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Citation |
Turner L. Crime Prev. Community Safety 2008; 10(3): 174-189. |
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Copyright |
(Copyright © 2008, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group -- Palgrave-Macmillan) |
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DOI |
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PMID |
unavailable |
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Abstract |
Responsibility for increasing public confidence in the criminal justice system (CJS) is devolved to the 42 Local Criminal Justice Boards, some of which have commissioned research to explore how they might achieve an increase in confidence. This paper argues that a dominant national-level discourse of public confidence limits the scope of such research, resulting in a repetitive body of knowledge about confidence that offers limited practical guidance to practitioners, and could potentially contribute to furthering processes described as punitive populism. The dominant discourse itself rests on an underlying normative discourse on "how to know" which may not reflect the reality of how lay people "know" about the CJS. The paper outlines the key features of the dominant discourse of public confidence and gives some illustrations ofits impact on research, before indicating the future direction of the author's own research in this area. |