ABSTRACT
If one were to ask any lay person as to what are the appropriate aims of the criminal justice system, ensuring that an offender make good the damage they have caused to the victim of the offence will inevitably be prominently featured (Shapland, Willmore and Duff 1985; Tan, A. 2005; Tan, C. 2005). This is hardly surprising because historically, there has been no clear cut division between the civil law and criminal law (Wolfgang 1965; Christie 1977). That a person who causes damage through his act should personally bear the cost of making good that damage was known in Anglo-Saxon England through the payment of compensation or ‘bot’ to his victim, and a fine or ‘wite’ to the king for breaching the peace (Softley 1978). This was the way things stood until around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in England, when a distinction emerged between criminal acts committed feloniously and civil wrongs, which were a matter for legal action between the parties concerned only. In the case of the former, the property of a felon was forfeited to the king and there was little the victim could do to recover his property or obtain damages (Pollock and Maitland 1898).
