ABSTRACT
Theories of punishment have, traditionally, been concerned not with the power to punish, but with the right to punish. This chapter demonstrates why the language of rights needs to be displaced and argues for some interventions into penal politics based not upon the language of rights, but upon calculated strategies for the socialisation/transformation of existing penal powers. Recent interventions into penal policy by interested pressure groups have focused on four major areas: juvenile justice; criminal process; prisoners' rights; and on individual miscarriages of justice due to police corruption, radical prejudice, judicial/bureaucratic malpractice or someone's sheer incompetence. The 'independence of the judiciary' has always been seen in the UK as being an indispensable constitutional guarantee against totalitarian rule. One effect of the doctrine of the separation of powers is that questions of judicial right are discursively segregated from questions of political will and power.
