ABSTRACT
This chapter is designed to help you to think critically about the concept of justice and what it means in different contexts and communities and at different points in history. A key aim is to situate criminal justice among a range of strategies that might be (and are) employed when social harms, such as crimes, occur. Political and popular debates around ‘justice’ tend to be driven by the equitable (or otherwise) nature of adjudication and the processing of individuals through the criminal courts. As a result, they are, in the main, concerned with how to ‘hold offenders to account’. The chapter interrogates such common-sense understandings by exploring some of the defining features of criminal justice and uncovering the consequences of criminal justice being given priority in the resolution of disputes. The particular focus of criminal justice, as a set of procedures and regulations specific to individual nation states, is also exposed in consideration of the growing impact of international legal conventions, the emergence of transnational agencies of surveillance and the global flow of particular penal and crime control discourses and policies. Such developments necessitate moving beyond dominant understandings of ‘justice’ and ‘criminal justice’.
