Hampshire Police Authority

26 November 2002

"Narrowing the Justice Gap" - 17 October, 2002

Report by Mrs. Judi Griffin, JP

Conference opened with a speech by Lord Falconer of Thoroton, Minister of State for Criminal Justice, Sentencing and Law Reform. He set the scene, giving the background to the programme and limits to the Criminal Justice White Paper and reforms of the Criminal Justice System (CJS).

The first session centred around what could be done to reduce the "Justice Gap" i.e. the number of crimes recorded -v- number of crimes brought to justice. The current size of the gap is unacceptable, 80% of recorded crime goes unpunished, and performance is getting worse.

There is a three pronged approach to narrow the gap:-

1. Tackling weaknesses in the criminal justice process ie, where do cases fall out of the process?

2. Targeting types of offender e.g. persistent offenders (10% of offenders commit 50% of all serious crime).

3. Targeting types of crime e.g. street crime.

The performance improvement target for each area for 2003/04 was 5%.

The next 3 sessions examined ways in which targets could be met. The afternoon sessions explained the rationale for the Persistent Offender Scheme, and described JTrack, a Home Office commissioned web based cross agency management information system to support the delivery of the scheme.

Syndicate groups based on Force areas, were charged with discussing how agencies working together could make `Narrowing the Justice Gap' and the `Persistent Offender Schemes' work.

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