Ministry of Justice Green Paper Service User Consultation

The Ministry of Justice commissioned User Voice to obtain service users’ feedback on the government’s proposals for reforms to the criminal justice system set out in their recent Green Paper: Breaking the Cycle: Effective Punishment, Rehabilitation and Sentencing of Offenders.

We therefore organised and facilitated two focus groups on Friday 25 February 2011.

Some of the participants had been involved in our Excluded Youth Project: What’s Your Story?, but others joined us for the first time. Although the groups were run in London, participants travelled from as far away as Birmingham, Bristol, Durham, Kendal, Manchester and Reading.

Participants were asked to respond to a number of questions contained in the Green Paper that were of direct relevance to their own personal experience.

These were categorised under the following headings:

• Punishment and payback;
• Sentencing;
• Working with communities to reduce crime; and
• Rehabilitating offenders to reduce crime.