Justice and Efficiency

The report of the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice, published in July 1993, is likely to frame a continuing and heated debate on the adequacy of British justice. Occasioned by repeated and famous convictions of the innocent, the Commission has clearly seen its remit as requiring the consideration of a range of competing interests, values and objectives in criminal justice. This book aims to provide a thorough and expert discussion of the adequacy of that response. The book is organised into two parts: the first consists of a number of overviews of the Commission's work drawn from a range of social vantage points, considering both its influences and its likely effects. In particular, successive contributors consider the everyday subjective experience of policing for particular targeted groups, and the way this has fed into miscarriages of justice and the setting up of the Commission. Each considers the extent to which these experiences and concerns have been addressed by its recommendations.
Other contributions consider the professional experiences of those lawyers expected by the rhetoric of criminal justice to protect "inter alia" such groups, and the likely effect of the proposed reforms on their ability to do so. An initial contextual piece considers the pressures and influences that effectively rewrote the agenda for the Commission, shifting it away from its initial clear focus on the prevention of miscarriages of justice. In the second part of the book, the key procedural and institutional issues are examined in turn, through a structure based principally on the Commission's own terms of reference. Many of the contributors in this part draw on empirical research that they themselves conducted for the Commission.