David Downes - The Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales

The Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...89

The Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales

Volume III of The Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales draws on archival sources and individual accounts to offer a history of penal policymaking in England and Wales between 1959 and 1997.

The book studies the changes underlying penal policymaking in the period, from a belief in the rehabilitative potential of imprisonment to a reaffirmation in 1993 that 'Prison Works' as a deterrent to crime. A need to curb the rising prison population initially focussed on developing alternatives to prison and a new system of parole; however, their relative ineffectiveness led to sentencing becoming the key to penal reform. A slackening of faith in rehabilitation led to pressure for greater emphasis on humane containment and the rebalancing of security, order and justice in prison regimes. Thus, 1991 was the climactic year for what became largely unfulfilled hopes for lasting penal reform. Escapes, riots and prison occupations were prime catalysts for changes, often highly contentious, in penal policymaking. Notably, there was no simple equation between political party, minister and policy choice. Both Labour and Conservative governments had distinctly liberal Home Secretaries and, after 1992, both parties took a more punitive approach.

This book will be of much interest to students of criminology and British history, politics and law.

David Downes is Professor Emeritus of Social Policy and a member and former director of the Mannheim Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice at the London School of Economics, UK.

Whitehall Histories: Government Official History Series
ISSN: 1474-8398

The Government Official History series began in 1919 with wartime histories, and the peacetime series was inaugurated in 1966 by Harold Wilson. The aim of the series is to produce major histories in their own right, compiled by historians eminent in the field, who are afforded free access to all relevant material in the official archives. The Histories also provide a trusted secondary source for other historians and researchers while the official records are not in the public domain. The main criteria for selection of topics are that the histories should record important episodes or themes of British history while the official records can still be supplemented by the recollections of key players; and that they should be of general interest, and, preferably, involve the records of more than one government department.

The Authorised History of British Defence Economic Intelligence
A Cold War in Whitehall, 1929-90
Peter Davies

The Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales
Vol I: The 'Liberal Hour'
Vol II: Institution-Building
Paul Rock
Vol III: The Rise and Fall of Penal Hope
David Downes

The Official History of the British Civil Service
Reforming the Civil Service, Vol. I: The Fulton Years, 1966-1981
Rodney Lowe

Reforming the Civil Service, Vol. II: The Thatcher and Major
Revolutions, 1982-97
Rodney Lowe and Hugh Pemberton

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Government-Official-History-Series/book-series/SE0789

The Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales

VolumeIII: The Rise and Fall of Penal Hope

DavidDownes

First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2021 Crown Copyright

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-0-36:7-65395-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-65399-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-12927-1 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

1. 2 Dropping the Admiral: Changing policy on maximum security imprisonment, 1965-8
2. 3 Forcing the Issue: The making of the dispersal system, 1968-79
3. 4 Getting to Grips: Getting to Grips: penal policy from May to Langdon
4. 5 The Making of the Criminal Justice Act 1991
5. 6 The Woolf Report and After
6. 7 The Pursuit of Innovation
7. 8 Conclusion

1. 2 Dropping the Admiral: Changing policy on maximum security imprisonment, 1965-8
2. 3 Forcing the Issue: The making of the dispersal system, 1968-79
3. 4 Getting to Grips: Getting to Grips: penal policy from May to Langdon
4. 5 The Making of the Criminal Justice Act 1991
5. 6 The Woolf Report and After
6. 7 The Pursuit of Innovation
7. 8 Conclusion

Guide

1. 5.1 Prison overcrowding, 1945-2012.
2. 5.2 Average prison population and Certified Normal Accommodation (CNA), England and Wales, 1960-2015.
3. 5.3 Young offenders aged 14-16, 1971 and 1981.
4. 5.4 Young male offenders sentenced to custody, 1982-1990.
5. 5.5 Crime rate, England and Wales, 1900-1997.
6. 6.1 Average annual number of prison escapes, per 1,000 prisoners 1979-2012.
7. 8.1 Changes in homicide rates, Canada 1961-2003 and United States 1961-2002.

The title of this book, The Rise and Fall of Penal Hope, attempts to convey, for the period 1959-97, the continued unfolding of a set of aims and aspirations which had preoccupied policy-makers in the criminal justice field in England and Wales for a centuiy or more - over and above the practical business of day-to-day administration and short-term planning - but which ultimately foundered on the rocks of the politicisation of law and order, the development of which is the subject of a separate volume by Tim Newburn and myself. This not to say that politics should somehow be excluded from issues of crime control, only that in this case its character hinged on what Professor Tony Bottoms termed 'populist punitiveness'.

The great American sociologist C. Wright Mills defined the 'master aim of the historian' as 'to keep the human record straight'. Even so, the amount of material relevant to the task is still immense, and the amount of ground to be covered remains daunting. And some of the shortfall in documentation can be made good by interviews with people who had been directly engaged in the making or study of penal policy in this period and who may give access to personal papers that shed light on their character..

My own response to the challenges involved was necessarily to be selective rather than comprehensive in analysis and coverage. The issues on which this history is based are those which demanded policy choices that had a decisive and lasting influence, for good or ill, on the penal system. Two such seminal developments were the Home Office acceptance in 1968 of the case made by the Advisory Council on the Penal System for the dispersal rather than concentration of category A prisoners, and the repeal of key sections of the 1991 Criminal Justice Act, which forms the taproot for the doubling of the size of the prison population, and the currently shameful state of many of our prisons, two to three decades on. In the words of the Chief Inspector of Prisons: "The recent history of many prisons in England and Wales has been deeply troubling. We saw once more in 2018-19... that far too many of our jails have been plagued by drugs, violence, appalling living conditions and a lack of access to meaningful rehabilitative activity."

Next page

1234567...89

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales»

Look at similar books to The Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Jacobson Jessica

Inside Crown Court: Personal Experiences and Questions of Legitimacy

David Nelken

Contrasts in Criminal Justice: Getting from Here to There

Adrian Barton

The Policy Making Process in the Criminal Justice System

Jenni Ward

Transforming Summary Justice: Modernisation in the Lower Criminal Courts

Gabrielle Watson

Respect and Criminal Justice

Karen Downes

Sold in Secret: The Murder of Charlene Downes

David Lemmings

Criminal Justice During the Long Eighteenth Century

David Smith

A New Response to Youth Crime

David S. Wall

The Chief Constables of England and Wales: The Socio-legal History of a Criminal Justice Elite (Routledge Revivals)

David A. Schlueter

Military Criminal Justice: Practice and Procedure vol 1

David Weisburd

Statistics in Criminal Justice

Edgar J. McManus

Law and liberty in early New England: criminal justice and due process, 1620-1692

Discussion, reviews of the book The Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.