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This article summarises some of the thinking and empirical findings behind a programme of survey work on procedural justice theory in Europe. The paper locates procedural justice theory in a framework of compliance theories and sketches out the main features of it, defining the central concept of legitimacy. It then presents the findings from the fifth European Social Survey, drawing on a ‘trust in justice’ module that was designed by the authors and colleagues. This provides a good support for the procedural justice hypotheses that we set out to test—that different types of public trust in the police (trust that they are effective, procedurally fair and distributively fair) are related to public perceptions of police legitimacy, which in turn are related to self-reported compliance with the law and preparedness to cooperate with the police.

This paper summarizes ‘procedural justice’ approaches to policing, contrasting these to the more politically dominant discourse about policing as crime control. It argues that public trust in policing is needed partly because this may result in public cooperation with justice, but more importantly because public trust in justice builds institutional legitimacy and thus public compliance with the law and commitment to the rule of law. Some recent survey findings are presented in support of this perspective.

The article focuses on Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe, who, despite his age, domestic political opposition and Western pressure for change, is currently seeking a further six-year presidential term in elections due in March 2008. Zimbabwe's economy is currently in crisis, with inflation spiralling to over 2,200 percent in March 2007.

This article presents findings from a survey that systematically explores public opinion, youth crime and justice in England and Wales. Particular emphasis was placed upon public reaction to restorative sentencing. The survey uncovered a number of misperceptions about youth crime. Few respondents rated youth courts as doing a good job, and most thought that sentences imposed on young offenders are too lenient. A considerable gap existed between the sentences that respondents wantedto see imposed on young offenders and the sentences that they assumed wouldbe imposed. Generally speaking, expected sentences were less harsh than favoured punishments. When respondents were asked to impose sentence in case scenarios, there was significantly less support for custody as a sanction when the young offender had made some restorative steps such as writing a letter of apology and promising to make compensation to the victim. When asked about alternatives to imprisonment, significant proportions of respondents found alternatives to be satisfactory substitutes for imprisonment, a result consistent with research in other jurisdictions.

This article examines the Home Office Crime Reduction Programme, mounted in England and Wales between 1999 and 2002. The programme failed fully to meet the expectations that it would substantially improve the knowledge-base about crime control, and the article considers possible reasons. There were problems of implementation limiting what could be learnt. Underlying this poor implementation was an oversimplified view of order maintenance that was implicit in the design of the programme. Those programme strands that were concerned with policing overemphasized the crime control function and underemphasized other features of policing that preoccupy middle-level police managers, such as organizational legitimacy. As the programme failed to engage with these everyday preoccupations, the projects funded under it tended to receive little priority from those who were in a position to determine their success.

This study examines why the prison population in England and Wales has been rising steeply and progressively at a time when crime rates and court workloads have been falling. It concludes that while many factors are at work, the key drivers of the rise are sentencers’ increased readiness to pass custodial sentences, and when they do so, to pass longer sentences. The changes are a result of an increasingly punitive climate of opinion about crime and punishment, and inter-related changes to legislation, sentencing guidance and guideline judgments.

This paper has two themes. The first concerns the status of phenomena counted by crime surveys: using threats as an example, it argues that surveys can count phenomena which are more inclusive than ‘crime’ either as operationally or nominally defined. Secondly, findings are presented from the British Crime Survey about threats and threatening behaviour. Though threats are often very upsetting experiences, there is not much evidence from the survey that victims perceive an unmet need for criminal justice services. The legal status of threats in England and Wales is discussed in an introductory section.

With the centenary of the probation service less than a year away, it looks increasingly unlikely that probation work will continue into its second century in a shape that has any significant continuity with the past. Following the Carter Review (2003), probation is in the process of radical 'modernisation'. The intentions are laudable: to reduce re-offending, and thus contain the burgeoning prison population. But the strategy carries big risks. The NOMS reforms have three main elements that relate to probation:

Presents a vision for the future of U.S. Marine Aviation. Tactical Air Integration; Legacy-to-modern aircraft transition; Marine Air Command and Control System modernization; Total force Aviation Combat Element composed of four Marine Aircraft Wings; Goal of maintaining operational flexibility and retaining the culture within the capstone operational concept.