Book Review: The Criminological Foundations of Penal Policy: Essays in Honour of Roger Hood
| Author | Denis Jones |
| Published date | 01 April 2004 |
| Date | 01 April 2004 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/147322540400400115 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
young man who went through a series of moving and emotionally charged meetings
during which he encountered his own vulnerabilities as well as those of the victim (of
a car theft) only to respond, when asked ‘would you steal any more cars now?’–‘well,
I certainly wouldn’t steal yours!’
Stories like this are sprinkled through the text but Roche does not fall into the trap,
identified by Crawford (2002), of simply collecting ‘exotics’. This is a serious work of
scholarship that can provide practitioners with far more than a few colourful anecdotes.
The questions of how accountable restorative justice is, and to whom its processes
are accountable, are important. They are currently under-researched and
under-theorised. As Roche points out early on: ‘Not enough thought has been given
to ways of closing the gap between what we hope people will do to each other and
what they actually do, the gap between the warm and fuzzy rhetoric of restorative
justice on the one hand and its sometime ugly practice on the other’.
What Roche reveals is a multitude of novel forms of ‘deliberative accountability’
operating in, and helping to establish, a hybrid field of ‘semi-formal justice’. These, he
argues, cannot be assumed to be universally benign just because they lay claim to the
virtue of being ‘restorative’. Roche’s text is littered with examples of how these
principles can equally easily accommodate the other major trends in criminal justice
policy, those for more exclusion, less tolerance and intense vindictiveness (Young,
1999). Huxley pointed out that mescaline was as likely to induce a schizoid reaction as
transcendence. Restorative justice undoubtedly opens many doors in our perceptions
of criminal justice presenting us with vivid and colourful vistas. The value of Roche’s
book is that it helps to distinguish those visions that offer some form of institutional
accountability from those that simply reflect the schizophrenic tendencies of the
criminal justice system (Sullivan, 2001).
References
Crawford, A. (2002) The State, Community and Restorative Justice: Heresy, Nostalgia
and Butterfly Collecting, in Walgrave, L. (Ed.) Restorative Justice and the Law.
Cullompton, Willan.
Huxley, A. (1954/94) The Doors of Perception. Flamingo.
Sullivan, R. (2001) The Schizophrenic State: Neo-Liberal Criminal Justice, in Stenson,
K. and Sullivan R. (Eds.) Crime, Risk and Justice. Cullompton, Willan.
Young, J. (1999) The Exclusive Society. London, Sage.
Lucia Zedner and Andrew Ashworth (Eds.), The Criminological Foundations of
Penal Policy: Essays in Honour of Roger Hood, Oxford University Press, 2003,
£60, 0-19-926509-7.
Reviewed by: Denis Jones, East Sussex Social Services Department.
Some of the world’s leading criminologists have contributed to this Festschrift in
honour of Roger Hood, concentrating upon the relationship between criminological
research and the development of criminal justice policy. Readers of Youth Justice are
Youth Justice Vol. 4 No. 1 71
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