CCCJ Seminar: 'Respect and Criminal Justice: Retrieval and Critique'

Speaker: Dr Gabrielle Watson, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford

At this seminar, Dr Gabrielle Watson will present an excerpt from her first book, Respect and Criminal Justice, which is forthcoming in 2019 with Oxford University Press.

Respect is a value whose importance in contemporary criminal justice many would endorse in principle. It is well-established that every person, by virtue of his or her humanity, has a claim to respect that need not be negotiated and cannot be forfeited. The core claim of the book is that at two defining points in the criminal process – policing and imprisonment – there is an overwhelming preoccupation with instrumental outcomes, with the result that respect is understood reductively and, at best, as a weak side-constraint on the pursuit of those outcomes.

The book takes the form of a sustained critique of the respect deficit in policing and imprisonment. It is especially concerned with the ways in which both institutions are merely constrained and not characterised by respect. It swiftly emerges, for example, that both institutions appeal to the word ‘respect’ – relying on its inclusive ethos in official discourse when it is expedient to do so – but rarely and only superficially address the prior question of what it is to respect and be respected. Despite much academic activity on the ‘democratic design’ of these institutions in recent decades, respect is more akin to a slogan than a foundational value of criminal justice theory and practice.

It would be useful (though not obligatory) to inform Dr Jonathan Rogers (jwr53@cam.ac.uk) if you expect to attend.