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1 Introduction
Pamela Davies
George Mair
Jamie Harding
- An Introduction to Criminal Justice 2
- How the Book is Organised 4
- Criminal Justice Since 1945: A Timeline 6
- References 16
One of the very first serious points for consideration in putting together our ideas for this book from the outset was the title. We unanimously agreed on An Introduction to Criminal Justice and are proud to have this on the front cover. However, behind this title, and as evident in the competitor titles from other publishers, sit a range of other potential and similar titles, including variations on the themes of ‘The Criminal Process’, ‘Criminal Justice’ and ‘The Criminal Justice System’. We felt it important not to wed ourselves to a label that foregrounded the contents as driven by considerations of criminal justice as a ‘system’ or as a ‘process’. There are problems with both formulations. A system implies a group of closely related parts that work together efficiently with little outside interference; a process is a series of actions that flow towards a planned outcome with a clear beginning and end. Neither term quite captures what criminal justice is and does, though process is probably the more accurate. Both terms will be used in this chapter and later by our contributors.
Another serious consideration, admittedly towards the end of our editorial journey in compiling this book, was the front cover. In considering images we were anxious to ensure that the cover design fitted with the title of the book and that both give a true reflection of the book’s content and do not convey a false impression of the text to would-be readers. We rejected one of the first mock-ups which superimposed our title on a background picture of a lawyer’s/judge’s wig. For us this was a non-starter. The book is not about the legal system, nor is it a law textbook. We settled on a more abstract and, as Natalie Aguilera from Sage put it, ‘Hitchcock-inspired’ cover.
We make these introductory points as a segue for illustrating the distinctiveness of this publication. Under this title and within the pages between the covers, what we have engineered is a book that is more than the sum of its parts. An Introduction to Criminal Justice contains within it a set of chapters that outline and reflect upon policy, practice, research and theoretical developments in the field of criminal justice. Each of these chapters is brought alive by their authors who draw on their research-rich biographies. In compiling this book, and in bringing these contributions together, we have produced a comprehensive text that is infused with wisdoms drawn from scholars adopting various combinations of historical, socio-legal and politico-economic analyses. The remainder of this introductory chapter continues to enlighten the reader about the rationale for the book. We elaborate on the above and convey our aims and ambitions in devising a text aimed at undergraduate students of criminology, criminal justice studies and related programmes. The chapter provides an overview of the content and outlines how we have chosen to organise the contents of the book into three constitutive parts.
Finally, one of the most important elements of this introduction is the inclusion of an overarching timeline of criminal justice since 1945 to date. This overview of the key developments in criminal justice in England and Wales since the end of the Second World War highlights a lengthy list of landmark developments or events that have been significant in respect of criminal justice as we move from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. As Mair notes in Chapter 2, the pace of change accelerates rapidly from the early 1990s and each of the chapters in the volume discusses developments that feature on this timeline.
An Introduction to Criminal Justice
As we have begun to establish above, the book is focused on criminal justice rather than criminology and the rationale for this book is to bring together a wealth of contemporary knowledge and thinking about matters concerning criminal justice in England and Wales. We do so with the aim of exposing undergraduates of criminology and/or criminal justice studies degrees to a range of scholarship that is research rich yet eminently accessible. Our ambition is to captivate new generations of students early in their studies, to enthuse them to be inquisitive and questioning in their journey towards independent criminological thought and in our ambitions for them to become collegiate forward-thinking practitioners as well as imaginative scholars and researchers. Criminology as an academic field of study has expanded enormously in the last 30 years, but we would contend that at its heart lies criminal justice – the agencies, institutions, processes and procedures that deal with victims, offenders and offending. If criminology were to lose touch with this central focus it would lose its way and while we are in no way trying to delimit criminology’s field, we make no apologies for making criminal justice the centre of our attention. Students studying criminology (or criminal justice, or police studies, etc.) need to have a thorough grounding in how the criminal justice process operates and this book aims to deliver this knowledge.
In claiming the book is ‘more than the sum of its parts’ – i.e. more than a collection of separate and discrete individual chapters, which a cursory glance at the contents pages may indicate – we take the opportunity early in this book to persuade the reader to visit these chapters as part of a package, assembled coherently. When the book is used in this way, we hope it will be evident that the book gathers a momentum in establishing that a comprehensive criminological understanding of criminal justice begins with an understanding as signposted by this text as a whole. In this way we anticipate the book will be a unique teaching resource. We now commence the job we have set ourselves, to tackle practical and normative issues in the Criminal Justice System. That system is to be imagined in the widest possible sense – to include an increasing plethora of agencies and institutions (the book incorporates chapters that focus on the police and multi-agency partners, prosecution and the courts, prisons and parole) that are subsumed under the umbrella ‘Criminal Justice System’. The 21 substantive chapters sandwiched between this introduction and the concluding chapter variously explore criminal processes and procedures and how ‘the system’ deals with those who are channelled into it. It thus examines criminal justice agencies and institutions as well as ‘agency’ in the criminal justice process. Thus our examination of criminal justice goes beyond mere description of what a state system of justice is, and what its constitutive components traditionally have been and contemporarily are. The text provides the basic overviews of these agencies and institutions, past and present and, in our final chapter we also ponder their futures. However, we have required our contributors to address the main points of debate and contention in matters of criminal justice. These issues and debates might sometimes be rooted in philosophical thought or epistemological differences of opinion, in different political or ethical values. They may be contemplated from different standpoints or through different lenses from which the system and processes of justice are viewed. Such perspectives may be legal, moral or criminological and, at other times, the starting point for the assessment might be victimological. This has given rise to a rich, varied and sometimes partisan analysis, but always a contribution that is thorough, authoritative, and imbued with the most up-to-date examples and references.
The above has guaranteed that a number of major themes run throughout the pages of the book. One example is the place of the victim in matters of criminal justice. The victim has slowly emerged as an increasingly important feature in criminal justice policy making and as a driver for change. As with other incremental developments and shifts in criminal justice focus however, some have questioned whose interests are being served (Duggan and Heap, 2014). Such questions are criminologically and victimologically important and a range of chapters, particularly in Part 2 of the book consider inequalities in criminal justice. In these chapters we find that the distinctions between victims and offenders often become blurred when justice, fairness and equality are the lens through which we consider the effectiveness of criminal justice practices and procedures. Questions of bias, prejudice, inequality, and injustice begin to emerge in Chapters 5 and 6 raising further questions that some of the later contributions take into consideration, especially in Part 3 where crime and harm, deprivations and human rights (see Chapter 22) enter the analysis of criminal justice. The latter set of concerns sees another recurring feature within the book – the connections between criminal justice within and between sovereign states and the interconnections between the global and the supra-national, the European, national, regional and local. These are big criminal justice questions that the book, though pitched at level 4 undergraduates, taps into in an accessible yet scholarly way. The book encourages the novice scholar to be aware of the importance and significance of the temporal and the episodic, of pendulum swings (for example welfare v. justice, see Chapter 18), of moments of crisis and the signal or trigger events (e.g. the murder of two-year-old James Bulger in Liverpool in 1993, which opened the way for a more punitive approach to criminal justice; see Chapters 2 and 18). At the start of several of the chapters we have provided shorter timelines of key developments in recognition of the importance of some key landmark points in time which are sometimes represented by dates when legislation was enacted and sometimes when key reports or inquiries were published following major inquiries or reviews.
While we have encouraged these big themes to emerge, we have maintained a consistency of approach within each of the chapters. There are common features that help readers engage more swiftly with what may seem challenging content. Each chapter has:
- an introduction that clearly sets out...
