Abstract
Many progressive reforms and initiatives are happening in criminal courts at a time when the imprisonment rate is rising. This chapter locates these developments as part of debates that started in the eighteenth century on whether the criminal justice system should be concerned with punishing rational offenders or assisting those not responsible for their actions. Restorative justice involves defendants being diverted to conferences in which they apologize to victims. Therapeutic jurisprudence gives judicial officers a healing role in conducting legal proceedings. A third movement, pretrial services, is less well known but has even greater potential to transform the criminal justice system. This chapter provides a critical overview, considering costs and benefits.
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Notes
- 1.
Wacquant (2009) makes a stronger argument in relation to African Americans, a larger proportion of the population in the USA. Tough laws have been targeted against offending in this “underclass”, while at the same time welfare benefits have been removed.
- 2.
For an introduction to this extensive literature, see Johnstone (2013).
- 3.
For an overview, see Daly and Hayes (1997).
- 4.
Criminologists often attribute greater punitiveness in the UK criminal justice system to neo-liberalism (Bell 2011). There has, arguably, been a missed opportunity for bail reform as a consequence of austerity measures that started before the 2007–08 Global Financial Crisis, although at the same time an expansion in restorative justice programs.
- 5.
See VanNostrand and Rose (2009). It is sometimes difficult to identify from these studies the extent to which the remand rate has fallen or whether this has reduced the overall imprisonment rate.
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Travers, M., Colvin, E., Bartkowiak-Théron, I., Sarre, R., Day, A., Bond, C. (2020). Bail Reform in Context. In: Rethinking Bail. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44881-3_2
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