Stop and Search as a Respectful Encounter

In this chapter, there is a shift in focus to the statutory power of the police to stop and search, the controversial status of which is not new. Less well documented, however, is that stop and search is highly relevant to the study of respect, since the practice tends to undermine the value, if not render it conspicuously absent. The chapter is organised as follows. The opening section explores how we might sharpen our critique of stop and search by framing it in terms of respect. Stop and search—a common form of adversarial contact between the police and the public—taps into deep and ingrained tensions between preventive policing, the exercise of coercive state authority, due process, and crime control. Among the most incisive criticisms of the power are its disproportionate and discriminatory exercise in relation to minority ethnic groups, its role in eroding police legitimacy, and the invasion of privacy and violation of bodily integrity necessitated by the search itself. The next section assesses three prominent proposals for the reform of stop and search—procedural justice training for police officers, tighter legal regulation of the power, and abolition—in terms of respect.

Procedural Justice and Narrow Instrumentalism

One persistent aspect of accounts of procedural justice relates to the role and value of ‘respect’ in citizens’ encounters with the police. In privileging procedures over outcomes, procedural justice—as standardly conceived—provides an optimistic view of the capacity of the police to bridge differences, interests, and values through respectful practices and decision-making. This chapter reflects on that familiar narrative and proposes that respectful relations have become—however unintentionally—a subsidiary concern of policing scholars and practitioners alike. Crime control outcomes increasingly occupy a central place on the intellectual agenda and, in practice, there is evidence of procedural justice being pursued on largely pragmatic ‘law and order’ grounds. When these instrumental concerns are not held in their proper place, we risk the erosion not only of respect but also of a range of other intrinsic values—transparency, neutrality, fairness, recognition, voice—that, taken together, comprise the very idea of procedural justice itself.

In Search of Respect in Criminal Justice

The principal aim of the chapter is to examine the merits of respect as a concept of critical enquiry. This is an ambitious task, not least because it involves a challenge to the definitional self-evidence of respect to which criminal justice scholars and practitioners routinely subscribe. The chapter pursues three distinct lines of enquiry and reflection. What is respect? The first task is to attend to this deceptively simple question. In so doing, the chapter assembles materials on respect from philosophy and elsewhere in the social sciences. Second, having explored what respect means in general terms—though this is hotly contested—the chapter sketches and filters the most prominent classic and contemporary works into an understanding of respect for criminal justice. By initiating a dialogue with related disciplines in this way, the aim is to build a strong conceptual platform from which to engage with the substantive material on policing and imprisonment in subsequent chapters. Third, the chapter situates respect in criminal justice in contextual and methodological terms. Much of this work must be justificatory both of respect and of my own methodological choices. Having explained in some detail what respect means and why it has been selected for examination, the chapter considers why policing and imprisonment have been selected as contexts for that examination, and how an interpretive approach offers a means by which to conduct that examination.

Introduction

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 humanity, has a claim to respect that need not be negotiated and cannot be forfeited. Rich and ongoing debates about respect beyond criminal justice—notably, in philosophy and elsewhere in the social sciences—indicate that scholarly interest in respect surpasses disciplinary boundaries, that it is of considerable explanatory and normative scope, and that it matters. It is curious, then, that despite academic interest in the democratic design of penal institutions in recent decades, respect is more akin to a slogan than a foundational value of criminal justice practice.

Respect at Prison Mealtime

This chapter continues to subject a series of unexamined beliefs on respect and criminal justice to critical scrutiny and challenge. There is a shift in focus to prison mealtime, whose pivotal role in shaping the experiences of prisoners has been considerably understated. The chapter is prefaced with a short commentary on prison mealtime in historical context. It is then structured around three key stages of contemporary prison mealtime—preparation, consumption, and resistance—which I propose as organising categories for critiquing the practice. When the authorities treat respect as a weak side-constraint on the pursuit of instrumental outcomes rather than a foundational value of the regime itself, it undermines those responsible for preparing food, degrades prisoners who have no choice but to consume it, and exacerbates the experiences of those who—for reasons of religious belief, physical or mental ill-health, or in protest—resist or refuse it.

Penal Policies and Institutional Sociologies

Given that respect is, almost without exception, one of the first values to emerge in conversations with inmates about ‘what matters’ in prison, one could be forgiven for assuming that scholars had given the issue thorough attention. This is not the case. This chapter—the first of two on prisons—situates a number of institutional sociologies of the prison in relation to the key trends in penal policy with which they coincided. In so doing, it offers a critique of the current approach to respect in prisons in England and Wales and identifies moments in recent history when respect—however reductively understood—was especially pronounced.

Realising Respect

A distinction is routinely drawn between, on the one hand, an approach to criminal justice that distances itself from practice and—in being pitched at a high level of abstraction—represents a mode of ‘utopian critique’ and, on the other hand, an approach to criminal justice that is fully immersed in the applied domain and constitutes itself as a tool of reconstruction and reform. This chapter seeks to reconcile both forms of enquiry, and is organised as follows. The first section draws together various strands of the critique presented in preceding chapters, identifies some recurring themes, and considers the implications of a reductive approach to respect for the liberal credentials of criminal justice. The second section proposes and evaluates three strategies for cultivating respect in policing and imprisonment in England and Wales. They are proposed on the assumption, of course, that policing and criminal justice practices are amenable to intentional design and redesign.