Book Review: The Handbook of the Criminal Justice System

Date01 December 2003
DOI10.1177/147322540300300309
Published date01 December 2003
AuthorDenis Jones
Subject MatterArticles
text Youth Justice Vol. 3 No. 3
205
practitioners about what New Labour has, and has not, achieved in its crime-related
policies. In covering a broad range of issues it provides important evidence both of
the ambiguities and contradictions of these policies and of the diversity of responses
they have produced among well informed and thoughtful commentators.
Mike McConville and Gail Wilson, Eds., The Handbook of the Criminal Justice
System
, Oxford University Press, 2002, £69.99, Hb, ISBN 0-19-925460-5, £26.99,
Pb, ISBN 0-19-925395-1
Reviewed by: Denis Jones, East Sussex Social Services Department.
While written as a guide to various aspects of the English criminal justice system for
a Chinese and Hong Kong audience (and published simultaneously in Chinese and
English), this authoritative will have a much wider appeal. Chapters are contributed by
many leading criminologists, from Robert Reiner to Keith Bottomley.
Readers of Youth Justice will be most interested in the chapters by Rob Allen, on
alternatives to prosecution, and by Nicola Padfield on juvenile justice. Allen gives a
useful if brief overview of the history and development of cautioning by the police in
England and Wales, and the power of the crown prosecution service to discontinue
proceedings. Padfield provides a brief history of juvenile justice from 1908 to the
present, discusses the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, and then works through the
sentencing options now available for juveniles. She suggests that the current
government is edging towards the removal of juveniles from the criminal justice system
altogether, returning to the welfare side of the old...

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