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18 Liverpool L. Rev. 3 (1996)

handle is hein.journals/lvplr18 and id is 1 raw text is: The Liverpool Law Review Vol. XVIII(1) [1996] CRIMINAL JUSTICE POLICY AND PRACTICE: RHETORIC, REALITY AND RESEARCH George Mair* Criminal justice policy as opposed to criminal justice practice is a remarkably under-developed area of study. The generic term social policy is often assumed to include criminal justice policy, but you will - on the whole - search in vain in social policy textbooks for discussions of criminal justice topics. 1 Education, environment, health, social security, employment, housing and the like are constantly being analysed and debated by those who study social policy, but criminal justice is ignored. Why should this be so? One reason probably has to do with the struggle of academic disciplines to map out and define a specific subject area which then becomes that discipline's property. And so, when the discipline which was known as social administration (which began to develop around the beginning of the century associated with the Webbs, Fabianism, and the London School of Economics) started to stake out an academic place for itself, criminal justice had already been spoken for. The discipline of criminology which had been developing since the middle of the 19th century had delimited criminal justice as its area of expertise - or it was assumed to have done so. But in fact, criminology was not terribly interested in policy matters; it was far more interested in developing scientific approaches to the study of crime and criminals.2 Criminal justice policy fell through a hole between the two disciplines. It may also be relevant to note that the topics associated with social policy were, initially at least, seen as purely benevolent - they were to help the disadvantaged. On the other hand, criminal justice policy was to do with offenders, to punish those who had broken the law. It can * M.A., M.Sc., Ph.D., E. Rex Makin Professor of Criminal Justice, Liverpool John Moores University. 1 See, for example, two classic texts: R.M. Titmuss, Social Policy: An Introduction, Allen and Unwin, 1974, and T.H. Marshall, Social Policy in the Twentieth Century, Hutchinson, 1975. 2 See D. Garland, Punishment and Welfare: a History of Penal Strategies, Gower, 1985.