The Business of Policing: Volume I: Crimes & Punishments

In The Business of Policing, Crimes and Punishments, Wood lays out a number of the principles that underlie his approach to police organization, principles which generally hew closely to extant research about human psychology, and reject classical assumptions about human rationality and free will. In that classical paradigm, human beings are endowed with a faculty known as reason, whether by God or by Nature, and this faculty allows them to distinguish and choose between good and evil, right and wrong. But as Wood points out in the introduction to this essay, the human being operates within a matrix of social constructions, not ration-ally sourced conclusions (what we have classically referred to as ‘truth’).

Crimes and Punishments: attempts to centralize this postmodern insight about humans in our approach to the problem of law. Thus, rather than think about law as a set of rules based on true, rational conclusions about humanity and the world, Wood challenges us to think about law as a tool for enabling the joint construction of that system in which all humans operate: society. Put another way; the law is here treated as a tool for enabling human co-operation, not protecting against violations of natural or civil rights, which has often had the consequence of rendering law, and especially criminal law, a purely punitive exercise.