Graham Smith

Hannah Quirk

Toby Seddon

While regulatory institutions and strategies have been the subject of increasing academic attention, there has been limited application of regulatory theories to criminal justice scholarship. This collection of essays from a range of outstanding international scholars adopts a critical, inter-disciplinary approach, providing an innovative application of regulatory theory to the practice of criminal justice and offering suggestions for further research. Part I explores the aims and values of criminal justice and other regulatory networks and the synergies and tensions between these fields; Part II examines criminal justice as a regulatory force to control 'deviant' and anti-social behaviour and Part III examines the regulation and oversight of criminal justice through the operation of prison inspectorates and explores notions of responsive justice.

Innovations in Policy and Research

Regulation and Criminal Justice

Within an international context in which the right to silence has long been regarded as sacrosanct, this book provides the first comprehensive, empirically-based analysis of the effects of curtailing the right to silence. The right to silence has served as the practical expression of the principles that an individual was to be considered innocent until proven guilty, and that it was for the prosecution to establish guilt. In 1791, the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution proclaimed that none ‘shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself’. In more recent times, the privilege against self-incrimination has been a founding principle for the International Criminal Court, the new South African constitution and the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Despite this pedigree, over the past 30 years when governments have felt under pressure to combat crime or terrorism, the right to silence has been reconsidered (as in Australia), curtailed (in most of the United Kingdom) or circumvented (by the creation of the military tribunals to try the Guantánamo detainees). The analysis here focuses upon the effects of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 in England and Wales. There, curtailing the right to silence was advocated in terms of ‘common sense’ policy-making and was achieved by an eclectic borrowing of concepts and policies from other jurisdictions. The implications of curtailing this right are here explored in detail with reference to England, Wales and Northern Ireland, but within a comparative context that examines how different ‘types’ of legal systems regard the right to silence and the effects of constitutional protection.

Hannah Quirk

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