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This chapter presents a bounded analysis of the nature and impact of innovation in criminaljustice contexts. Implicit within this reflexive critique are some evocative questions.What constitutesinnovation, and who or what is being reformed? What makes advances in criminaljustice just? According to whom and to benefit whom? Calls for criminal justice reform andpublic service innovation continue to saturate public, professional, and academic discourses inmany jurisdictions.Yet, while support for change in principle may be widely observed, it is notmatched by a commensurate level of consensus regarding the forms and directions changesmight take in practice, and why. In this chapter, we present one possible schema whereby innovation in criminal justice contextscan be analysed in a more systematic fashion. Specifically, after describing 'social innovation'as the central concept of interest here, we start to test its possibilities by interrogating it interms of what Siedman (2010) calls strategies of amelioration, disruption and transformation,and accommodation. In doing this, we reflect on the extent to which creative and pioneeringforms of social innovation may be used not only to benefit the people involved, but also theextent to which they ameliorate, disrupt and transform, or accommodate macro-processes ofmass supervision and hyper-incarceration. Against the backdrop of contemporary criminal justice systems and penal cultures, we usethis schema to demonstrate that innovation is not morally or politically neutral. In other words,not all that is 'innovative' is necessarily good or just (Graham and White 2014). Questions aboutthe forms and functions ('what', 'where', and 'how') of innovation in criminal justice should notbe divorced from questions about its architects and beneficiaries, including their intentions andideologies ('who' and 'why') . Attention is drawn to issues of power and politics in consideringwhich 'innovative' justice initiatives are genuinely predicated on a logic of reform and whichparadoxically propagate the status quo or mask the sources and effects of the carceral problemsthey are supposed to resolve. To preface these discussions, it is necessary to clarify the terrain that lies beyond the scopeof our analysis. This chapter does not focus on new developments in electronic monitoring andsurveillance technologies, psychological rehabilitation programmes, or the next generation of criminogenic risk assessment tools.Although prominent features of contemporary criminal justice,in many senses these represent the status quo rather than something particularly innovativeor creative. Similarly, routine features of offender management processes (e.g., monitoring andcompliance) and the labelling of people by risk, diagnosis, or crime type are largely peripheral tothe line of inquiry pursued in this chapter. Rather, we wish to highlight social justice and socialchange as integral to our notion of innovation and the ethics and efficacy of its use in advancingpositive penal and social change.
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