On 31 December 2019, an outbreak of an unknown respiratory disease, later known to be coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was reported in Wuhan, China. The disease rapidly spread through China and, eventually, the rest of the world, resulting in the World Health Organization (WHO) characterizing COVID-19 as a pandemic on 11 March 2020 (WHO, 2020a). At the time of writing, some two years after the initial cases of COVID-19 were reported in Wuhan, there have been 526 million reported cases and nearly 6.2 million deaths worldwide.

The disease appears to be transmitted through ‘droplets and fomites during close unprotected contact’ between infected and uninfected individuals (WHO, 2020b: 8). Research shows that the severity of symptoms among COVID-19 patients can be quite broad, ‘encompassing asymptomatic infection, mild upper respiratory tract illness, and severe viral pneumonia with respiratory failure’ which can prove fatal (Zhou et al, 2020: 1054). Research also shows that severity of disease is dependent on such things as the presence of pre-existing health conditions (Guan et al, 2020) and patient age (Coker, 2020) as well as location and intensity of transmission (WHO, 2020b).

The first cases of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom (UK) were reported on 29 January 2020. In March 2020, in response to the threat posed by the virus, the UK government introduced a range of measures to reduce incidents of community transmission. Central to these recommendations were the implementation of stringent social distancing measures (involving the closure of schools, recommendations to avoid nonessential travel and the suspension of all public events) along with recommendations for anyone with at least one of two common symptoms of COVID-19 (a persistent cough or a fever) to self-isolate for a minimum of seven days. Self-isolation was also recommended for those most at risk of developing severe disease.

While life as most of us knew it paused, or even ground to a halt, for a range of public services it became more a case of business as unusual, and the criminal justice system in England and Wales was no exception. ‘Crimes continued to be committed, reported and investigated; cases were charged and progressed; detainees remained in the adult and youth secure estates; and those under the care of youth offending and probation services remained so’ (Criminal Justice Joint Inspection, 2021: 5).

Understanding and responding to pandemics in criminal justice: the need for a holistic approach

In the introduction to this collection, we introduced the notion that it is important to understand the impact of COVID-19 on the criminal justice system in England and Wales holistically. We argued that to understand the ways in which the pandemic changed the facilitation and experience of crime and justice, we needed to see not just the ways it effected the functioning of individual agencies but also the interconnections between these agencies, and that this is where real learning around recovery and future pandemic preparedness can be obtained. We believe that the contents of this collection make a strong argument for this approach.

Throughout the chapters, reference has been made to the interrelated impacts of criminal justice agencies on the operation and experience of crime and justice during the pandemic. Multiple chapters referenced the closure and increased backlog of cases going through the criminal courts as causing considerable concerns further down the line. Chapter 4 showed that the closure of courts during the first lockdowns not only created a backlog of cases, but also made it difficult for some of the key objectives of probation work to be undertaken. While this was a concern on a practical level, particularly in relation to the long-term impact of probation supervision, the chapter also argued that it could potentially pose a threat to the legitimacy of the service. Should a client breach their community order, the closure of courts meant that returning a case to court would simply not be possible, reducing practitioners’ abilities to enforce sentences. Legitimacy was also raised in Chapter 3 in relation to portal justice.

Chapter 5 again raised concerns about the impact of court closures and case backlogs on the prison system. The chapter recognized that the increasing backlog of cases meant fewer people were being given prison sentences and that this, combined with the natural outflow of residents at the end of their sentences, allowed for a reduction in the prison population. This raises a number of concerns. First, the situation with the court system meant that individuals on remand were spending much longer in custody than was previously the case.