Book review: Respect and Criminal Justice
| Author | David Hayes |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895820985631 |
| Published date | 01 November 2021 |
| Date | 01 November 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Criminology & Criminal Justice
2021, Vol. 21(5) 725 –729
© The Author(s) 2021
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Book reviews
Gabrielle Watson, Respect and Criminal Justice, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2020; 256 pp.:
978-0198833345, £80.00 (hbk)
Reviewed by: David Hayes, University of Sheffield, UK
DOI: 10.1177/1748895820985631
The concept of respect is commonly invoked in criminal justice, from the requirement
that States must respect their citizens’ human dignity (even when investigating, prosecut-
ing and punishing them), to the invocation of respect as a professional value of the vari-
ous institutions that make up the criminal justice ‘system’. In Respect and Criminal
Justice, Gabrielle Watson offers a sustained critique of the uses to which the concept of
respect is put in criminal justice. She argues that, in England and Wales at least, respect
frequently fails to meaningfully sway the actions of institutions and individuals, despite
their avowed commitment to respecting their subjects, because it is used in a nebulous,
opaque and often contradictory way.
Watson’s book reviews the conceptual uses of respect across two substantive case
studies of policies and practice in English policing and imprisonment. Her first chapter
discusses the concept of respect as it appears in the philosophical and social-scientific
literature, and establishes some of the key themes for the later analysis. Thereafter,
Watson evaluates the way in which this concept is deployed in four specific contexts,
cutting across a wide range of levels of abstraction along the policy/practice spectrum.
Specifically, she examines the uses to which respect is put in: academic and policy dis-
cussions of procedural justice in policing; stop-and-search practices; prison policy, gov-
ernance and sociology; and the practice of preparing and consuming food in prisons.
Across these fields, Watson notes a tendency for ‘narrow instrumentalism’ (p. 43) to
prevail in institutional decision-making, to the detriment of commitment to intrinsic
criminal justice values. In such a context, respect can only ever be a ‘weak side-con-
straint’ on instrumental aims (p. 31), and in practice, fails to meaningfully secure proces-
sual values such as equality, fairness and justice. The problem is not so much that
instrumentalism will always break free of its nominal limiting features, so much as that
respect has failed because it has been underdeveloped in institutional policy-making.
Precisely because respect is such a polyvalent concept, encompassing act and attitude,
recognition of sameness and difference, if it is left at the level of a superficial buzzword,
it can be taken to mean different things in different contexts. We are left with an ‘incom-
plete and fragmentary’ (p. 192) conception of respect at different levels, which is hard for
985631CRJ0010.1177/1748895820985631Criminology & Criminal JusticeBook reviews
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