Book Review: Crime, truth and justice: Official inquiry, discourse, knowledge
| Published date | 01 October 2005 |
| DOI | 10.1177/146247450500700410 |
| Date | 01 October 2005 |
| Author | Jacqueline Tombs |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Crime, truth and justice: Official inquiry, discourse, knowledge, George Gilligan and John
Pratt (eds). Cullompton: Willan, 2004. 285 pp. ISBN 1–84392–027–1.
Crime, truth and justice, edited by George Gilligan and John Pratt, is an interesting
collection of essays about how official discourses frame our knowledge about crime and
justice. Albeit through somewhat different lenses and with different empirical referents,
the essays illustrate how various forms of official discourse, ranging from official
inquiries and commissions to information routinely published in government annual
reports and statistics, not only lie at the heart of our understandings of crime and justice
but also form the ‘objective data’ of much contemporary criminological work. Indeed,
as Gilligan observes in chapter 1, in some instances ‘official reports may be the only
significant data available. So, almost by default, they provide the empirical truth on
which to evaluate the effectiveness or otherwise of that agency’ (p. 200, emphasis in
original). At a time when managerialist ideologies have led to a virtual industry in the
production of official annual reports, as if they provide the primary mode of account-
ability for the operations of various official and quasi-official public bodies, it is all the
more important to ask just what the ‘empirical truths’ dispersed through the forms of
official discourse are really all about. That this book focuses on that question is
commendable.
From the outset Frank Burton and Pat Carlen’s (1979) path-breaking study of official
discourse is placed at the centre of the book’s project. In the short well-structured Intro-
duction and in Gilligan’s first chapter the editors skilfully attempt to provide analytic
coherence to the 13 very different essays. They do this by articulating how the essays
relate to some of the key theoretical arguments opened up by Burton and Carlen over
25 years ago; arguments reflected on, reconsidered and brilliantly revitalized by Pat
Carlen in the final chapter (13) of this volume. In addition, Gilligan and Pratt care-
fully underline the diverse ways in which the essays contribute to our understanding of
how official discourses, particularly official inquiries, discover, construct and dissemi-
nate ‘truth’. That the essays reveal variations, contradictions and ambiguities, both in
how official discourses operate and in what they accomplish, is testimony to Carlen’s
argument in the final chapter. Thus, without engaging directly either with the issues
opened up by Burton and Carlen (1979) or with those taken further by Carlen in this
volume, some of the contributions reveal how official inquiries operate to produce
truths/knowledges that support the prevailing political and ideological hegemony while
others show that the discursive processes involved can be transformative.
The versatility of official discourse in accomplishing its distinctive projects is reflected
in the volume’s four-part structure. The first part, on ‘Official discourse and modern
societies’, contains three essays – by George Gilligan, David Brown and Phil Scraton –
all of which examine forms of official inquiry and the representations of truth that such
inquiries engender. The five essays in the second part, on ‘Official discourse, legitima-
tion and deligitimation’ – by John Pratt, Nigel Hancock and Alison Leibling, David
Dixon, Philip Stenning and Carol LaPrairie, and Loïc Wacquant – refer to ways in
which official discourses produced in specific contexts can serve to legitimate or chal-
lenge government policies and state agencies. The four essays in the third part, on
‘Official discourse as closure, healing or crisis management’ – by John Lea, Ronnie
Lippens, Stéphane Leman-Langlois and Clifford Shearing, and Nils Christie – reveal
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