New Labour and criminal justice: Reflections on a wasteland of missed opportunity
| Published date | 01 September 2010 |
| Date | 01 September 2010 |
| Author | Maurice Vanstone |
| DOI | 10.1177/0264550510373810 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
New Labour and criminal justice:
Reflections on a wasteland of
missed opportunity
Maurice Vanstone, Swansea University
Abstract At the time of writing, the New Labour project has ended and Labour has
returned to the opposition benches. It came into power in 1997 bringing with it a
general optimism about change for the better, and in particular, hope that the penal
and criminal justice systems would be steered away from the punitive populism of
the Tory years and towards new constructive and rational goals based on values
such as fairness and benevolence. This paper reflects back on that hope and con-
cludes that whilst some positive achievements were made, New Labour’s overall
performance in this field must be judged not only as disappointing but also as a fail-
ure to grasp a historic opportunity to change the face of criminal justice.
Keywords crime, criminal justice, New Labour, politics, populism, rehabilitation
Following the New Labour victory in 1997 I wrote an imagined review of the first
five years of the administration’s criminal justice and penal policies (Vanstone,
1997). I set it against a backcloth of a Tory criminal justice system, shaped in part
by the King of Populism, Michael Howard (long since retired to his Never-probation-
land retreat), in which the number of people being imprisoned had risen inexorably,
necessitating the return of a modern form of prison hulk; young people had contin-
ued to be demonized; vigilantism had been given a new lease of life; money making
had re-entered the penal system; research had been devalued; and policy had been
presented in the macho language of war.
I envisaged a criminal justice and penal landscape in which rehabilitation and
reconciliation instead of punishment and revenge dominated political discourse;
problem-solving had become the driving motivation behind policy development;
criminal justice had been absorbed into a broader campaign for social justice in
which equal weight was given to addressing environmental and individual
The Journal of Community and Criminal Justice
Copyright ª2010 NAPO Vol 57(3): 281-285
DOI: 10.1177/0264550510373810
www.napo.org.uk
http://prb.sagepub.com
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