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Stephen Farrall, The Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales Vol. IV: The Politics of Law and Order. By David Downes and Tim Newburn (Routledge, 2023, 342pp., £96.00 hbk), The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 64, Issue 5, September 2024, Pages 1235–1238, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azae007
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Extract
In my earlier review of Paul Rock’s first two volumes in this series (Farrall, 2022), I started by noting the problems that confront all those writing histories of the present, namely, what to focus on, and what to leave out, since dealing with every bit of policy, legislation and debate slows the narrative, whilst ‘cherry-picking’ runs the risk of missing something crucial. Simultaneously, authors also need to balance an account of ‘what happened’, who did (or said) what, which actors steered processes and the reasons things unfolded as they did with a historically-informed sociological account of wider social changes which draws on theoretical understandings. Downes and Rock provide a model for avoiding falling into various of these traps, and that alone means that this volume is a highly rewarding read.
VOLUME IV: AN OUTLINE
Downes and Newburn pick up from where Downes (as Vol. III) left off, dividing their contribution into three parts. The first of these deals with criminal justice legislation from 1946 until 1997 (with chapters devoted to the events of 1945–1970, 1970–1979, 1979–1992 and 1992–1997, as Chapters 2–5). The second part deals with an explanation of these trends. The third part, slightly sneakily given the former Home Secretary (Jacqui Smith) ‘stipulated that the history could not extend beyond 1997’ (Rock, 2018: x), deals with criminal justice matters from 1997 until 2010. It is good to see senior colleagues pushing back against the (quite improper, I think) stipulation from a New Labour Home Secretary that they were not to cover the New Labour era. The third part then delivers the analytic aspects of their account, which revolve around the political orientations of the Conservative and Labour Parties during the period from 1945 until about 1993 and what this implied for social and economic policies and in turn crime rates and criminal justice responses (Chapter 6). Chapter 7 turns to another explanation, that relating to pressure and sectional interest groups (the Howard League, NACRO, Liberty as well as bodies representing the police and prison officers). The liberal pressure groups found that they had less and less power from the early 1990s, whilst at the same time right-wing groups saw their influence increase, even after New Labour won power in 1997. During this time too, the role of victims emerged and started to more centrally affect criminal justice policies (such as sentencing). Chapter 8 deals with the various scandals which have engulfed the criminal justice system at various points and have impacted upon it. This includes various prison escapes, the miscarriages of justice which were finally recognized in the 1980s and were associated with the sentencing of innocent Irish citizens for Irish Republican Army atrocities in the 1970s, the policing of the miners’ strike during the mid-1980s and the police failures in 1989 which led to the deaths of almost 100 Liverpool football fans at Hillsborough, the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, as well as a number of other moments of failure and corruption. Chapter 9 provides a summary of the second part of this book, whilst Part Three contains just one chapter, which deals with the 1997–2010 period.
