Comparative Criminal Justice

This book offers a scholarly introduction to comparative criminal justice. It examines and reflects on the ways different countries and jurisdictions deal with the main stages in the criminal justice process, from policing, to systems of trial, to sentencing, and punishment. This popular bestseller has been fully updated and expanded for the fourth edition.

This textbook provides the reader with:

• a comparative perspective on criminal justice and its main components
• a knowledge of methodology for comparative research and analysis
• a discussion of global trends such as the global drop in crime, the punitive turn, penal populism, privatization, international policing and international criminal tribunals
• an understanding of the emerging concepts in comparative criminal justice, such as security, surveillance, crimmigration and penal exceptionalism
• a global and historical consideration of the death penalty and international criminal justice
• increased attention to environmental crime, genocide and policy brutality.

The new edition has been fully updated to keep abreast with this growing field of study and research, to include a broader coverage of judicial decision makers; a new chapter on the death penalty in comparative perspective; and further coverage of key topics such as global policing and electronic monitoring, and new insights into measuring and understanding crime and punishment globally.

In this book, lists of further reading, study questions and boxed case studies help bring comparative criminal justice alive for students and instructors alike. This book is perfect reading for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates taking courses in comparative criminal justice and those who are engaged in the study of global responses to crime.

Francis Pakes is Professor in Criminology at Portsmouth University, UK. He has published extensively on comparative criminal justice, criminal justice in the Netherlands, punishment in the Nordic countries and is currently engaged in an in-depth study of imprisonment in Iceland.