Unravelling Criminal Justice

This book brings together the major findings of 11 projects funded under the "Crime and the Criminal Justice System Initiative" by the Economic and Social Research Council in the mid-1980s. Normally, each project team produces a spate of books and articles for largely academic audiences, but in this case a special effort has also been made to convey the importance of the findings to a wider public. The crises which afflict our criminal justice system can only be resolved if their hard-won insights are taken up in public policy debates. Topics range from chapters on the changes in criminal justice policy since 1945 to the scope for using the law as a resource to devise elaborate schemes of tax avoidance. Major policy initiatives on criminal prosecution and police accountability are shown to be falling short of their objectives. In these and other chapters, the complexity of key problems that beset the system is unravelled and the possibilities of change are set out in correspondingly sharp relief.