Public Confidence in Criminal Justice by Elizabeth R. Turner

Author:Elizabeth R. Turner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

4.5 ‘Justice Tempered by Understanding’: Modern Criminology in Britain

In the twentieth century, the decades following the Second World War were decisive in establishing sites of technical criminological expertise which could be used to inform penal practice in England and Wales. In 1944, a report for the Home Office recommended that studies should be made of ‘the effectiveness of penal treatment, recidivism, the value of approved school training, the personality of offenders, the criteria used by the police in recording crime, and the efficiency of probation officers’ (Lodge 1974, 14). Following on from this recommendation, the Home Office Research Unit was formed in 19574 and the Cambridge Institute of Criminology in 1959.

Looking back on these formative years for English criminology Lord Butler recalls that, as Home Secretary at the time, he was attempting to ‘lay a path for an enlightened penal policy’ (Butler 1974, 1). He continued:Crime and its treatment seem to me to be no less suitable as a subject for study and teaching by the universities than a number of other social phenomena; and this is a field in which we particularly need the help and urge of the informed but detached public opinion which the universities are so well able to produce. (4–5)

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