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Book Review: Confronting crime: Crime control policy under New Labour

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
AuthorMike Nellis
DOI10.1177/1462474505048135
Published date01 January 2005
Date01 January 2005
Subject MatterArticles
06 048135 (to/d) 23/11/04 3:09 pm Page 91
Copyright © SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi.
www.sagepublications.com
1462-4745; Vol 7(1): 91–119
DOI: 10.1177/1462474505048135
PUNISHMENT
& SOCIETY
Book reviews
Confronting crime: Crime control policy under New Labour, Michael Tonry (ed.).
Cullompton: Willan Publishing, 2003. 251 pp. £30. ISBN 1–84392–022–0 (hbk).
Confronting crime seeks to analyse New Labour’s second-term crime control polices, as
instanced by the Halliday review of sentencing, the White Paper Justice for All and the
2002 Criminal Justice Act – still only a Bill when the book was written – which gave
substantive, if modified expression to them. It derives from a one-off Cambridge Crime
Policy Conference and several meetings of the Cambridge Crime Sentencing Policy
Study group which were attended by a mix of practitioners (managers and civil servants,
though not, in this instance, sentencers), and academics, some of whom were then part-
nered-up by the editor to ‘bring to bear the best features of the overlapping intellectual
worlds they separately inhabit’. The setting up and sustaining of these meetings,
modelled on the influential ‘executive sessions’ at Harvard University’s School of
Government is one of Michael Tonry’s achievements as Director of the Cambridge Insti-
tute of Criminology, although they are similar in intention to the long-standing, if less
frequent, Cropwood Seminars that are also run from the Institute.
The collection is bookended by two extremely lucid and acerbic chapters by Tonry
himself. The first ruthlessly appraises the use of evidence by New Labour’s crime poli-
cymakers. The second brainstorms a series of strategies and techniques for reducing the
prison population in England and Wales. Tonry uses a very generous definition of
‘evidence-ledness’ – ostensibly a New Labour touchstone – and by no means restricts it
to the kind of empirical data that scrupulous academic researchers might insist upon.
He allows ‘professional experience’...

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