In addition to the Introduction, 13 chapters comprise this edited volume. Part 1 includes three chapters examining the role of official discourse in modern societies. Chapter 1 explores the linkages between official inquiry, representations of truth, and the governance of the criminal justice system. Chapter 2 examines the politico-legal underpinnings of the strategies, techniques, and outcomes of royal commissions in New South Wales (NSW). Chapter 3 examines the potential for management and manipulation within the process of official inquiry. Part 2 is comprised of five chapters that deal with the ways in which official discourse provides a legitimacy to particular authorities. Chapter 4 discusses the rationalization and legitimation of prisons in 19th century England. Chapter 5 examines the accessibility of truth about prison in our late modern society through an analysis of official prison inquiry in the United Kingdom. Chapter 6 examines official discourses surrounding police and how official inquiries serve to shape those discourses. Chapter 7 examines three commissions in Canada that were established to consider the position of Aboriginal people within Canada. Chapter 8 examines the way in which American ideas of crime and punishment have worked to criminalize poverty and have helped shape current European policies toward crime and punishment. Part 3 presents four chapters that examine the roles and outcomes of official inquiries. Chapter 9 traces dominant ideological shifts in the United Kingdom through an analysis of official inquiries into ethnic-related urban violence between 1982 and 2001. Chapter 10 examines the Parliamentary Inquiry Report regarding how the police and the judiciary mishandled a pedophilia case that broke out in the summer of 1996 in Belgium. Chapter 11 analyzes the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which focused on discovering the truth about the past in terms of victims, perpetrators, and apartheid. Chapter 12 examines aspects of vengeance versus reconciliation through an analysis of the events surrounding the German invasion of Norway and the Nazi concentration camps. Finally, part 4 reconsiders official discourse as chapter 13 examines the concept of “miscarriage of justice” from a modernist and poststructuralist perspective. Index