Abstract
Turner shows that the shape taken by the public confidence agenda has ‘conditions of existence’, including the following: (1) increasing separation between the public and the criminal justice system makes it necessary for the public to have confidence in justice, rather than witnessing this first-hand; (2) an understanding of the criminal justice system as legitimately oriented towards the production of effects, which grants ‘experts’ priority in knowing about and accurately and objectively representing the reality of crime and justice; and (3) a political system which incentivises aspiring political leaders to treat public perceptions of policy and practice as centrally important and encourages them to see such perceptions as able to be accurately captured by aggregating opinion surveys. These conditions of existence have emerged through historical changes, including the following: (1) professionalisation of criminal justice limiting opportunities for public participation; (2) a shift towards an instrumental orientation of transforming individuals; and (3) the change to universal adult suffrage creating new expectations for accountability, and, increasingly, managerialist regimes using quantitative performance indicators.
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Notes
- 1.
This trend can also be seen in the demise of the practice of ‘pleading benefit of clergy’, which allowed hundreds of offenders each year to escape hanging for minor offences against property in what ‘amounted in fact to a pre-sentencing pardoning system’ which rested upon the clergyman’s willingness to attest to the ability of the illiterate to read, and the judge’s willingness to participate in the fiction (Beattie 1986, 474). This historical anomaly, which resulted in some capital offenders receiving the relatively mild (for the time) punishment of branding to the thumb, was addressed in the mid-seventeenth century by the introduction of pardons conditional on accepting transportation. Once judges had a merciful alternative to execution, they were less willing to permit a plea for ‘benefit of clergy’ (Beattie 1986, 474–5). Judicial discretion was thus increased by the demise of this practice, but the clergy were no longer involved in any collusion to produce mercy.
- 2.
For example, in 1786 the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London petitioned the king about the rising tide of crime which they considered to be attributable to the end of transportation meaning that offenders who had served their sentence were now being released in England (at that time transportation to America had been ended due to the war of independence) (Emsley 1987: 218). The following year the first convicts departed for Botany Bay (Emsley 1987, 203). It is also instructive to recall at this stage the link between economic redundancy, social homelessness, and perceived criminality, referred to above, and also to note that transportation to America, and later Australia, was used both as a legally inscribed penal sanction, and as a way of disposing of surplus peasant populations (most notoriously from Ireland and the Scottish Highlands). At various stages between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries (depending on geographic location), vast numbers of peasants found themselves surplus to the requirements of landlords and forcibly dispossessed of both the right of access to common land, and the right to cultivate land suitable for maintaining their subsistence. In becoming thus both ‘masterless’ and deprived of legitimate ways of obtaining the means of existence, they were exposed to the risk of severe destitution and starvation, which may have led them into courses of action where they would fall foul of the criminal law. Either way, enforced emigration or penal transportation were available to dispose of them, ostensibly to improve their situation, but certainly furthering the aims of the landed gentry to extract maximum rent from their land, as well as assisting the government in populating its new overseas possessions (Prebble 1969; Hill 1972; Thompson 1980; Hunter 2010).
- 3.
- 4.
Lodge (1974, 11) has characterised the establishment of the Home Office Research Unit, as a component of the ‘inevitable…development in Great Britain of scientific criminological research’ which has happened as a result of ‘forces that for many years had been building up’. By way of illustration he refers to the establishment in 1931 of the Association for the Scientific Treatment of Criminals (later to become the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency) following work done by the Medical Research Council, and, in the same decade, correspondence between the penal reform campaigner Margery Fry and the Home Office on the need to start criminological research (13).
- 5.
The National Crime Survey surveys were, according to Sparks (1981, 6) ‘designed and implemented with what can only be described as indecent haste ... little more than two years was allowed for pretesting a new (and very expensive) research technique, in order to overcome the problems concerning the “reliability and accuracy” of survey findings which the President’s Commission had uncovered. Even the little time that was allowed for pretesting was badly used.’ Piloting efforts were ‘puny and inept’ and answered none of the questions which had been raised by the earlier surveys.
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Turner, E.R. (2018). Archaeology: Surfaces of Emergence for the Public Confidence Agenda. In: Public Confidence in Criminal Justice. Critical Criminological Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67897-9_4
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