This edited collection brings together contributors from criminology, health, psychology, drama, business, art, and design, to examine how creative practice can facilitate transformational change within the criminal justice system through making as art, design, drama, storytelling, restorative justice, and related approaches. The volume asks not only what enables people affected by the criminal justice system to lead crime-free lives, but also how creative methods can reshape relationships, identities, institutions, and justice itself. The book charts new territory, understanding justice not only in relation to past harms, but as a generative process that creates the conditions through which better futures can be imagined and realised. The ultimate contribution of the book is a new definition of Creative Justice as a participatory and relational approach to justice in which creative processes of making, dialogue, and co-production bring people, communities, and institutions together to rehabilitate, restore, and regenerate. Working across individual, relational, and systemic levels, it generates recognition, trust, empathy, voice, agency, responsibility, belonging, solidarity, resilience, hope and generativity. Through these qualities, Creative Justice creates the conditions for meaningful and lasting personal, social, and institutional change.

Lorraine Gamman PhD is Professor of Design at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, UK, and Director of the Design Against Crime (DAC) Research Lab, which she founded in 1999. DAC explores how art, design and creative engagement processes can reduce crime in partnership. Gamman an authority in applied social design practice, is the co-creator of a range of award-winning anti-crime product interventions, and design benchmarks that have influenced international design.

Laura Caulfield PhD is Professor of Psychology and Dean of Research Culture and Postgraduate Research at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. In 2017 she founded the Institute for Community Research and Development. Laura is author of Arts in Criminal Justice and Corrections: International Perspectives on Methods, Journeys, and Challenges (Routledge, 2024) and Criminological Research and Skills for Beginners (2014, 2018, 2025, Routledge).