World Criminal Justice Systems, Eighth Edition: A Comparative Survey

One of the worst college textbooks I have had. The author is obviously an intelligent person and has done a tremendous amount of research on the subject, but this textbook is a poorly organized and difficult to follow. The author will begin a chapter with an overview of a nations government and spend 12-15 lengthy pages about the history of the government, the history of certain criminal justice systems, the history of courts, etc. Then the chapter turns to each subsystem of the criminal justice system and offers a more in-depth history in tandem with the subsystems current organization. Because of this, there is a tremendous amount of repetition. There is also more focus on history, the reason why the criminal justice system evolved as it did, and the "feelings and will of the people" that influenced that evolution, than there is an actual description of the subsystem is organized and functions currently. Often times the author will reference a rather obscure passage in the opening explanation of the government in a chapter many times later, but the passage was so obscure that it literally takes re-reading the entire opening again to find it. Again, the book is chock full of information, much of which I found to be quite interesting. The execution and organization leaves a lot to be desired, though.

The book is very good and very useful for my research. it explains in details the criminal systems of many countries, strarting from England, France, Japan,South Africa, Russia, China and Islamic countries.