Waterside Press readers will be sad to learn of the death of our author Martin Wright at the age of 94. Martin wrote three seminal works published or reissued by our imprint: Justice for Victims and Offenders: A Restorative Response to Crime (1996), Restoring Respect for Justice: A Symposium, and Making Good: Prisons Punishment and Beyond (these last two both 2008). He was also co-editor of the omnibus Civilising Criminal Justice: An International Restorative Agenda for Penal Reform that we produced in 2013. Martin’s insightful and often challenging ideas were central to the Restorative Justice Movement and work of Victim Support. A mark of the esteem in which he was held, is that any list of his collaborators and contributors in these ventures reads like a Who’s Who of Penal Reform both in the UK and abroad.
Such work was central to his life and career, including leading the Howard League (1971-1982), and his long and varied involvement in the voluntary sector and academic circles. This encompassed being a prison visitor, a librarian at the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University, policy officer for Victim Support, a mediator in Lambeth, and a founding member of both the Restorative Justice Council and Restorative Justice Consortium.
Between times, Martin was a Senior Research Fellow, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, De Montfort University, Leicester, joint editor of Mediation and Criminal Justice: Victims, Offenders and Community (published by Sage in 1988), an active member of the European Forum for Restorative Justice, speaker at countless events and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Conflict Resolution, Bulgaria. A Quaker himself, attending meetings in Brixton Hill, he was also a regular and much-appreciated contributor to conferences held by Quakers in Criminal Justice.
In July 2023, the Howard League held a special event at City, University of London to celebrate Martin’s achievements, his topic that day, ‘What’s Wrong with Criminal Justice?’ He and others must have been worried by the direction in which criminal justice travelled from the turn of the 20th century if not before. After more encouraging years during which the work of those such as Martin encouraged politicians to support positive moves towards for example better prison conditions and regimes, reduced incarceration, punishment in the community, bold schemes for youth justice and a greater acceptance of the social causes of crime.
Professor Mike Nellis, Emeritus Professor of Criminal and Community Justice at the University Strathclyde has described him as ‘a towering figure, no doubt about that, almost always – on matters of restorative justice, at least – the smartest man in the room.’ At the 2023 conference Nellis conveyed this accolade: ‘[He was] one of the greatest penal reformers of [his] generation,’ adding that it said something about Martin’s longevity, prolific output, erudition, and intellectual versatility, that meant ‘penal reformer’ may not be the label most lastingly associated with him – but that he had ‘most certainly been an important one … and recognition of [his] place in that honourable calling, and what [he had] added to it, was long overdue.’[i]
Writer was of course a label that would be equally fitting, at least in his chosen niche where he was second to none. In an era of the increasing use of imprisonment, populist ‘answers’ to crime, and a downward spiral in constructive ideas, the world is a far poorer place without those capable and well-informed enough to say exactly what is wrong with criminal justice.
He is survived by his wife of 67 years, Lisa, his sister Vivian and his children and grandchildren.
[i] https://howardleague.org/blog/martin-wright-whats-wrong-with-criminal-justice/