ABSTRACT
In some respects, the new laws and innovative programmes brought about by the challenges of the movement can be seen as predictable extensions of the changing political and social concerns of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The 1970s was a decade of expanding criminal justice; more police, more prisons and more community forms of policing and sanctioning. In an era with a strong progessive ethos, expansion and alteration of criminal justice was construed as an attempt to create and distribute improved services and improved justice to offenders and victims alike. During this period, schemes were created in both countries, for expanding the social service role of the police: through community policing and juvenile liaison in Britain, and crisis intervention in the United States. Especially in the United States, considerable effort was directed at diverting community problems away from the justice system by creating neighbourhood dispute resolution and mediation centres.1 Sanctions were often redesigned to ‘treat’, ‘rehabiliate’ or ‘re-educate’ offenders inside and outside prisons, occasionally through radical experiments.2 While in retrospect these developments can now be seen as part of a progressive agenda in the area of justice, at the time they were criticized by both the right and the left. Many on the left noted how the new alternative sanctions were not truly alternatives, but merely additions to the complement of criminal justice responses, further widening the net of state control into the community. The right complained that the new approaches were not real sanctions and would do nothing to eliminate crime and disorder. At the same time as these developments were being introduced for offenders, victims were also identified as in need of improved services and assistance, and, in the USA, a burgeoning programme of victim assistance developed primarily through the financial support of Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, LEAA.3
