Criminal justice and political cultures

This book develops a discussion in which we and others have been engaged in recent years about the changing relationships between national cultures or traditions in criminal justice, on one hand and, on the other, influences on knowledge and practice that exceed or subvert the boundaries of these systems as we conventionally understand them. The first staging-post in the production of this book was a symposium we convened at Keele University in 2001 under the title ‘How does crime policy travel?’ 1 Five of the papers from that event were subsequently published in a special edition of the journal Criminal Justice and one in Theoretical Criminology. Those six papers all reappear here alongside a number of new contributions that we have commissioned in an attempt to extend the scope of this discussion and make its key arguments more accessible. We are very far from claiming that the contributors to this volume are alone in facing up to these concerns or that we were the first people to notice them. Neither is criminology unique among the social sciences in needing to confront anew the dialectic between national particularity and inter- or trans- or supranational mobilities now. Rather it is precisely the fact that it shares these characteristics with so many fields of governance and policy that makes the task of reappraisal timely and necessary.