Call for Papers: IJPDS Focus Issue on People and the Criminal Justice System (10/30/26)
Posted: 4/9/2026 (Conference)
People who have contact with the criminal justice system experience disproportionate social and health disadvantage both prior to and following their justice involvement, compared to the broader community. Achieving equity in areas such as health, housing, and education among people with justice system involvement should be a global priority. Simultaneously, the need to reduce offending and recidivism is central to improving public safety, strengthening justice system legitimacy, and reducing future victimisation.
Across jurisdictions worldwide, criminal justice policy is frequently shaped by political considerations rather than rigorous empirical evidence. Growing availability of population-based administrative data sources (including linkages across sectors) allow researchers the opportunity to generate actionable evidence that can improve not only health, wellbeing, and social outcomes for people with justice system contact, but also justice-related outcomes including recidivism, victimisation patterns, and other crime and public safety measurements.
This Focus Issue will provide a platform for high-quality research with the broad aims to:
- Reduce social and health inequities, as well as improve outcomes, for people with current, past, or potential future justice system involvement including outcomes directly related to crime, victimisation and justice system performance.
- Improve community safety, reduce recidivism, and strengthen the fairness, effectiveness, and legitimacy of criminal justice responses.
All manuscripts that align with these aims and sit within the scope of the journal are welcome. We encourage empirical and methodological research as well as reviews. We are especially interested in manuscripts which use multi-sectoral data linkage (e.g. corrections, law enforcement, courts, probation/community corrections, health, housing, education, child protection, social services, employment) to address health and social inequalities as well as key crime and justice outcomes such as reoffending, desistance, victimisation, procedural justice, diversion effectiveness, supervision outcomes, or system-level decision making.
Ensuring we showcase a diversity of perspectives is critical to appropriately achieve the aims of this issue. To do so, we encourage submissions from researchers who:
- Are, or work with, people with lived/living experience of the criminal justice system.
- Represent a broad range of disciplines including criminology, public health, psychology, epidemiology, law, economics, and other social and health science disciplines.
- Engage directly with criminal justice policy, reform, system performance, or interventions aimed at reducing crime and harm.
- Are located in low- and middle-income countries.
Submission Deadline: 30th October 2026
To Submit Your Manuscript, Click Here
Deadline: 10/30/2026