The organisation was established in July 1931 by Grace Pailthorpe (who was a surgeon during the First World War, a Freudian psychotherapist, and later a surrealist artist) as the Association for the Scientific Treatment of Criminals.
[5] The ISTD initially had a psychoanalytical approach to crime and criminal justice, and its early members included Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Otto Rank, and Edward Glover.
[15][16] The organisation left King's College London School of Law in August 2010[17] and is now affiliated with the International Centre for Comparative Criminological Research at the Open University.
[5] In 2013 the CCJS wrote the UK Justice Policy Review 6/5/2012 - 5/5/2013 which was used in support of Chris Grayling's failed probation privatisation.
The charity wrote, “interventions which do not seek to address wider social issues, [such] as inequality, deprivation, poor mental health and drug addiction, are unlikely to provide long-lasting solutions to knife violence”.