ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one particular source of influence on penal policy and politics: the role of pressure and special interest groups. At the onset of the period covered by this history the Howard League for Penal Reform had the field almost exclusively to itself. Formed in 1921 from the merger between the original Howard Association, founded in 1866, and the more militant Penal Reform League, founded in the wake of the suffragette movement in 1907, it had counterparts in many Commonwealth countries. The idea of the campaigning consortium had, by the end of the last century, become well established. For much of the 1960s and 1970s, the Advisory Council on the Penal System and its predecessor the Advisory Council on the Treatment of Offenders had been an important source of established opinion. Well-established pressure groups across the field of penal reform found that the tenor of their relations with government changed in the early 1990s.
