ABSTRACT
When completing a project, it is sometimes useful to pause and reflect on what was intended at the beginning. When discussing and planning this work, we were struck with the inability of otherwise able criminology and criminal justice students to demonstrate or articulate much in the way of meaningful knowledge about policy, but especially the processes involved in the making and implementing of policy. As a result we felt that their understanding of both the theory and the practice of their chosen subject specialism was at best partial. Practice is obvious: they need to know what, how and why criminal justice agencies do what they currently do, what, how and why they previously did what they did and, arguably most importantly for the next wave of criminologists and criminal justice practitioners, what future policy can look like, how that can be achieved and why future policy will be shaped in the manner it is. Theory and policy may not be so obvious but we believe that theory, policy and practice are linked, even if the relationship is not articulated. As Knepper (2007: 19) stresses in his attempt to connect social policy with criminological theory: ‘Every theory of crime contains an argument about what should be done in response. While theories about the aetiology of crime do not always offer policy proposals as such, the theorised source of crime signals a preferred solution.’
