This book shows how the overall impact of the penal policy agenda of the Coalition Government 2010-2015 has not led to the intended 'rehabilitation revolution', but austerity, outsourcing and punishment, designated here as 'punitive managerialism'. divThe policy of austerity has led to significant budget cuts in legal aid and court services which threaten justice. It has also led to staffing reductions and overcrowding in the prison system which threaten order and have undermined more positive work with prisoners. The outsourcing of prison and community-based offender services is based on untried method with uncertain results. The shift in orientation towards punishment is regrettable because it is essentially negative. The book notes that this move to punitive managerialism is located in the broader trend towards neo-liberalism. It concludes by attempting to articulate the parameters of an affordable and emotionally satisfying yet humane and rational penal policy.>
This book interrogates Conservative government penal policy for adult and young adult offenders in England and Wales between 2015 and 2021. Government penal policy is shown to have been often ineffective and costly, and to have revived efforts to push the system towards a disastrous combination of austerity, outsourcing and punishment that has exacerbated the penal crisis. This investigation has meant touching on topical debates dealing with the impact of resource scarcity on offenders' experiences of the penal system, the impact of an increasing emphasis on punishment on offenders’ sense of justice and fairness, the balance struck between infection control and offender welfare during the government handling of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and why successive Conservative governments have intransigently pursued a penal policy that has proved crisis-exacerbating. The overall conclusion reached is that penal policy is too important to be left to governments alone and needs to be recalibrated by a one-off inquiry, complemented by an on-going advisory body capable of requiring governments to ‘explain or change’. The book is distinctive in that it provides a critical review of penal policy change, whist combining this with insights derived from the sociological analysis of penal trends.
This book shows how the overall impact of the penal policy agenda of the Coalition Government 2010-2015 has not led to the intended 'rehabilitation revolution', but austerity, outsourcing and punishment, designated here as 'punitive managerialism'. divThe policy of austerity has led to significant budget cuts in legal aid and court services which threaten justice. It has also led to staffing reductions and overcrowding in the prison system which threaten order and have undermined more positive work with prisoners. The outsourcing of prison and community-based offender services is based on untried method with uncertain results. The shift in orientation towards punishment is regrettable because it is essentially negative. The book notes that this move to punitive managerialism is located in the broader trend towards neo-liberalism. It concludes by attempting to articulate the parameters of an affordable and emotionally satisfying yet humane and rational penal policy.>
This book interrogates Conservative government penal policy for adult and young adult offenders in England and Wales between 2015 and 2021. Government penal policy is shown to have been often ineffective and costly, and to have revived efforts to push the system towards a disastrous combination of austerity, outsourcing and punishment that has exacerbated the penal crisis. This investigation has meant touching on topical debates dealing with the impact of resource scarcity on offenders' experiences of the penal system, the impact of an increasing emphasis on punishment on offenders’ sense of justice and fairness, the balance struck between infection control and offender welfare during the government handling of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and why successive Conservative governments have intransigently pursued a penal policy that has proved crisis-exacerbating. The overall conclusion reached is that penal policy is too important to be left to governments alone and needs to be recalibrated by a one-off inquiry, complemented by an on-going advisory body capable of requiring governments to ‘explain or change’. The book is distinctive in that it provides a critical review of penal policy change, whist combining this with insights derived from the sociological analysis of penal trends.
A remote island. An isolated community. A terrible secret. If the new District Sheriff, Tristan Haraldsen, thought moving to a remote village on the island of Vagar would be the chance for a peaceful life with his wife Elsebeth, his first few weeks in office swiftly correct him of that notion. Provoked into taking part in the village’s whale hunt against his will, Haraldsen blunders badly, and in the ensuing chaos two local boys go missing. Blaming himself, Haraldsen dives into the investigation and soon learns that the boys are not the first to have gone missing on Vagar. As Tristan and Elsebeth become increasingly ensnared by the island’s past, they realise its wild beauty hides an altogether uglier and sinister truth.
This book investigates death after police contact in England and Wales in the twenty-first century. It examines how regulatory bodies construct accountability in such cases. Cases of death after police contact have the potential to cause deep unease in society. They highlight the unique role of the police in being legitimately able to use force whilst at the same time being expected to preserve life. People who are from Black, or Minority Ethnic backgrounds, or have mental health issues, or are dependent on substances are disproportionately more likely to die in these cases, and this emphasises the sensitive nature of many of these deaths to society. Deaths after Police Contact examines police legitimacy and the legitimacy of police regulators in these cases. The book argues that accountability is produced by a relatively arbitrary system of regulation that investigates such deaths as individual cases, rather than attempting to learn lessons from annual trends and patterns that might prevent future deaths. It will be of great interest to scholars and upper-level students of policing and criminal justice.
In 21st century Britain, a 'perfect storm' seems to have engulfed many of its institutions. This book is the first wholesale consideration of the crisis of legitimacy that has taken root in Britain's key institutions and explores the crisis across them to determine if a set of shared underlying pathologies exist to create this collective crisis.
How can a society prevent-not deter, not punish-but prevent crime? Criminal justice prevention, commonly called crime control, aims to prevent crime after an initial offence has been commited through anything from an arrest to a death penalty sentence. These traditional means have been frequently examined and their efficacy just as frequently questioned. Promising new forms of crime prevention have emerged and expanded as important components of an overall strategy to reduce crime. Crime prevention today has developed along three lines: interventions to improve the life chances of children and prevent them from embarking on a life of crime; programs and policies designed to ameliorate the social conditions and institutions that influence offending; and the modification or manipulation of the physical environment, products, or systems to reduce everyday opportunities for crime. Each strategy aims at preventing crime or criminal offending in the first instance - before the act has been committed. Each, importantly, takes place outside of the formal criminal justice system, representing an alternative, perhaps even socially progressive way to reduce crime. The Oxford Handbook of Crime Prevention is a comprehensive, up-to-date, and authoritative review of research on crime prevention. Bringing together top scholars in criminology, public policy, psychology, and sociology, this Handbook includes critical reviews of the main theories that form the basis of crime prevention, evidence-based assessments of the effectiveness of the most important interventions, and cross-cutting essays that examine implementation, evaluation methodology, and public policy. Covering the three major crime prevention strategies active today-developmental, community, and situational-this definitive volume addresses seriously and critically the ways in which the United States and the Western world have attempted, and should continue to strive for the of crime.
The United Kingdom has more than 4.2 million public closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras-one for every fourteen citizens. Across the United States, hundreds of video surveillance systems are being installed in town centers, public transportation facilities, and schools at a cost exceeding $100 million annually. And now other Western countries have begun to experiment with CCTV to prevent crime in public places. In light of this expansion and the associated public expenditure, as well as pressing concerns about privacy rights, there is an acute need for an evidence-based approach to inform policy and practice. Drawing on the highest-quality research, criminologists Brandon C. Welsh and David P. Farrington assess the effectiveness and social costs of not only CCTV, but also of other important surveillance methods to prevent crime in public space, such as improved street lighting, security guards, place managers, and defensible space. Importantly, the book goes beyond the question of "Does it work?" and examines the specific conditions and contexts under which these surveillance methods may have an effect on crime as well as the mechanisms that bring about a reduction in crime. At a time when cities need cost-effective methods to fight crime and the public gradually awakens to the burdens of sacrificing their privacy and civil rights for security, Welsh and Farrington provide this timely and reliable guide to the most effective and non-invasive uses of surveillance to make public places safer from crime.
The history of modern crime control is usually presented as a narrative of how the state wrested control over the governance of crime from the civilian public. Most accounts trace the decline of a participatory, discretionary culture of crime control in the early modern era, and its replacement by a centralized, bureaucratic system of responding to offending. The formation of the 'new' professional police forces in the nineteenth century is central to this narrative: henceforth, it is claimed, the priorities of criminal justice were to be set by the state, as ordinary people lost what authority they had once exercised over dealing with offenders. This book challenges this established view, and presents a fundamental reinterpretation of changes to crime control in the age of the new police. It breaks new ground by providing a highly detailed, empirical analysis of everyday crime control in Victorian provincial cities - revealing the tremendous activity which ordinary people displayed in responding to crime - alongside a rich survey of police organization and policing in practice. With unique conceptual clarity, it seeks to reorient modern criminal justice history away from its established preoccupation with state systems of policing and punishment, and move towards a more nuanced analysis of the governance of crime. More widely, the book provides a unique and valuable vantage point from which to rethink the role of civil society and the state in modern governance, the nature of agency and authority in Victorian England, and the historical antecedents of pluralized modes of crime control which characterize contemporary society.
This title examines the role of political culture and penal populism in the response to the emotive subject of child-on-child homicide. Green explores the reasons underlying the vastly differing responses of the English and Norwegian criminal justice systems to the cases of James Bulger and Silje Redergard respectively. Whereas James Bulger's killers were subject to extreme press and public hostility, and held in secure detention for nine months before being tried in an adversarial court, and served eight years in custody, a Redergard's killers were shielded from public antagonism and carefully reintegrated into the local community. This book argues that English adversarial political culture creates far more incentives to politicize high-profile crimes than Norwegian consensus political culture. Drawing on a wealth of empirical research, Green suggests that the tendency for politicians to justify punitive responses to crime by invoking harsh political attitudes is based upon a flawed understanding of public opinion. In a compelling study, Green proposes a more deliberative response to crime is possible by making English culture less adversarial and by making informed public judgment more assessable.
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