Matrix Insight

Crime management, criminal and civil justice, and policing have been relentlessly moving up the political agenda over the last thirty years.

Since the early 1990s, we at Matrix – now merged with the Crime Risk Management Group of Morgan Harris Burrows (MHB) – have worked closely with policymakers and practitioners across the criminal justice system, including the police, prosecution, courts and probation. In partnership with both we have been seeking to evaluate and help develop the crime, justice and community safety landscape: identifying ‘what works’, and giving leaders in the field confidence in changing policy and services.

We have experience across the criminal and youth justice systems internationally and the UK, working, for instance:

• with the European Commission: evaluating best practice for the retrieval of criminal assets;
• with the Home Office: seeking to understand the underlying economics of the drugs trade, and immigration abuses, in order to identify how to disrupt or alter the market;
• with the Ministry of Justice: describing and evaluating what happens to those on community orders, by tracking a cohort of offenders at specific points in their sentence;
• with the Department for Communities and Local Government: trying to understand the low detection rates in cases of arson, with a view to identifying means of improving arson investigations;
• with senior police officers: attempting to prioritize and balance public security interventions whilst budgets tighten; and
• with the Youth Justice Board, understanding ‘what works’ in preventing ‘at risk young people’ from entering the youth justice system

It is a diverse range of work, but with key shared themes; understanding what our clients are seeking to achieve; assessing whether interventions or policies do, or could, work and how transitions could and should be delivered; and, a final, often forgotten question – do the benefits outweigh the costs?

With skills in social research, operational research, strategic consultancy and economics, combined with extensive experience at all levels of the criminal justice system, these are challenges we are well-placed to answer.