The October Prize Draw is for the OUP book ‘Criminology’, edited by BSC members Steve Case, Phil Johnson, David Manlow, Roger Smith, and Kate Williams. Thanks to OUP the British Society of Criminology (BSC) has TWO copies to give away. To enter please email info@britsoccrim.org with ‘Prize Draw – October’ in the subject line. The closing date is 31 October 2017. The draw will be made 1 November 2017. All entries are checked as being BSC members and then drawn randomly. We only contact the winner directly. Notice of the winner will be made in the BSC bulletin and on Twitter. A sample chapter can be accessed here.

The 17th Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology is currently being held in Cardiff, UK. In today's session, Professor Jacqueline S. Hodgson of the Warwick's Criminal Justice Centre presented a paper titled "The CCRC, the applicant and her lawyer: a disruption of procedural models".

‘The Preventive Turn in Criminal Law’, a new book by Dr Henrique Carvalho, offers the latest addition to the Oxford Monographs on Criminal Law and Justice published by OUP (Oxford University Press).

This new book seeks to understand where the impulse for prevention in criminal law comes from, and why this preventive dimension seems to be expanding in recent times.

The series aims to cover all aspects of criminal law and procedure including criminal evidence and encompassing both practical and theoretical works.

Prof Jackie Hodgson and Asher Flynn from Monash have a new edited collection on 'Access to Justice and Legal Aid: Comparative Perspectives on Unmet Legal Need' published by Hart.

This book considers how access to justice is affected by restrictions to legal aid budgets and increasingly prescriptive service guidelines.

As common law jurisdictions, England and Wales, and Australia, share similar ideals, policies and practices, but they differ in aspects of their legal and political culture, in the nature of the communities they serve and in their approaches to providing access to justice. These jurisdictions thus provide us with different perspectives on what constitutes justice and how we might seek to overcome the burgeoning crisis in unmet legal need.

The book fills an important gap in existing scholarship as the first to bring together new empirical and theoretical knowledge examining different responses to legal aid crises both in the domestic and comparative contexts, across criminal, civil and family law. It achieves this by examining the broader social, political, legal, health and welfare impacts of legal aid cuts and prescriptive service guidelines. Across both jurisdictions, this work suggests that it is the most vulnerable groups who lose out in the way that law is now done in the 21st century.

The book is essential reading for all those interested in access to justice and legal aid.