Blackwell Reference Online

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Under tremendous pressure from the pent-up demands of societies constrained by nearly a generation of depression and war, postwar governments, especially in North America and Australia, turned with new interests to the “social problems” that had been apparent during the last boom years of the 1920s – crime, urban decay, racial and ethnic violence, corruption of municipal services. The particular focus of postwar politicians was on modernizing the state agencies that addressed these social problems, and criminal justice agencies loomed large from the very start. In the United States this played out as a problem of federalism, how should the federal government (greatly expanded by its role in fighting both depression and war) modernize state and local criminal justice agencies? To answer that question a new kind of knowledge was needed that was neither criminal law nor a science of legislation nor a science of criminal motivation. Rather it was a social science of criminal justice agencies. This new discourse was distinctive for three themes.First and foremost, sociolegal studies involved empirical examination of legal conduct by criminal justice actors, prosecutors, police officers, public defenders, judges, and so forth. This differentiated law and society criminal justice from the bulk of academic criminal law scholarship within law schools, most of which remained normative and ... log in or subscribe to read full text