Secondary Data Analysis
What are the impacts of police station and court closures, and the introduction to and changes in sentencing guidelines, on the use of diversion and reoffending among children and young people in the UK?
Diversion is an approach aimed at preventing reoffending by providing alternatives to formal criminal justice proceedings, typically used with first-time and less serious offending. Whilst it is known that formal proceedings (e.g., incarceration) can worsen young people’s educational and criminal trajectories, there is limited evidence in England and Wales about the factors that drive the use of diversion, and the causal impact of diversion on reoffending.
This project aims to fill these gaps by exploiting key changes in the criminal justice system over the past 25 years – namely police station and court closures and changes to sentencing guidelines – to explore how these changes impacted on the use of diversion and any resulting changes in reoffending amongst young people.
This project aims to study how variations in the use of diversion resulting from court closures, police station closures and sentencing guidelines’ introduction and changes, have shaped the criminal justice trajectories of young people.
The main research questions are:
The project will use the granular NPD-PNC datasets containing information on young individuals’ school trajectories, police crime records and criminal justice outcomes, to generate cross-sectional and time-series descriptive statistics on key variables such as diversion rates and reoffending.
Using descriptive statistics and regression analysis, this project will examine the relationship between the use of diversion and the likelihood of reoffending among young people who have contact with the criminal justice system.
The project will also estimate the causal impact of police station and court closures and introduction to and changes in sentencing guidelines on a variety of youth criminal-justice outcomes. It will use econometric techniques which exploit the “natural experiments” induced by these policy changes, including difference-in-difference and triple-difference approaches.