WATERSIDE PRESS is the only law publisher to focus on criminal justice networks and information designed to reach over conventional boundaries. Many Waterside Press titles have become staples of the Criminal Justice System, its practitioners, trainers and librarians. Our authors range from judges and other experts to campaigners and ex-offenders. In putting justice into words, we aim to blend accessibility, with diversity, innovation, and integrity.

Our spheres of interest include the interaction between law and order and race, discrimination, gender, drugs, social exclusion and popular culture - as well as, e.g. public safety issues, restorative justice, capital punishment, deaths in custody, the rehabilitation of offenders and 'going straight', new initiatives, policy-making and the socio-legal aspects of the democratic process.

Founding partner and editor-in-chief Bryan Gibson worked on the inside of the CJS as a barrister, justices’ clerk and contributor to journals and newspapers including the Criminal Law Review, New Law Journal, Law Society's Gazette, Community Care, Inside Time, The Times, Guardian, Sunday Express and other newspapers. He is a former co-editor of the weekly court journal Justice of the Peace (Butterworths) and has also written for BBC TV, and The Stage (as a reviewer of plays). Other highlights of his career include devising a blueprint for Unit Fines which reached the statute book in 1991 before being abandoned in a notorious U-turn; the development of 'custody-free zones' for juveniles (1980s); and advising the Magistrates’ Association on the legal parameters of its Sentencing Guidelines (1990s). He has also been associated with a number of campaigns and has written over 20 books under the Waterside Press imprint and that of Barry Rose.