Re-framing prosecutorial perceptions of ‘justice’: Towards the goal of ‘thrivership’

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) launched its Domestic Abuse Delivery Programme 2022–2023 squarely pronouncing domestic abuse as ‘a crime that will not be tolerated’ (CPS, 2022a). The service’s programme vows to raise public confidence in the criminal justice response (CPS, 2022b) by ‘improving victim safety’ (Ibid). The framing of achieving victim safety through delivery of ‘improved’ [read successful] prosecutions is not probed, but assumed. This chapter situates this prosecutorial confidence in the criminal law as a means of obtaining ‘justice’ and ‘safety’ for victims in the context of the modern liberal democratic state and the punitive and preventive turns (Carvalho, 2017). It seeks to uncover the logics that led to this ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011). Drawing on empirical work conducted by the author and others, it proposes alternative conceptions of 'justice' that might instead guide the prosecutor.