How the Criminal Justice System Knows

Social and Legal Studies vol.6 no.1 1997 5-22

[This is just the abstract: to read the full article you will have to obtain the journal. For more information, contact the author.]

In contested criminal cases two incompatible types of knowledge appear: knowledge offered by lay persons, and knowledge produced within the criminal justice system. This article examines the distinctive features and method of production of prosecution case knowledge, which is constructed by the exercise of police power to overcome resistance and so reveal hidden truth. The record of this production of knowledge forms a guarantee that it can and does accurately represent pre-existing facts. Such revelatory knowledge is systematically privileged over lay knowledge. But because it requires resistance to its own formation in order to exist, police knowledge production generates resistances which are never totally contained, and which may be joined to more general, community resistance.