In defence of therapeutic jurisprudence: Threat, promise and worldview

Therapeutic jurisprudence has inspired and influenced a range of criminal law and justice reforms which offer some light at the end of the tunnel for traditionally wicked socio-legal problems such as offender recidivism. Prominent among these reforms are the rise of the specialist sentencing (problem solving) courts and court supervised treatment programs. But in a policy terrain dominated by regular ideological and political swings, and by significant economic pressures, there are proposals for these reforms to be more widely adopted, not by the convening of more specialist courts, but by mainstreaming their practices and procedures. This paper examines some significant resistance to those proposals