I didn't have much luck with the audio-visuals this week - the perils of writing lectures on a Mac! I hope Al Murray managed to get his point across even without video.
The point of this week's lecture was to open up the question of what the criminal justice system should be doing (and who it should be doing it for), before we start looking at statistics next week & ask whether it's doing it well. The lecture approached the question of what the CJS ought to be doing from two angles - starting from first principles and then looking at what the government currently says about it. The point I wanted to stress is that there are lots of different ways of defining success for the CJS: reducing crime, reducing fear of crime, rehabilitating offenders, locking up offenders for long periods, making the "law-abiding majority" feel safer, etc - and they all have costs and benefits. What we saw in the seminar was that they also appeal to different groups of people: not everyone wants the CJS to 'succeed' in the same way.
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