ABSTRACT
Human rights are amongst of the most important issues for contemporary criminology and there have been a number of attempts to incorporate human rights into the criminological canon. We shall look at three writers, all of whom furnish very useful accounts. These three thinkers are Manuel Lopez-Ray, Stan Cohen and Lucia Zedner. Lopez-Ray was taken with the practical issues that public policy throws up, such as devising agreed standards of treatment for prisoners and young offenders and using the law to secure human rights for those subject to the criminal justice system. He saw a focus upon human rights within academic criminology as enabling it to do international and comparative work, notably around the measurement of indices of good practice. Stan Cohen is a colossal figure in the Social Sciences and left an immense legacy of work. In regard to human rights his contribution spanned both practical activism as well as a deal of published literature and he had an impact upon the development of international relations as a discipline. In terms of criminology his contribution is undoubted, though complex, and we shall focus on the way he conceived of the state and the way it executes its crime control function. Lucia Zedner has explored the ways in which ethical problems have arisen in relation to the day-to-day operation of the criminal justice system; notably she has explored the ways in which the individual’s ability to go about his or her business is often compromised by meta-risk considerations that undermine personal privacy and compromise civil liberties. These thinkers are representative of three broad approaches to the treatment of human rights within criminology – Lopez-Ray’s with a focus on practical social policy, Zedner’s with an emphasis upon deliberative democracy as a bulwark against the likelihood of a diminution in the rights and civil liberties resulting from actuarial policies of predictive risk, and Cohen’s with its deeper philosophical concerns about social control and how we should live in late modernity. Interestingly both Zedner and Cohen approach human rights with one eye on social control. For them the extent, and form, of social control has definite human rights concerns for the citizenry. They are less interested with the human rights of criminals than they are with curtailment of the freedom and autonomy of the mass of citizens who are law-abiding. Therefore the form, and extent, of state social control in late modernity is the major concern. Moreover, because state social control tends to be focused on definite groups the bulk of the population typically remains unconcerned that social control is being extended in any case (Cohen 2001).
