Accountability in the Administration of Criminal Justice: A Selective Annotated Bibliography

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

This is the sixteenth in a series of bibliographies that have been
published by the University of Toronto Centre of Criminology since 1970,
and the seventh in which Catherine J. Matthews has been involved since
she joined the series in 1980. This particular work was prepared for the
Solicitor General of Canada in 1992 as part of the centre’s focused
research on accountability, and includes literature published between
1965 and 1991. More than 2800 initial references from on-line and print
indexes were winnowed down to approximately 250 (largely scholarly)
secondary sources. (A few primary sources, such as the report of the
McDonald Commission on the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, have also been
included.) References have been organized into three sections, which
concern (i) issues in accountability, (ii) police complaints and
civilian review of police, and (iii) issues in accountability as they
pertain to government and the criminal justice system.

Because there are only three sections and each is organized by author,
one can appreciate why Matthews felt it unnecessary to include an author
index. It is unfortunate, however, that the individual sections were not
more closely subclassified. The first one, on issues, goes on for 44
pages and reads like a laundry list. Matthews might have considered
organizing this section by issue, or at the very least by a geographical
subdivision so that references to Canada and other individual countries
appeared together. The other two sections, while shorter, could also
have benefited from further classification. Of the 250 references,
slightly less than half have no annotations: the bibliographer was
unable to lay her hands directly on the source. A number of these
references are from unpublished sources, which suggests that readers
might have the same difficulty.

If the purpose of a bibliography is to set out the literature of a
subject and make it accessible to others, this one is not completely
successful. I can only wish Matthews better success on her eighth
bibliography.