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19 Asian J. Criminology 1 (2024)

handle is hein.journals/asjrcrm19 and id is 1 raw text is: Asian Journal of Criminology (2024) 19:1-25 https://doi.org/1 0.1007/si 1417-024-09419-z The Relationism Theory of Criminal Justice-A Paradigm Shift Jianhong Liu' Received: 15 February 2024 / Accepted: 20 February 2024/ Published online: 6 March 2024 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2024 Abstract There are two significant difficulties in building a general criminal justice theory. First, dif- ferent from criminology theories, criminal justice produces multiple outcomes at different levels. Second, the scopes of existing theories largely originate from Western contexts and data, few including cross-cultural variation. This paper outlines a unified theory to explain multiple criminal justice outcomes at the system, institutional, and individual levels across cultures under a paradigm shift from the current monotonic paradigm to a more general comparison paradigm. The new paradigm logically contains the existing paradigm while broadening research questions and scope of criminal justice studies. It constructs a new set of concepts and propositions, presenting an effort toward a general causal criminal justice theory. Keywords Criminal justice theory - Theory building - Cross-cultural variation - Theoretical paradigm - Modeling criminal justice outcomes Introduction Originating in the 1950s, academic criminal justice has made great achievements and has developed into an independent discipline primarily in the United States and Europe. However, to date, a major deficiency of the discipline is the lack of a well-recognized general criminal justice theory, as concluded by some prominent criminal justice schol- ars (Bernard & Engel, 2001; Clear, 2001; Crank, 2002; Cullen, 1995; Duffee, 1980; Hagan, 1989; Kraska, 2006; Kraska & Brent, 2004; Macdonald, 2008; Maguire & Duf- fee, 2015; Marenin & Worrall, 1998; Sullivan, 1994; Zalman, 1981). Criminal justice teaching programs in Western countries by default assume that the content of crimi- nal justice theory is about crime and crime rates, which essentially is the subject of criminology theory (Bernard & Engel, 2001; Cullen, 1995; Hagan, 1989;Henderson & Boostrom, 1989 ; Macdonald, 2008 ; Maguire & Duffee, 2015). The majority of Intro- duction to Criminal Justice textbooks dedicate nearly all their discussion to theories of criminal behavior. Most Western criminal justice scholars believe that theory is about E Jianhong Liu jliu@um.edu.mo Faculty of Law, E32-3005, University of Macau, Avenida da Universidade, Macau, Taipa, China Springer