Criminal justice involves not only substantive sanctions but also elaborate procedures.
Legal scholars often emphasize procedural justice as an inherent element of criminal justice and a counterbalance to the abuse of power in the criminal process. From the sociolegal perspective, however, the criminal process is not just about procedure.
As Malcolm Feeley (1979) famously put it, “The process is the punishment.” In his case study of the criminal justice system in New Haven, Feeley shows that many human and social factors are key to understanding the criminal process in addition to procedural rules on the books, such as corruption, compromises, political connections, and the interactions between judges, lawyers, prosecutors, defendants, and other actors in the process. The same observation holds true for understanding criminal processes in Asia. The three selections in this section use the cases of Vietnam, Myanmar, and India to illustrate how those nonlegal elements are at work in the criminal process.8.6