Culture and Criminal Justice: A Theory of Relational Justice

Abstract

Prominent Enlightenment scholars such as Bentham, Voltaire, Helvetius, and Quetelet recognized the value of comparative inquiry, systematically contrasting features of crime and justice in their own nations with those of others. “Comparative criminology is as old as criminology itself.” However, interest in comparisons waned throughout much of the 19th and early 20th century, “as nations looked inward”.  Comparative inquiry once again began to capture the interest of criminologists in the middle years of the 20th century – a development that Bennett characterized as an especially beneficial “revival.”  Yet 20 years after Bennett’s pronouncement of this welcome development, Farrington in his 2000 Presidential Address to the American Society of Criminology assessed that “cross-national comparative studies in criminology are important but relatively infrequent”. Comparative criminology gained importance in recently years again. The increasing pace of globalization means that criminologists can no longer ignore the legal systems and the work of legal practitioners outside their own countries. However, for the most part, comparative research has mainly been conducted by Western researchers with the aim of reflecting on how their own criminal justice systems have developed. They have made comparisons with criminal justice systems in other Western countries. For non-western countries, research has produced a large number of useful descriptions of criminal justice systems in different countries. There is a fairly large literature written in English about crime and criminal justice in Asian countries, published in the Asian Journal of Criminology. There is also a sophisticated interdisciplinary literature about comparison in the fields of comparative law, socio-legal studies, criminology and sociology. However, few theorists or researchers from non-Western have contributed to these literatures.