ABSTRACT
Throughout this book, references have been made to the – invariably socioeconomic – structural conditions that have a serious impact on the lives of offenders and place signifi cant limits on the choices that they can and do make. An important structural restriction in their lives is clearly that of the criminal justice system and thus the disputed issue as to in whose interests this operates is extremely important. This last substantive chapter considers that signifi cant issue and explains from different theoretical perspectives why it is that the various components of the ‘criminal justice system’ – or for some the ‘criminal justice process’ – have come to operate in the way that they have and in whose interests it functions in contemporary post-industrial societies. We shall commence this chapter by considering four different models of criminal justice development: (1) the orthodox social progress model; (2) the radical confl ict model; (3) the carceral surveillance society model; and (4) the left realist hybrid model. We will then proceed to consider the notion that we live in a penal society (see Hopkins Burke, 2012, 2013).
