Cross-Cultural Collaboration for Community-Oriented Policing and Restorative Justice

Background: The Changing Criminal Justice Landscape

We begin by taking stock of the context in which the criminology is grounded. Until the early post WWWII period, criminology had been dominated by a positivist approach which viewed the causes of crime as a consequence of one’s circumstances and neo-classicism which was based on the belief that swift and certain responses to crime would reduce the likelihood of repeat offending (Walsh & Ellis 2006). However, during the late 1960s and 1970s respectively, the discipline underwent two major crises (Young 1988). The first related to what Young (1988) referred to as an ‘aetiological crisis’. For the most part, positivism was based on the belief that as post-war social conditions improved crime would decrease. Instead, crime continued to rise. The second, a crisis of ‘penality’, followed the publication of a number of criminal justice studies in the United States which questioned both the effectiveness of the police and the reformative potential of prisons in managing the problem of crime. These crises found expression in ‘nothing works’ pessimism and led to a ‘questioning of the state’s ability to control crime’ (Garland 2001, p. 62).

Advanced liberal democracies (e.g., UK, US, Canada, Australia) responded to this crisis by reforming criminal justice institutions and mobilizing non-state mechanisms in the ‘fight against crime’. From a criminological perspective advanced liberal democracies refer to political systems that group countries together. From the 1980s onwards criminal justice became characterized by an enhanced role for victims and communities in the administration of justice (rather than professionals alone) and the politicization of crime control. The rise of ‘populist punitiveness’ (Bottoms, 1995) involved politicians talking tough and introducing ever more stringent penal policies in order to secure public support (Young & Matthews 2003). This cultural and political shift resulted in increased resources for policing, prosecutions and prisons (McEvoy, 2007; Roach 2005) but also had the adverse effect of creating a perception of increased criminal incidents despite a relatively stable decline in crime rates from the mid-1990s (Young & Matthews, 2003).