Book Review: Criminal Justice
| Author | Andrew Sanders |
| Published date | 01 November 2005 |
| Date | 01 November 2005 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1466802505057719 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Lucia Zedner
Criminal Justice
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. xi + 319 pp. £18.99 ISBN
0–19–876366–2 (pbk)
•Reviewed by Andrew Sanders, University of Manchester, UK
Readers of this journal do not need me to tell them that the field of criminal
justice is huge, varied and constantly in flux. But whether the fundamentals are
common to the varied jurisdictions of the western world, and whether they
have changed much in the last 150 years or are in the process of change now,
are matters of intense debate. We will return to that debate later. First, let us
consider the choices that Lucia Zedner, like all authors of ‘criminal justice’
books, had to make. The Clarendon Law Series is aimed at law students rather
than social science students or academics. Yet this is not a textbook nor a law
book in any conventional sense. It does not dwell on the ever-changing detail.
It is primarily about Britain, but draws on theoretical work from other
jurisdictions; and unlike many books with this title it covers all the main areas:
policing, process, punishment and the emerging ‘actuarial society’.
The book has eight chapters. Two introduce the concepts of crime and
criminal justice. Three chapters are on punishment, and most of another is on
sentencing. Setting aside the concluding chapter, this leaves just one and a half
chapters on policing, pre-trial and trial processes and the position of victims.
This is a curious balance to strike, even allowing for the fact that no book of
around 300 pages can even approach comprehensiveness. What is, and is not,
discussed sometimes seems arbitrary. For example, there are 23 pages on
sentencing. However, the process by which most defendants come to be
sentenced in the first place—the mass production of guilty pleas—is merely
acknowledged. Judges, magistrates, appeals, miscarriages of justice and
restorative justice get little more attention. The way suspects, defendants and
sentenced offenders experience criminal justice is not even acknowledged as
worthy of comment. Surprisingly, given Zedner’s predominantly sociological
treatment of the subject, we are told something about the human rights of
prisoners but not what being imprisoned is actually like.
On the other hand, there is an excellent final chapter, on ‘the security
society’. It draws on material in the earlier chapters in tackling the debate
BOOK REVIEWS
431
Criminal Justice
© 2005 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi.
www.sagepublications.com
1466–8025; Vol: 5(4): 431–438
DOI: 10.1177/1466802505057719
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