Editorial Introduction: A New Chapter

The Howard Journal has a long and distinguished history. It first appeared in 1921 and has been published annually since 1951. This double issue marks its 55th volume. Throughout that time the journal has been associated with, while maintaining full editorial independence from, the Howard League for Penal Reform. That remains the case today. The journal has long been an established part of criminological research and penal policy debate in the UK. Indeed, for many years it was one of only two outlets for publishing criminological work – the other being the British Journal of Criminology. Since the late 1990s, these two journals have been joined by many others – spurred by the growing public and political salience of crime and the rapid expansion and internationalisation of criminology. The academic journal market in criminology has become increasingly specialist with titles devoted to particular intellectual orientations, or methodologies, or subfields in the study of crime and justice. Our hope is that the Howard Journal can become an important and distinctive voice within what has become a fragmented, pluralised criminological field. This double issue marks the formal relaunch of journal – though the term ‘relaunch’ is best understood in terms of a process rather than as an event. It is the first issue of my term as the journal's new Editor-in-Chief. The journal has a new name – The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice – which is intended to signal its broader remit and ambitions. Vanessa Barker, a sociologist of punishment working at Stockholm University, has joined the journal as one of its four editors, along with Penny Green (Queen Mary University of London), Simon Mackenzie (Victoria University of Wellington), and David Scott (Liverpool John Moores University). The journal has a new International Editorial Board composed of members with a broad range of theoretical orientations, substantive interests and methodological approaches, working in Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, France, India, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, and the USA, as well as in the UK. This is intended to be a working Board collectively involved in the running and direction of the journal. Building on its history, our ambition over the coming few years is to set the Howard Journal on a new path. We hope to make the journal a ‘go to’ place for high-quality theory, research and debate on all aspects of the relationship between crime and justice across the globe. We intend it to be a leading forum for conversation between academic theory and research and the cultures, policies and practices of the range of institutions concerned with harm, security and justice. The journal will remain committed to offering an outlet for the latest and best research and theorisation from across the range of disciplines upon which the field of criminology draws – sociology, history, law, psychology, political studies, anthropology, and so on. It will remain a place to which people turn for critical extensions of the empirical knowledge base in respect of crime, harm, justice and security, as well as for new approaches to the question of how to make sense of those practices. But the search for better (more just, more effective, less discriminatory, more liberty enhancing . . .) crime control arrangements, or ways to prevent harm or foster public security, does not simply require more reliable empirical knowledge of how justice works or what works in crime reduction. That search also stands in need of new ideas – and our hope is to make this journal a place for the presentation, analysis and appraisal of such ideas. Across all of these domains, we shall aim to protect and extend a role that the Howard Journal has long performed rather well: that of being an avowedly (rather than quasi-) academic journal that can be read with interest and profit by those engaged in a range of institutional settings with policy making and practice with respect to crime control and harm reduction. The question of the relation between knowledge and practice has become a live one today across many parts of the globe – not only in UK universities preoccupied with ‘impact’, and not simply due to the imposition of governmental templates about what ‘impact’ should look like and be measured. We very much hope that this journal can provide a venue for the varied forms of knowledge that are produced at the intersection between academia and practice, as well as for reflecting on the importance and changing forms of that relation. One aspect of that boundary relation that has come especially to the fore over recent years concerns the travel of crime policy and criminological ideas across borders and across policy domains. The dominant interest here has been to do with the export of crime control rhetorics and practices from the West (and especially the US) and with the reception and mutation of different policies under varying local conditions of importation. As well as such questions of reception, however, there is a pressing need to attend much more carefully to voices from the Global South as producers of criminological knowledge. The criminology of the post-colonial world necessarily concerns, not just assimilating the often disturbing implications and effects of history, but also why certain ‘generic’ solutions fail to apply when lifted out of context, as well as why other more contextually appropriate ones may. In these respects the discoveries and implications of African, Asian, and Latin-American scholarship, as well as studies of indigenous peoples within ‘Western’ countries, are likely to be among the leading and most provocative themes of the next few decades. Our intention is to make the Howard Journal a home for analysis and debate of emerging global studies of crime and its control. The Howard Journal welcomes articles from scholars working on questions of crime and justice from across the globe. We especially invite contributions from doctoral researchers and early career scholars, and are seeking increased diversity among contributors. The journal's ‘stock-in-trade’ is likely to remain the standard 8,000 words article. But we will also publish shorter pieces as well as longer contributions where the subject matter, or treatment of that subject matter, requires it. The journal will also be open to new formats for discussing criminological theory and research and for debating crime and justice issues. These include special issues, themed debate sections, and interviews with academics and practitioners. Each issue will carry a book review section under the guidance of the journal's new Book Review Editor, Emma Bell, from Savoie University, France. We have, however, decided that the ‘Counterblast’ section has outlived its usefulness and it has been discontinued. It is often remarked that any journal is only as good as the authors who write for it and the quality of work that it attracts and publishes. This is a truism. But it is also the case that a journal can set out its ambitions in ways that make it more, rather than less, likely to attract the best work. That is what I have tried to do here. The Howard Journal has embarked on an exciting new phase in its long history. I hope very much that you will join us in making it a place for intellectually curious and practically engaged theorising and research about the questions of crime, security, and justice, faced by the world today.

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