Confronting Crime: Crime control policy under new labour

by Michael Tonry (Editor)

From Labour's promise to be 'tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime' through to the White Paper and new criminal justice legislation, controlling crime and reforming the criminal justice system has been one of the government's key priorities.

This book provides a detailed review of the thinking behind these new plans and legislation, looking at policies and proposals in the field of punishment, particularly those embodied in the Halliday Review of the Sentencing Framework (2001), the government White Paper Justice for All (2002), and the 2002 Criminal Justice Bill. The contributors to the book subject to scrutiny the evidence for the 'evidence-based policy making' that is often claimed as a distinctive new feature to these processes, examining approaches to drug-dependent offenders, dangerous sex offenders, nuisance offenders, procedural and evidential protections in the courts, sentencing guidelines, sentencing management, racism in sentencing, custody plus, custody minus, and reducing the prison population.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Professor Michael Tonry is the McKnight Presidential Professor of Criminal Law and Policy, director of the Institute on Crime and Public Policy of the University of Minnesota, and a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute on Comparative and International Criminal Law in Freiburg, Germany. Previously he was professor of law and public policy and director of the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University. Since 2001, he has been a visiting professor of law and criminology at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and since 2003, a senior fellow in the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, Free University Amsterdam. He has been a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and has held visiting posts at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, and the Max Planck Institute in Freiburg.

Professor Tonry is author or editor of a number of books including Between Prison and Probation (with Norval Morris; OUP 1991), Malign Neglect (OUP 1995), Sentencing Matters (OUP 1996), Thinking About Crime (OUP 2004), Punishment and Politics—Evidence and Emulation in the Making of English Penal Policy (Willan 2004), Punishing Race (OUP 2011), and, as editor, Prosecutors and Politics in Comparative Perspective (Chicago 2012) and Crime and Justice in America, 1975-2025 (Chicago 2013).

In earlier careers, Professor Tonry was a commercial lawyer with large law firms in Chicago and Philadelphia, practiced as a sole practitioner in Castine, Maine, and directed a private sector research firm. He founded and, from 1987 to 1990, directed the MacArthur Foundation-United States Department of Justice Program on Human Development and Criminal Behavior. From 1986 to 1990, he was editor and publisher of The Castine Patriot, a weekly small town newspaper; from 1990 to 1999, editor of Overcrowded Times—Solving the Prison Problem; and from 2000 to 2010, editor of Criminology in Europe. He founded and edits Crime and Justice - A Review of Research and three Oxford University Press book series: Studies in Crime and Public Policy, Oxford Handbooks on Criminology and Criminal Justice, and (with Antony Duff) Studies in Penal Theory and Philosophy.