Justice for All: Putting Victims at the Heart of Criminal Justice?
| Date | 01 June 2003 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00258 |
| Published date | 01 June 2003 |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 30, NUMBER 2, JUNE 2003
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 309–26
Justice for All: Putting Victims at the Heart of Criminal
Justice?
John D. Jackson*
This article considers the claim in the government’s White Paper,
Justice for All, to put victims and witnesses at the heart of the criminal
justice system and argues that there is an unresolved tension within the
paper between instrumentalist crime control concerns and intrinsic
concerns for the rights of victims and witnesses. It is argued that many
of the proposals now contained in the latest Criminal Justice Bill are
so preoccupied with rebalancing the system away from offenders that
they risk doing injustice to defendants with little tangible benefit to
victims and witnesses in terms of rights and remedies.
INTRODUCTION
In its White Paper, Justice for All, published in July 2002, the Labour
government committed itself to taking forward its policy on crime into the
heart of the criminal justice system by embarking on a programme of
radical reform.
1
Since the 1997 general election there have been several
White Papers and no less than 14 Bills on crime and justice,
2
but this
White Paper and the legislative programme promised in it represent the
most sustained attempt to address all the various strands of Labour’s crime
and justice policy.
3
The three strands of policy that are most clearly
addressed in the paper are the need for effectiveness in the detection,
conviction, and punishment of criminals; the need to modernize the
criminal justice system; and the need to rebalance the system in favour of
the victims of crime.
309
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350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
*Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice, School of Law, Queen’s
University Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland
I am grateful to Mike Redmayne for helpful comments.
1 See Home Office, Justice for All (2002; Cm. 5563).
2 See the Guardian, 14 November 2002.
3 There is a considerable literature on Labour’s crime policy: see, for example, K.
Bottomley, G. Johnstone, and J. Penn (eds.), New Directions in Criminal Justice:
Labour’s Crime Policy Examined (1998) 19 Policy Studies, issues 3 and 4.
The first strand, encapsulated in the famous adage ‘tough on crime, tough
on the causes of crime’, preoccupied much of Labour’s first term with
particular emphasis given in its flagship enactment, the Crime and Disorder
Act 1998, to tackling youth crime through crime prevention and dealing
swiftly with persistent young offenders. Later in that term it took steps to
reduce particular crimes such as street crime and drug-related crime, and
embarked upon a full-scale review of sentencing policy by establishing the
Halliday review in May 2000.
4
The White Paper responds to this review by
proposing to set out in legislation a sentencing framework which aims to
create tough community sentences as a credible alternative to custody.
5
The second strand considered vital in tackling crime is the need to
modernize the criminal justice system. Modernization has been a perennial
theme of many of this government’s policies and was the main subject of
two earlier White Papers devoted to modernization of the justice system. In
the first of these the Lord Chancellor stated that the government was elected
on a radical agenda to modernize the country, exposing all its institutions and
services to scrutiny.
6
In the second, devoted to criminal justice and published
before the general election in 2001, the government sketched out the need to
‘join up’ the component parts of the criminal justice system and make them
more efficient in order to deal with the ‘justice gap’ between the number of
recorded crimes and the number of successful prosecutions.
7
The 2002 White Paper tracks the modernization steps that have already
been taken. The government is embarking on a programme of police reform
under the Police Reform Act 2002 which is designed to make greater use of
support staff.
8
Reforms have also been taking place in a more piecemeal
manner within the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to address a specific
‘justice gap’ identified between the CPS and enforcement officers. The
Glidewell recommendation that the police and the CPS develop joint units
known as ‘Criminal Justice Units’ to ‘maximise efficiency and effectiveness’
has been put into place in a number of areas in England and Wales.
9
More
recently, the recommendation in Lord Justice Auld’s review that the CPS
should determine the charge in all but routine minor cases has been piloted
and the 2002 White Paper enthusiastically endorses this approach.
10
Lord
310
4 This review did not report until after the general election in July 2001. See Home
Office, Making Punishments Work: Report of a Review of the Sentencing Framework
for England and Wales (2001), available at
halliday.htm>.
5 See Part 12 of the Criminal Justice Bill 2002.
6 Lord Chancellor’s Department, Modernising Justice (1998; Cm. 4155).
7 Home Office, Criminal Justice: The Way Ahead (2001; Cm. 5704).
8 See D. Ormerod and A. Roberts, ‘The Police Reform Act 2002 – Increasing
Centralisation, Maintaining Confidence and Contracting Out of Crime’ [2003] Crim.
Law Rev. 141.
9Review of the Crown Prosecution Service (1998; Cm. 3960) (the Glidewell report).
10 See Review of the Criminal Courts of England and Wales (2001)(the Auld review) ch.
12, para. 12.
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