Central Issues in Comparative Analysis of Criminal Justice Systems and Criminal Policy: The Need for a Comparative Approach

follows a mixture of diffuse, unstructured responses to crime lacking both internal coherence and external evidence of a rigorous design concept. There is no theory of criminal policy, but instead a conceptual and practical patchwork. But there are two different patterns around which such policy is organized: (1) the conservative model, proposing increasing penalties on criminals to reduce crime, and (2) the liberal approach, proposing social programs aimed primarily at reducing crime by reducing poverty and alienation (Donnelly 1989, 457). The debate between conservatives and liberals has become personalized by the confrontation of quite opposite theoretical perspectives associated with two American criminologists and their work. In 1985 James Q. Wilson published the second edition of Thinking about Crime; in 1985 Elliott Currie wrote Confronting Crime. These two books provide alternative ways of examining and dealing with the problem of street crime in the United States. Wilson argues for a focus on a policy perspective that is largely independent of traditional social scientific theories of crime. His analysis an