Crime and punishment are enduring themes in law and society research, as is justice.
In the empirical study of these topics, law and society studies and criminology overlap. The emergence of the “punishment and society” literature in recent decades further blurs the boundary between the two fields.
However, law and society researchers often approach the criminal justice system differently from criminologists. They care less about crime rates, crime prevention, or severity of punishment and more about the social processes by which crime is constituted and punishment is carried out. Furthermore, law and society scholars consider justice a culturally sensitive concept, something socially constructed and politically embedded. This is especially the case for Asia, where no uniform patterns of crime and punishment or notions of justice can be found.Studying the criminal justice system, however, presents daunting challenges for empirical researchers. Much of police practice is not open to the public. Police officers and prosecutors usually are reluctant to accept requests for interviews or participant observation. Even for criminal trials, which are publicly accessible in some countries (but not in others), the view offered to sociolegal researchers is often limited to the performative aspects. What goes on between judges and other actors beyond the public trial is a large black box. Whereas criminologists draw on surveys and other statistical methods to compensate for the lack of fieldwork access, sociolegal researchers, especially
ethnographers, must find innovative ways to approach their research subjects and issues (see Chapter 9 for more in-depth discussions on methodology).
The selected readings in this chapter present a variety of ways to study crime and justice in the law and society tradition. They range from historical overviews and archival research to experiments, in-depth interviews, and participant observation. None of these studies are perfect, as they only reveal small parts of the black box of criminal justice. However, each of them penetrates the hard surface of this box and shows how things work inside of it. The theoretical interests of the researchers are quite diverse, ranging from ideologies of punishment and justice to concrete procedures and practices on the ground. To some extent, this intellectual diversity reflects the characteristics of criminal justice as a field for law and society research. It is largely driven by empirical issues rather than theoretical debates. As different Asian countries face distinct practical challenges in their criminal justice systems, scholars' interests and concerns are also quite different, even under the same research topic (e.g., punishment).