This book presents a wholly new perspective on the Child Support Agency. The authors were granted privileged access to the CSA's own staff and were thus able to monitor case conduct from both the Agency and the client perspective. In a gripping analysis they compare the accounts of former husbands and wives with those of their respective legal advisers,and, critically, they incorporate the experience and views of the beleaguered CSA staff who attempted to calculate and enforce child maintenance obligations in those same cases. The media picture of the misery visited upon 'absent fathers' is borne out in part, but even more striking is the authors' account of a catastrophic administrative failure which led to the abandonment of many of the basic tenets of administrative justice. The reasons do not lie in the perceived unfairness of the formula but rather in the failure of those drafting the Child Support legislation to appreciate the impact of such change upon the rest of our hugely complex benefit structure. Their failure to grasp that the problems of inadequate disclosure and ineffective enforcement - with which courts had grappled for decades - could not be tackled effectively by a distant bureaucracy.

Reparation, or making amends, is an ancient theme in criminal justice. It was revived in both Europe and North America in the 1980s as a practical alternative both to retributivism, and to the various utilitarian projects traditionally associated with retributive justice.Making Amends examines the practice of these schemes in the UK, USA, and Germany, and shows how criminal justice institutions were unresponsive to these attempts to cast justice in a new form. Yet the experiments reflected an abiding dissatisfaction with criminal courts and with the manner in which justice is conceived and expressed within the criminal framework. The authors' conclusions therefore have implications for the workings of the criminal justice system as a whole.

It is a common perception that violent crime is on the increase and social surveys record a growing fear of victimisation among the public. Yet not all violence is criminalised, and much criminal violence still goes unreported.
Punishing Violence examines the series of decisions - by victims, police officers, prosecutors and courts - which determine whether or not violent behaviour is criminalised.
Antonia Cretney and Gwynn Davis examine the relationships underpinning violence, the reasons for violent acts and the factors militating against successful court prosecutions. In doing so, they provide an authoritative account of the reality of assault and identify a serious dislocation between the purposes of victims and the purposes of the justice system in the treatment of violent crime.

Reparation, or making amends, is an ancient theme in criminal justice. It was revived in both Europe and North America in the 1980s as a practical alternative both to retributivism, and to the various utilitarian projects traditionally associated with retributive justice. "Making Amends" examines the practice of these schemes in the UK, USA, and Germany, and shows how criminal justice institutions were unresponsive to these attempts to cast justice in a new form. Yet the experiments reflected an abiding dissatisfaction with criminal courts and with the manner in which justice is conceived and expressed within the criminal framework. The authors' conclusions therefore have implications for the workings of the criminal justice system as a whole. This book should be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates, academics and professionals in the fields of criminology and social policy.

This book presents a wholly new perspective on the Child Support Agency. The authors were granted privileged access to the CSA's own staff and were thus able to monitor case conduct from both the Agency and the client perspective. In a gripping analysis they compare the accounts of former husbands and wives with those of their respective legal advisers,and, critically, they incorporate the experience and views of the beleaguered CSA staff who attempted to calculate and enforce child maintenance obligations in those same cases. The media picture of the misery visited upon 'absent fathers' is borne out in part, but even more striking is the authors' account of a catastrophic administrative failure which led to the abandonment of many of the basic tenets of administrative justice. The reasons do not lie in the perceived unfairness of the formula but rather in the failure of those drafting the Child Support legislation to appreciate the impact of such change upon the rest of our hugely complex benefit structure. Their failure to grasp that the problems of inadequate disclosure and ineffective enforcement - with which courts had grappled for decades - could not be tackled effectively by a distant bureaucracy.