes argues that this increase in crime is the result of profound cultural changes which occurred in… [Full Details]

Norman Dennis, George Erdos, David Robinson, April 2003

In January 2003 the Home Office claimed that the chance of being a victim of crime "remains historically low". However, the staggering rise in the volume of crime, within living memory, has been so great that it is difficult to convey the enormous shift in the law-abidingness and "policeability" of the English… [Full Details]

Kenneth Minogue, July 2002

For hundreds of years civil society was "the arena of freedom", that network of free institutions made possible by the framework of law and order. As government grew, politicians took over many of the functions of those institutions. The state became the source of benefits, redistributing wealth and "crowding out" the institutions of civil society… [Full Details]

Norman Dennis, George Erdos and Ahmed Al-Shahi, September 2000

The Macpherson Report (1999) produced no evidence at all of racist policies in the Metropolitan Police. The report did not even produce evidence of any racist "bad apples" among the officers who were involved in the investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. See also the accompanying Institutional Racism and the Police… [Full Details]

David Green (Ed.), August 2000

The Macpherson Report (1999) was a watershed in British race relations and led to the adoption of policies by the Metropolitan Police and Home Office. Macpherson's claim that the Metropolitan Police were guilty of "institutional racism" provoked considerable controversy at the time of publication and continues to be strongly disputed… [Full Details]

Norman Dennis (Ed.), January 1998

This book brings together police officers from both sides of the Atlantic to describe their efforts to deal effectively with rising crime. New York achieved a significant reduction in its crime rate following the introduction of "zero-tolerance" policing under the leadership of William Bratton, while at about the same time, a similar experiment was being conducted in Hartlepool under the leadership of Ray Mallon… [Full Details]