Sanders & Young's Criminal Justice (5th edn) by Lucy Welsh, Layla Skinns and Andrew Sanders

Sanders & Young's Criminal Justice (5th edn) by Lucy Welsh, Layla Skinns and Andrew Sanders is a textbook perfect for anyone studying Criminal Justice, Law or Criminology. This textbook looks at each stage of the criminal justice process, including stop and search, arrest, interviewing, prosecutions, trials, and inequalities, as well as at things which go wrong in the criminal justice process and the future of criminal justice, amongst many other topics. This makes it really quite a holistic and somewhat up-to-date textbook on this area, evaluating our criminal justice system and whether it achieves the goals it sets out to achieve.

I quite liked this book as it is written in a very interesting area but also looks at various viewpoints to help the reader make informed judgements. As such, this textbook left room for students to explore their opinions and viewpoints by discussing many legal cases, journal articles and statistics on the relevant area. In the main, this textbook was also very easy to read and understand, which is really valuable for any undergraduate student, as it helps such students to understand the content and succeed. Some of the chapters were also of a great length not being too long. I also liked the suggested further reading section at the end of each chapter, giving the students an opportunity to explore a certain part of the subject in more detail.

There were a number of things which I did not like about this textbook other than some of the particularly long chapters. To begin, it would have been nice to find chapter summaries, as well as conclusions at the end of each chapter. This would further aid comprehension for the reader and remind them of the key points of each chapter. Also, because this is mainly an undergraduate textbook, it would have also been nice to have some questions to check understanding at the end of each chapter and perhaps even some thinking points throughout the chapters. On top of this, I would have enjoyed reading about the cases in the book in further detail in order to better understand the cases and better apply them to the relevant content of the book. Finally, the book should cover more general criminology and criminological perspectives, such as psychological, sociological, and biological perspectives. This book, for instance, looked at a number of elements linked to sociological theories of crime but did not really explore these theories.

Altogether, I rate this book 2 stars, making it an ok book because although it was very good in terms of being comprehensive about the subject and made this an interesting topic to read about, it was ultimately very word-heavy with very few alternative formats other than the occasional table of statistics. This could potentially hold back undergraduate students who are neurodiverse or have learning disabilities. I would still recommend this textbook to any student of Criminal Justice or anyone with a general interest in this area.