The Empirical Strikes Back: Beyond Theorising Transnational Policing and Nation-building
presented by the Crime and Justice Research Network and the School of Social Sciences and International Studies

Professor Andrew Goldsmith
Executive Director and Professor of Law
Centre for Transnational Crime Prevention
University of Wollongong

MB 211
Morven Brown Building
University of NSW

This presentation will draw upon the empirical work of the ARC-funded Policing the Neighbourhood study, a comparative three country study of Australian police involvement in peacekeeping and nation-building activities in the Asia Pacific.  It will reflect upon the literature analysing transnational policing and nation/state building, and consider what has been, and needs to be, learnt through close empirical observation of the nature of transnational policing activities of different kinds.

Andrew Goldsmith is Executive Director, Centre for Transnational Crime Prevention, Faculty of Law, University of Wollongong, where he is also a professor of law. He is Chief Investigator of an ARC Linkage grant (partnered with the Australian Federal Police), Policing the Neighbourhood, a study of Australian policing missions in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Timor-Leste. A book from this project is due shortly for completion under contract with Oxford University Press Clarendon Series in Criminology. His most recent book, edited with James Sheptycki, was Crafting Transnational Policing: Police Capacity-building and Global Policing Reform (Hart, Oxford, 2007).  He also retains adjunct professor status at Flinders University in the School of Law.

The Three Rs - Remorse, Risk and Redemption - Subject Themes vs Sentencing Discourse in NSW Criminal Justice
Maggie Hall

Moot Court
Faculty of Law
University of NSW

Beyond a purely philosophical examination of the aims of sentencing (and arguably the entire criminal justice system) lies a view of criminal justice which presupposes certain actions and reactions in the subjects of its dispositions. From assessments of remorse, through prescriptions for denunciation, restitution and rehabilitation, assumptions are made about the subjective state of the accused. The words of judges on sentence contain prescriptions for action which are often used by release authorities as an assessment tool – to assess how the prisoner has attended to the issues considered causative of offending. The predominance of the risk paradigm in criminal justice and corrections, along with discourses of responsibilisation overlays the performance of the sentence and interweaves with the personal characteristics of the prisoner to produce outcomes often dissonant with the expectations of the community. Redemption is linked to the performance of certain requirements, usually programme participation, with scant recognition of the barriers inherent in the processes of imprisonment.
A full assessment of the utility of our criminal justice system, particularly in the light of our increasing reliance on imprisonment, relies on matching the aims and objectives with the outcomes. Recognition of the often unstated assumptions which underlay our rationales for punishment must include the voices of those which are subject to its processes.

Sex Workers in Prison
Louise Clark

Audio recording (WMA) and powerpoint slides

There has been growing recognition that the demographic of women in the British criminal justice system, includes women who may have had involvement in the sex industry. Prisons have now started to develop specific work to address this. Aimed at both practitioner and academic audiences, this seminar reports on research to assess the experience of this group of women in the prison service and the impact of a prison staff awareness training programme developed from the research. It concludes with challenging the Government's proposed strategy for prostitution in England, which views the women as purely victims and which hinders the provision of harm minimisation support to them.

Plural policing and the police custody process in England and Wales
Layla Skinns

Audio recording (WMA) and powerpoint presentation

For the last decade, the police custody process has been a neglected area of scholarly research in England and Wales. Yet, the context of police custody has changed dramatically. This is partly due to civilianization and privatization, meaning that there are a growing number of non-sworn staff employed by either the police or private security companies to perform key tasks in the police custody process and the use of public-finance initiatives to re-develop police custody areas. Indeed, there is a growing body of empirical research on plural policing, but little of it has focused specifically on the police custody process. Police custody has also been affected by changes to the provision of legal advice as a result of the Legal Services Act 2007 and is likely to be affected by the review of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984) (PACE), which has been underway since March 2007. Therefore, my recent mixed-method research, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council offered a timely contribution to this neglected area of research; two police custody areas, one publicly-run and one privately-run, were used as case studies to examine suspects' access to their due process rights, as well as the impact of plural policing and multi-professional relationships on the custody process. Some of the key findings from the research so far are that plural policing has both advantages - for example, suspects felt better treated by civilian staff and a higher proportion of requests for legal advice were met in the privately-run police custody area - and disadvantages - for example, 'power creep' (Crawford et al. 2005: 42), where new powers were necessitated by staff being drawn into new roles and the 'problem of many hands' (Rhodes, 1996: 663), where many people contributed to the police custody process, but no one contribution could be readily identified - which need to be carefully weighed up. In this paper, I draw on my mixed-method research and on the existing research on plural policing to examine the meaning of plural policing in the police custody process and its implications for (i) suspects (ii) relationships between the police and non-sworn staff (iii) accountability (iv) the regulation and governance of police custody areas.

The Prisons Project
Chris Cunneen, Eileen Baldry, Alex Steel, Melanie Schwartz, Maggie Hall
Video recording (WMV) and powerpoint presentations (1) and (2)

The Australian Prisons Project seeks to answer these (and other) questions, through comprehensive national research and analysis on developments in Australian prison policy and practice over the last three decades. It aims to identify changes in penal culture over the last 25 years that have led to a re-emergence of imprisonment as a frontline criminal justice strategy. It examines the impact of changes in bail and sentencing policy and practice; the effects of notions of risk in the development and consolidation of new models of imprisonment; and the way in which a reconfigured penal culture impacts upon particular groups including Indigenous people, women and people with mental illnesses.

Proportionality in Sentencing and the Restorative Justice Paradigm: ‘Just Deserts’ for Victims and Defendants Alike?
Tyrone Kirchengast
Video recording (WMV) and powerpoint presentation

The doctrine of proportionality seeks to limit arbitrary and capricious punishment in order to ensure that offenders are punished according to their ‘just desert’. Proportionality goes some way toward achieving this ‘balanced’ approach by requiring a court to consider various and often competing interests in formulating a sentence commensurate with offence seriousness and offender culpability. Modification of sentencing law by the introduction of victim impact statements or the requirement that sentencing courts take explicit account of the harm done to the victim and community has generated debate, however, as to the extent to which offenders may be now subject to unjustified, harsher punishments. This paper proposes that in order to overcome the controversy of the modification of offender and victim rights in sentencing, sentencing courts adhere to a doctrine of proportionality which is explicitly sensitive to the needs of victims and offenders in a model of restorative justice that focuses on the consequences of crime as against the individual, rather than the state. The extent to which proportionality, as the current constitutive principle of Australian sentencing law, may be modified to better encourage a dialogue between victim and offender is discussed.

Exploring ‘Agency’ and ‘Resistance’ in the Context of the Violence of Incarceration
Professor Phil Scraton
Audio recording and powerpoint presentation

In The Violence of Incarceration I have proposed that physical and emotional violence are central elements in the incarceration of men, women and children in advanced democratic societies. As prison populations and those held in secure accommodation have expanded dramatically, ever-harsher regimes of containment have consolidated. Given the dynamics of interpersonal violence, institutionalised abuses and prisoner isolation this seminar raises significant questions regarding limitations on prisoner agency and prisoner resistance. Theorising custodial violence as a continuum, it connects routine, punitive responses, undermining prisoners’ self-esteem and mental health to the directly brutal and brutalising manifestations of formal and informal punishments. Reflecting on recent research with women prisoners in the North of Ireland the seminar is intended as exploratory.

Grounds for Detention of a Defendant until the end of judicial proceedings - Theory and Practice
Dotan Rousso
Criminal Prosecutor in Israel’s Supreme Court and former head of legal research at the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament.
Audio recording and powerpoint presentation

Israeli law authorizes holding a defendant in detention without bail during a criminal trial subject to certain conditions: first, the court must find a prima facie evidentiary basis for the charges; second, grounds for arrest, such as potential danger to the public or flight risk if released, must be held to exist. Yet in many cases, additional extra-statutory considerations play a major role in the court's decision to hold a defendant without bail: considerations such as promoting plea bargains; deterring other potential offenders from following in the defendant's footsteps; speeding up the trial; in high profile cases, satisfying public opinion; or as an expression of the court's revulsion with an ugly crime. In certain cases in which the court is convinced of the defendant's guilt, remand may be ordered as a means of ensuring that the sentence eventually imposed on him will be more severe than if he were free on bail, thereby applying detention as "a down-payment on the sentence". Can this judicial approach, though not strictly in accordance with the law, be justified from a public policy point of view?

Border Autopsy: Misadventure or death by policy?
Sharon Pickering and Leanne Weber
Powerpoint presentation

In what is often described as a 'world in motion', western governments are investing enormous resources in border controls aimed at immobilising unwanted or suspect populations. These measures range from visa controls to offshore interception regimes, physical barricades and military patrols. As a result, thousands of men, women and children have drowned while attempting perilous sea voyages to Europe; the US-Mexico border has claimed far more lives than the Berlin Wall; and many unanswered questions remain about the role of Australian border authorities in the sinking of the so-called Siev-X off the coast of Java in October 2001. Still, the human consequences of border control policies remain largely invisible to the populations of developed nations, and are received with widespread indifference when they do come to notice. In October this year, Croatian police announced, incorrectly as we now know, that a body recovered from the Adriatic Sea was not the remains of missing Australian backpacker Britt Lapthorne, explaining that it was 'not unusual' to find bodies of irregular migrants who had failed to reach Italy by sea from neighbouring Albania and Montenegro. In this paper we will outline the deadly consequences of contemporary border controls, consider possible explanations for the widespread indifference to this mounting death toll, and contemplate the possibility of a less border-conscious future.

Adult accounts of organised child sexual abuse in Australia
Michael Salter
Audio recording and Powerpoint presentation

This paper will outline the preliminary findings of a doctoral research project on adult accounts of organised child sexual abuse in Australia. The project is designed to document the activities of organised groups of sexual abusers through the life histories of adult survivors.

The paper will draw on life history interviews with adult survivors of organised abuse to explore the questions: What are the ways in which the sexual abuse of children can be organised or coordinated by multiple perpetrators? What happens to victimised children in organised contexts? What are the risk factors for organised abuse? What are the social factors that enable, or compound, the sexual exploitation of children? The paper will also provide a reflection on the complexities of providing a cogent criminological account of organised, and otherwise complex, child sexual abuse.

A system of penal abuse: Australia’s immigration detention experience
Michael Grewcock

On 29 July 2008, the Immigration Minister announced a series of measures designed to relax the mandatory detention policy applying to ‘unauthorised non-citizens’. This paper discusses the proposed changes and reflects on the experience of immigration detention in Australia since 1989. It also argues that immigration detention should remain an important subject of concern for criminology.

White Supremacy: Justifying Hatred in the Name of Love
A/Prof. Gail Mason
Co-Director, Institute of Criminology, The University of Sydney
Audio recording (WMA file, requires Windows Media Player)

White supremacist organisations are known for their use of hateful language and violent behaviour. Yet, in recent years a trend towards greater civility and respectability has been identified amongst some of these groups. Is this merely a form of ‘rhinestone racism’ designed to avoid the law and camouflage the real agenda or does it reflect genuine feelings of care and concern that, nonetheless, are intimately linked to prejudice and xenophobia? This paper will present the findings of a study investigating the policies and mission statements of a sample of white supremacist organisations. It seeks to name the ‘normal’ and seemingly caring values that infuse the ideology of these groups and through which they are currently seeking to enter the mainstream. It questions whether concepts such as hate speech, hate group and hate crime are capable of capturing the ‘discourse of care’ through which the messages of white supremacy appear to be increasingly conveyed.

The Influence of Gruesome Evidence on Juror Emotion and Decision Making

Speaker: David Bright, PhD candidate, School of Psychology, Faculty of Science, UNSW
Abstract (Word file)
Audio recording (WMA file, requires Windows Media Player)

The Formation of Urban Security Networks: Risk, Fire and Private Regulation in the 19th century

Speaker: Pat O'Malley, University of Sydney
Abstract (Word file)

DNA Technology Transforming Police Work

Speaker: Jenny Wilson, PhD candidate, School of Social Sciences and International Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, UNSW

Are Human Rights Relevant for Criminology?
Speaker: Prof. Stephan Parmentier, Head of Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, Research Group on Human Rights and International Justice, K.U.Leuven, Faculty of Law, Belgium.

Jun 07

May 07

Apr 07

Mar 07

Sep 06

Facilitating Restorative Justice Conferences: Does Convenor’s Background Matter?

Speaker: Jasmine Bruce, PhD Candidate, School of Social Science and Policy, UNSW

Shooting the Passenger: Australia’s War on Illicit Migrants

Speaker: Mike Grewcock, PhD Candidate, Faculty of Law, UNSW

Open Discussion on the Role of the CJR Network

Chair: Professor Chris Cunneen

Prisoners: Rights and Citizenship - an ever changing story

Speaker: Professor David Brown