Designing criminal policy
David Garland, 10 October 1991
Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England, 1830-1914
by Martin Wiener.
Cambridge, 391 pp., £30, February 1991,9780521350457 Show More
by Martin Wiener.
Cambridge, 391 pp., £30, February 1991,
“... Until relatively recently, criminal justice history was written not by professional historians but by the system’s practitioners – retired prison officials, civil servants, criminologists, reformers of various kinds. The widely shared conviction that the penal system was being shaken free of the irrationalities of the past and brought closer to the professional wisdom of the present tended to permeate even the best of these accounts and to impart an onwards-and-upwards structure to their narrative ... ”