Understanding Criminal Justice: Sociological Perspectives

• NCJ Number: 216905
• Author(s): Philip Smith; Kristin Natalier
• Date Published: 2005
• Length: 234 pages
• Sale Source: Sage Publications Ltd
• Publication Format: Book (Softbound)
• Publication Type: Issue Overview
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This book provides a systematic and comprehensive introduction to law and the criminal justice system from a sociological perspective, and attempts to provide an understanding of contemporary research and debate on the law, policing, court processes, and punishment.

Abstract

With respect to the issue of how to think about law and criminal justice, the first lesson or point made was to the importance in moving beyond explanations that ground outcomes in individual and collective choices and plans. There are structural forces and cultural forms that make their choices possible and thinkable. The second lesson or point made is that the sociological perspective tends to be structural rather than individual. The sociologist is more concerned with the network of relationships into which they are embedded, their roles, their membership in collective categories such as those of race and gender, within a broader social structure. The argument is made that laws and criminal justice systems do not exist outside of the relationships, structures, and ideologies of a society. The concept of modernity (a shift towards an urban, industrial, state-regulated, secular society) must be central to the efforts at understanding the structure and function of social control systems. Prisons, formal legal codes, lawyers, and professionalized police, for example can all be seen as expressions of unfolding properties of modernity. Modernity provides a starting point from which to launch inquiry into contemporary law and criminal justice. However, limits to its reach have been documented. This book attempts to facilitate a deeper understanding of law and the criminal justice system. It provides a series of tools that encourage a critical and informed approach to some of the most important and prevalent institutions in contemporary life. Discussion focuses on the empirical nature of law and criminal justice, their presence and effects in the real world. It emphasizes the ways in which both laws and the systems through which they are implemented are the products of human actions and meaning making. Bibliography