A Shifting and Convoluted Paradigm in the Regime of Crime Control, Due Process and Penal Justice

摘要

The well-known criminal justice constituencies of crime control, due process and penal sentence are facing far reaching transformations resulting in some paradoxical outcomes that include an upsurge in populist legislations and the emergence of non-state actors in justice administration. Although these may be reflections of criminal justice’s attempt to enhance effectiveness, the outcome has been severely convoluted that the question of rights and even the foundation of theory of social contract are waning into the shadows of bureaucratic policies and practices that seemed to threaten the fabric of justice administration. This paper is an attempt to show how criminal justice policies and strategies are gravitating from their orthodox constituency to a territory that is mixed in populism, punitivism as well as the compounded regime of coalitions of public and private actors defined mostly by contentious new practices of crime control, procedural changes and an economic way of thinking, leading to unconventional and often controversial practices.