ABSTRACT
As authors and academics we share a commitment to interdisciplinary working within the social sciences. Since we both started out in the field of social policy, perhaps this should be no surprise. One of the central features of social policy, in terms of both its application and its study, as far as we are concerned is that it is something of a magpie field (Blakemore, 1998), drawing evidence about the things that impact on welfare or well-being from every available source and as a result crossing a number of academic disciplines. Whilst this occasionally eclectic approach can be seen as a weakness at times, we strongly believe that being able to draw from a variety of sources allows a deeper understanding of social problems often in a more holistic way than unitary discipline pathways. It has provided us with the ability to teach and research in a number of areas over the years, including criminology and criminal justice studies. It was essentially as a result of our experience of teaching policy-related issues to criminology and criminal justice students that the idea for this book took shape.
