Quick and Effective Justice?

While police forces and the prison system grapple with the swingeing cuts inflicted by the Coalition Government, a new Civitas report reveals that policing strategies that target individual offenders could help protect the public.  Offender-Desistance Policing and the Sword of Damocles by two Cambridge University criminologists, Lawrence W. Sherman and Peter W. Neyroud, argues that letting the police deal with low-risk offenders quickly with a structured supervision plan linked to a deferred prosecution could reduce offending and allow police and the other agencies to focus more on preventing serious crime.