Criminal Justice 2000: Strategies for a New Century
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Criminal Justice 2000: Strategies for a New Century by M. Cavadino, I. Crow and J. Dignan Winchester: Waterside Press (2000) ISBN 1 872 870 775 (224 pages, £20.00)
Reviewed by Mike Nellis Some years ago, Andrew Rutherford set out three ‘credos’, or mentalities—the punitive, the managerial and the caring— and showed via a series of personal narratives how each had informed the careers of some key practitioners in British criminal justice.1 The book under review, although stylistically very different, is in part a continuation of that work, concerned with the pursuit of decency in criminal justice in the new century, deliberately and directly engaged with New Labour. The book’s thesis is driven by a reworking of Rutherford’s three credos (renamed ‘strategies’), and tied to speculation on both the possible and the desirable interplay between them over the next decade or so. Credo three (caring) —the least well characterized in Rutherford’s original work—both needs and gets the biggest conceptual overhaul. A mix of human rights, just desserts, and restorative justice are now placed at its centre. The authors argue in general terms for a policy which combines strategies two and three—efficiently managed care and justice—whilst worrying that what the future might actually deliver is efficiently managed punishment. In a series of substantive chapters the prospects for sentencing, imprisonment, probation, fines and youth justice are analyzed in terms of the above framework. Developments in each field are covered in often painstaking detail, and the book will provide a useful resource on the period (and its immediate antecedents) long after the framework itself has been discarded—which one fears might be soon. The chapter on the Probation Service is particularly impressive, but events have moved on dramatically since the book was completed, and it is easier than ever to see that reality is receding from the authors’ rather moderate ideals at an even faster rate than they might have feared. The book’s basic flaw is the belief, albeit one laced with caveats, that managerialism is neutral, a mere administrative technology that can be used to serve ends of varied moral hue. The authors endorse it pragmatically, thinking they can do so with impunity, seemingly forgetting that it sanctions extremes of manipulativeness, impersonality and conformity (in the ‘noble cause’ of order, efficiency, effectiveness, whatever) that are deeply at odds with the humanism of strategy three (something which Rutherford, I think, recognized). Contemporary managerialism is a mild and seductive form of totalitarianism, rooted in the worst of modernist impulses. Criminal Justice 2000 regrettably underestimates its centrality to the New Labour modernization project, and fails properly to envision the kind of consequences that, entwined with new digital technologies,2 it will have for future forms of social control. Criminal Justice 2000 is thus an honourable and thoughtful book, but not a truly wise one. It is probably right that a combination of huma
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