Professor George Pavlich (photo courtesy of subject)
Human societies have long grappled with the question of how best to encourage what they take to be good behaviour and deter wrongdoing. The modern response has tended to take the form of systems that equate wrongdoing with criminality and punish wrongdoers as 'criminals'. Indeed, the very term 'criminal justice' implies an intrinsic link between justice and criminality.
UAlberta Law Professor George Pavlich is among those researchers arguing for a radical re-evaluation of the way society criminalizes many forms of wrongdoing. As the current Canada Research Chair in Social Theory, Culture and Law and a cross-appointed professor in law and sociology, Pavlich's work extends well beyond our understanding of the law and into questions of how we define criminality.
A recently published book, Criminal Accusation: Political Rationales and Socio-Legal Practices (Routledge, 2018), focuses on the crucial moment whereby a person is accused of a "criminal" offence and its impact on said person's life-and on society more broadly.
"In our struggle to shrink the size of the criminal justice system, we've tended to overlook the opening moments where the process begins, with an initial criminal accusation," said Pavlich.
"This recently published book analyzes the ideas and political patterns that influence how people enter the criminal justice system in the first place, and how this influx could be abated. As social actors, we need to develop more effective and democratic ways of determining which forms of wrongdoing should be treated as criminal and which ones ought to be governed by way of other processes."
Criminal Accusation examines the historical evolution of how individuals and indeed entire classes of people have faced criminal accusation, from antiquity to the modern era. Key waypoints include the twelfth century English monk Thomas of Monmouth's infamous "blood libel" against Norwich's Jewish community (followed by comparable accusations across Europe) and the emergence of the "criminal class" of Victorian Britain-both textbook examples of the insidious power of a criminal accusation.
Pavlich's book also hearkens to his own experience witnessing the crushing power of the criminal justice system in his native South Africa under Apartheid. In the preface to the book, he recounts an early formative experience in a Johannesburg courtroom in the early 1980s where he witnessed a rural African man being sentenced to corporal punishment for carrying an illegal weapon (a penknife intended for cutting meat) in a court process carried out in a language the accused did not understand.
This experience and others like it led Pavlich to the conclusion that criminal justice systems tend to exacerbate existing societal problems by fixing all criminal blame on individuals often ignoring the social structures that foster said criminality.
"It's no secret that our criminal justice systems have not carried through on the promise to radically reduce, even eliminate, crime," he said.
"However, many fail to recognize a crux of the problem, that the process of criminalization is an ineffective method of preventing wrongdoing. I believe that we need to narrow the scope of the criminal justice system so as to limit it to the most serious offences, and deal with more minor forms of wrongdoing by way of other governmental mechanisms."
Criminal Accusation: Political Rationales and Socio-Legal Practices is now available for purchase online through the Routledge publishing house.