Book Review: The presumption of innocence in Irish criminal law: Whittling the golden thread, Claire Hamilton. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007. 252 pp. 27.50. ISBN 0716534088
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474509341147 |
| Date | 01 January 2010 |
| Author | Conor Hanly |
| Published date | 01 January 2010 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
To the extent to which corrections has its own culture, it has traditionally been a hyper-
masculine culture, and this fact presents a challenge for female staff members seeking
to evolve a congruent role for themselves, while gaining acceptance from prisoners and
peers. As one of many examples, Sarah Tait reports that women she interviewed in a
study of gender roles ‘felt excluded from Control and Restraint procedures, yet under
pressure to prove their ability to control prisoners and scrutinised when dealing with
resistant prisoners, particularly early in their careers’ (p. 75). To the extent to which
perceived evaluative criteria in prison settings remain pegged at a primitive level, so will
the behavior they inspire, and as a result neither male nor female staff members are apt
to achieve their fullest potential.
This point also applies to some of the performance standards promulgated under New
Prison Management regimes for professionals who work in prisons, which make demands
on them in pursuit of efficiency that can be unrealistic, unethical, or both. In a conclud-
ing chapter to the book, Ben Crewe mentions that in English prisons, psychologists are
often required to do risk assessments. As a card-carrying psychologist, I stand ready to
testify that my training has not qualified me to use Ouija boards. I recognize that it
would be very nice if one could predict the risk of individuals’ re-offending, so as to
make release decisions based on empirically verifiable probabilities. However, I think
there is nothing nice about psychologists being asked to engage in behavior that may
have unnecessarily turned them ‘into the new enemies of the prisoner community’
(p. 430). To prevent grotesque eventualities such as these, I suspect it would behove New
Prison Administrators to attend to Andrew Coyle’s dictum that ‘the management of
prisons is primarily about the management of human beings, both staff and prisoners.
This means that there are issues that go beyond effectiveness and efficiency’ (p. 242).
Hans Toch
University at Albany, State University of New York
The presumption of innocence in Irish criminal law: Whittling the golden thread, Claire
Hamilton. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007. 252 pp. €27.50. ISBN 0716534088.
DOI: 10.1177/1462474509341147
In the Book of Genesis, we are told that the Lord promised Abraham that he would
spare all the wicked people of Sodom if 10 righteous men could be found.1Thus began
a tradition of allowing the guilty to go free so as to avoid the risk of punishing the
innocent. This tradition found its way into the common law, and by the 18th century
it found its most famous exponent in William Blackstone (1979/1769: 352), who wrote
that ‘the law holds, it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent
suffer’. To give effect to this tradition, the common law developed the presumption of
innocence, expressed most famously by Viscount Sankey LC in Woolmington v. DPP:
‘Throughout the web of the English criminal law one golden thread is always to be
seen, that it is the duty of the prosecution to prove the prisoner’s guilt.’2This principle
is now regarded, alongside trial by jury, as one of the cardinal characteristics of the
common law attitude to criminal justice. Whether this in fact remains true is the subject
of a new book by Claire Hamilton.
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