13th Health & Justice Summit

'Interconnecting Health and Justice'

Over two days, we will explore how health needs shape justice outcomes and justice systems shape health outcomes. With a solution-focused goal, we will examine learning from the UK and international systems and give a platform to the latest research aligned with the key themes of the Summit – which are:

• Health as a determinant of justice involvement
• Justice involvement as a determinant of health
• Health as a pathway to diversion, rehabilitation, and desistance
• Legal frameworks that protect health rights
• Public health and criminal justice partnerships
• Addressing structural inequalities, severe multiple disadvantage, and wider determinants of health

For more detail on each theme, see below.

Watch this space and follow us on LinkedIn for programme announcements.

Health as a determinant of justice involvement

People who encounter the criminal justice system often have significantly higher rates of:

• Mental ill‑health
• Substance use disorders
• Neurodiversity
• Trauma histories and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs)
• Chronic physical illnesses and communicable diseases, e.g. TB, sexually transmitted infections
• Unmet social needs such as housing, education, and poverty

These health-related vulnerabilities, which increase the likelihood of arrest, victimisation, and recidivism, have been identified within research and the recent Chief Medical Officer report on the health of people in prison, on probation and in the secure NHS estate.

Justice involvement as a determinant of health

Contact with the justice system can worsen health outcomes:

• Custody increases risks of mental health deterioration, self‑harm, and suicide.
• Barriers to continuity of care at the intersections within the justice system undermine treatment (police custody to court, court to prison, prison to court, prison to prison, prison to hospital, hospital to prison, on and after release).
• The prison environment can aggravate chronic conditions, and closed environments increase communicable disease transmission risk. Risk of punitive outcomes and threat of re-traumatisation can prevent people from accessing health services e.g. drug and alcohol, mental health and sexual health services.
• Health inequalities in a hidden population—especially around race, gender, and socioeconomic status—deepens systemic disadvantage.

Health as a pathway to diversion, rehabilitation, and desistance

At this intersection, health approaches can replace or reshape justice responses:

• Liaison & Diversion services direct people with mental illness, learning disabilities, or vulnerabilities away from the criminal justice system and into support.
• Problem-solving courts integrate treatment with judicial oversight.
• Trauma-informed policing and probation reduce escalation and reoffending.
• Public health approaches to violence understand harm as preventable, not inevitable.

Legal frameworks that protect health rights

Justice systems protect or fail to protect:

• Access to healthcare as a human right (e.g., ECHR, UN Mandela Rules), Equivalence principle
• Safeguarding, fitness to plead, capacity, rights of victims and witnesses
• Equality and non-discrimination in health provision across custodial and community justice settings

Public health and criminal justice partnerships

Where operational collaboration happens:

• Data sharing between NHS providers, NHS and HMPPS, courts, police, to improve outcomes
• Partnership agreements and joint commissioning of healthcare in custodial settings
• Integrating health and community justice: partnership working and joint commissioning for healthcare embedded within neighbourhood health systems and community place-based care. 
• Offender health strategies that bridge community and secure settings
• Multi-agency safeguarding and partnership working.
• Forensic mental health pathways

Addressing structural inequalities, severe multiple disadvantage, and wider determinants of health

Many of the root drivers of both ill-health and justice involvement are the same:

• Poverty
• Homelessness
• Racial and ethnic disparities
• Substance misuse
• Violence and exploitation
• Lack of service access

Health–justice integration aims to tackle these upstream and to break the cycle where severe multiple disadvantage and revolving door justice involvement is established.

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