ABSTRACT
These practitioners face competing values every day in their work and an appreciation of this encourages any reader to recognise how each practitioner within each institution has its own ‘working credos’.3 With such variations within each institution it is difficult to see how there can be one seamless process with a single aim. The criminal justice system is best understood therefore as a series of processes with many of its practitioners working with different values. This could suggest chaos, but in fact it is at worst organised chaos because the machinery of the institution tends to drive through a particular course and practitioners often work beneath the radar to preserve their own working credos.
