Managing Modernity: Politics and the Culture of Control by Matt Matravers

Author:Matt Matravers [Matravers, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General, Social Science, Criminology
ISBN: 9780415568289
Google: QVEbQAAACAAJ
Goodreads: 13712877
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-01-15T11:05:37+00:00

7

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Victims of Crime: Their Station and Its Duties

SANDRA E. MARSHALL

In contemporary penality this situation has been reversed. The processes of individualization now increasingly centre upon the victim. Individual victims are to be kept informed, to be involved in the judicial process from complaint through to conviction and beyond. (Garland 2001:179).1

A central theme of David Garland’s book is the way in which the shift from welfarist to retributivist perspectives on crime has brought with it a shift in focus away from the defendant/offender’s rights and interests to those of the victims of crime; greater attention is now being paid to the role that victims should have in the criminal process. Victims claim rights ranging from the right to be informed about the progress of their cases to the right to have some say in the sentencing of the offender. The process Garland identifies raises crucial questions about the way we think of the nature of crime and the way we characterise the relationship between individual citizens and between citizens and the state. These we can recognise as fundamental questions of political theory which impinge on the debate about the very nature of crime. Which is not to say that the developments in penal practice have been deliberate attempts to take forward such philosophical theories but only that the concepts and ideas contained in them form an illuminating context for a critical analysis of our penal practices. In particular, one could say that the individualisation which Garland relates to the shift in focus to the victim raises the vexed political theory problem of the way to distinguish between the public and the private spheres. Thus, from one philosophical perspective, we might think that the change in penal practice is best understood as a development of the relationship between individual, contracting parties, as it might be characterised in liberal theory, encompassing as that does a range a different philosophical theories which start from the same set of (very) roughly Kantian assumptions about the autonomous self and the fundamental status of freedom as a moral and political value. One way, then, that increased prominence of this focus on the individual and individual rights might go is towards a greater privatisation of the penal process, that is, towards seeing crime as a breach of the contract between individuals which may need, practically, to be managed by the state, but which is to be properly understood as a private conflict. The phenomenon that Garland points to can thus be understood as the re-balancing of competing, individual rights. This is not, of course, the only way to conceive of criminal justice and the victim’s place within it; more communitarian theories will provide a way of characterising the status of victims and crime which will result in a different way of understanding the centrality of victims in the criminal process. One aim of this essay is to give a preliminary sketch of the direction in which such a theory might go.

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