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Volume I of The Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales frames what was known about crime and criminal justice in the 1960s, before describing the liberalising legislation of the decade. Commissioned by the Cabinet Office and using interviews, British Government records, and papers housed in private, and institutional collections, this is the first of a collaboratively written series of official histories that analyse the evolution of criminal justice between 1959 and 1997. It opens with an account of the inception of the series, before describing what was known about crime and criminal justice at the time. It then outlines the genesis of three key criminal justice Acts that not only redefined the relations between the State and citizen, but also shaped what some believed to be the spirit of the age: the abolition of capital punishment, and the reform of the laws on abortion, and homosexuality. The Acts were taken to be so contentious morally and politically that Governments of different stripes were hesitant about promoting them formally. The onus was instead passed to backbenchers, who were supported by interlocking groups of reformers, with a pooled knowledge about how to effectively organise a rhetoric that drew on the language of utilitarianism, and the clarity and authority of a Church of England. This came to play an increasingly consequential and largely unacknowledged part in resolving what were often confusing moral questions. This book will be of much interest to students of criminology and British history, politics and law.

Volume II of The Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales traces, for the first time, the genesis and early evolution of two principal institutions in the criminal justice system, the Crown Court and the Crown Prosecution Service. This volume examines the origins and shaping of two critical institutions: the Crown Court, which rose from the ashes of the Courts of Assize and Quarter Sessions; and the Crown Prosecution Service which replaced a rather haphazard system of police prosecuting solicitors. The 1971 Courts Act and the 1985 Prosecution of Offences Act were to reconfigure the architecture of criminal justice, transforming the procedures by which people were charged, prosecuted and, in the weightier cases demanding a judge and jury, tried in the criminal courts of England and Wales. One stemmed from a crisis in a medieval system of travelling justices that tried people in the wrong places and for inadequate lengths of time. The other was precipitated by a scandal in which three men were wrongly convicted for the murder of a bisexual prostitute. Theirs is an as yet untold history that can be explored in depth because it is recent enough, in the words of Harold Wilson, to have been 'written while the official records could still be supplemented by reference to the personal recollections of the public men who were involved'. This book will be of much interest to students of criminology and British history, politics and law.

Contents: Introduction; Published writings; Observations on debt collection; Some problems of interpretative historiography; Law, order and power in late 17th and early 18th century England; Governments, victims and policies in 2 countries; The present state of criminology in Britain; Witnesses and space in a Crown court; Introduction: the emergence of criminological theory; The social organization of a Home Office initiative; The opening stages of criminal justice policy making; Sociology and the stereotype of the police; Murderers, victims and 'survivors': the social construction of deviance; Victims, prosecutors and the state in 19th century England and Wales; Chronocentrism and British criminology; Aspects of the social construction of victims in Australia; Urban homelessness, crime and victimisation in England (with Tim Newburn); Treatment of victims in England and Wales; Name Index.

Holloway Prison for Women was rebuilt in the expectation that it would revolutionize the treatment of female offenders. This work describes the changes in penal ideology and conceptions of women's criminality as they fed into the design of this new prison from 1968 to 1988.

Thinking about criminology : facts are bits of biography / Paul Rock and Simon Holdaway -- Theorizing : sotto voce / Clifford Shearing -- Making the invisible visible in criminology : a personal journey / Elizabeth A. Stanko -- Translations and refutations : an analysis of changing perspectives in criminology / Frances Heidensohn -- Copping a plea / Robert Reiner -- Back to the future : the predictive value of social theories of delinquency / David Downes -- Roots of a perspective / Nils Christie -- From criminology to anthropology? Identity, morality, and normality in the social construction of deviance / Richard Jenkins -- Obituaries, opportunities and obsessions / Ken Pease -- Thinking about criminology : a reflection on theory within criminology / Simon Holdaway and Paul Rock.

Annotation

Contributions cover such subjects as criminological theory and the new East End of London, the practice of comparative criminology including an analysis of variations in penal cultures within the US, restorative justice in Colombia, New Labour's politics and policy in relation to dangerous personality-disordered offenders, the legal construction of torture, and the future for a social democratic criminology.