Paul O\u27Mahony, Crime and Punishment in Ireland

Only within the last decade, however, have courses in comparative justice systems proliferated, usually in schools or departments of criminology, criminal justice, police and/or corrections administration, and more frequently in graduate than undergraduate programs. Several factors contribute to the lack of interest in comparative criminology. First, the United States has had a long history of isolationism. A second area of difficulty arises from the paucity of readily available source materials available to professors and students. English on the criminal justice systems of non-English speaking nations are much more limited and of widely varying quality. Courses on comparative criminal justice, offered in U.S. universities, focus, primarily on the national systems of the United Kingdom, Japan and Russia with somewhat lesser attention focused on Scandinavian, French, German, Italian and Israeli practices and problems. Africa, Latin America, the Islamic nations, and particularly smaller countries, such as Ireland, are almost totally neglected. In recent years, a number of cross-cultural and transnational surveys of criminal justice have been published. O\u27Mahony\u27s Crime and Punishment in Ireland is a welcome addition to the existing literature, and would have been deserving of a more enthusiastic cead mile failte had it appeared some years ago when, in response to student requests, I included units on the criminal justice system of the Republic of Ireland (“Ireland”) in my comparative course