Comparative Criminal Justice

This book offers a scholarly and lively introduction to comparative criminal justice. It considers the state of crime globally and 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 fifth edition. This textbook provides the reader with:

• A comparative perspective on criminal justice and its main components
• Insight into methods for comparative research and analysis
• A discussion of global trends such as the global drop in crime, the punitive turn, penal populism, privatisation, international policing, and international criminal tribunals
• An understanding of the emerging concepts in comparative criminal justice such as security, surveillance, crimmigration, and penal exceptionalism
• Global and historical consideration of the death penalty and international criminal justice
• Increased attention to environmental crime, climate change, genocide, and police 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 the global south, and new chapters on criminology and climate change, and on victimology.

In this book, lists of further reading, study questions, and boxed case studies help bring comparative criminal justice to life 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.