I recently logged onto the Home Office Research Development and Statistics (RDS) website and was greeted with a large flashing announcement that read; “economists we want you”. This appeal echoed the views of a senior RDS person I recently interviewed who stated; “We recruit quite a lot of people and it's very rare that we employ people who have degrees in criminology because they don't have any skills… We're employing all sorts of people and the most obvious are those with psychology, economics and physics because they have more skills” (Walters, 2003) – great news for all those criminology students! But what can be said about the trajectory of Home Office criminology and the construction of criminological knowldege?
Having to flee the family home as a result of domestic violence and move into temporary accommodation can be a distressing and unsettling experience for women and children. Furthermore, victims can feel a sense of injustice at having to move (effectively making themselves homeless) in order to escape the violent and abusive behaviour of a partner. Consequently, any policy measures or initiatives that enable victims to remain in their own homes, while at the same time prioritising their safety, need to be given serious consideration. In 2003, the 'Sanctuary' model, which is an example of such a scheme, was introduced in England (Netto et al., 2009; Jones et al., 2010).
On January 26,2007, Professor Rod Morgan resigned as Chairperson of the Youth Justice Board (YJB). In an open letter distributed widely, Morgan explained that the youth justice system in England and Wales was being' swamped'. He drew particular attention to, and expressed his frustration with 'the numbers of children and young people being criminalised and ... the growth in the number of relatively minor offenders being prosecuted'. In August 2007, the YJB's annual report was published. The report refers to 'missing data for 2005/06' in respect of 'first-time entrants'; that is children and young people subject to formal reprimands, final warnings or court disposals (in the vast majority of cases Referral Orders). Despite the missing data, however, the available statistics reveal that in a single year no fewer than 97,329 children entered the youth this approach was self-evident from the outset. The dissenting voices were marginalised, however, and early intervention was, and continues to be, rolled out in two key forms. First, with regard to actual offenders, ss. 65-66 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 essentially put an end to diversion (cautioning) and established instead the statutory, interventionist system of 'Reprimands' and 'Final Warnings'. The Reprimand applies to children who 'have not previously been convicted of an offence', whilst the Final Warning is primarily reserved for second-time offenders. Reprimands and Warnings effectively comprise a 'two-strikes-and-you're-incourt' rule, that has led to a significant increase in the number of children and young people appearing in court, often for minor infringements of the criminal law; the 'swamping' to which Morgan refers. Such
In the 1920s, Alexander Paterson, the Prison Commissioner declared that people ‘come to prison as punishment not for punishment’ (Ruck, 1951:23). However, prisoners’ autobiographical accounts have ...
We did not want to enquire too closely when the Government announced its support for ‘evidence-based’ policy-making. After the long years of having criminological research ignored, under-valued and under-funded by the Conservatives, we were not inclined to be picky. So, like drifting mariners, many of us succumbed to the siren call of the Home Office for independent evaluation of its Crime Reduction Programme. I like to think we had some honourable motives: a desire to support the application of knowledge to social progress, perhaps? I also like to think we trusted our Government, whose promises of reform appeared to merit support. Along with some of my academic colleagues, we have published our various accounts of our evaluation experiences in a special issue of the journal Criminal Justice (Volume 4 (3), 2004). For my part, it was with sadness and regret that I saw our work ill-used and our faith in government's use of evidence traduced.
Official government figures continually inform us that a disproportionate and increasing number of black males, including those aged 18 and under, are being stopped and searched by the police and imprisoned. This article will attempt to move beyond these insightful and depressing statistics, in order to highlight the real lived experiences of black young people with regards to the justice system; particularly their daily interactions with the police and other official agents of authority. Throughout this discussion I will draw on my own ethnographic research, and my experiences as a community and youth work practitioner, in East London during the past 20 years.
In a recent radio programme, a group of workers lamented the fact that black youngsters did not have role models and might be suffering a number of difficulties because of this. In a brief moment t...
A month before Christmas a close friend was ice-skating with her daughter on an open-air ice rink. She fell and broke her arm in two places after hitting a rough patch on the ice. She was off work for a number of days and spent many hours in hospital. Subsequently, she discovered that five people that week had broken their arms after falling on the same rink. It was obvious that a combination of too many skaters and lack of maintenance were key elements in the ‘accidents’. There is no legal requirement that these falls are ‘notified’ to a central government department and published on a regular basis. They will form part of some set of ‘accident’ statistics but will receive very little media attention when published. Now imagine the uproar if five people had been attacked in a city centre on five separate occasions and all had their arms broken. There would be a public uproar demanding that the Chief Constable do something about it. Moreover, the events would be recorded in the police statistics.
In February 2015 I had the privilege of participating in a conference on ‘Police Corruption, Racism and Spying' from which many of the papers in this issue of cjm originate. We heard powerful accou...
There is persuasive evidence that the reduction of health inequalities can only be achieved by addressing their fundamental causes as opposed to the diseases through which they are expressed or the immediate precursors of those diseases. This explains both the persistence of health inequalities over time and the failure of policies which only target their immediate manifestations to have any lasting impact. Fundamental causes of health inequalities are thought to include: inequalities in power, money, prestige, knowledge and beneficial social connections. The aim of this discussion is to consider the impact of hegemonic masculinity in determining unequal social and political relations which are deleterious to the health of both men and women on a global scale.
In my article I want to place what has been described as the ‘New Punitiveness' in the context of British imperial history. By highlighting the experiences in the colonial periphery my intention is...
In April 2009, California officials unveiled historic plans to cut $400 million from the state's $9.8 billion corrections budget by reducing the prison population by 8,000. With half the reductions...
Bereavement is an inevitable part of life and learning how to cope with loss is therefore an important life skill for young people and adults alike. Worden's (1983) theory of bereavement processing, outlines four tasks that must be accomplished in order to adapt to the loss: acceptance; working through the pain of grief; adjusting to the new environment without the deceased and, lastly, forming a new and appropriate bond with the deceased that allows the bereaved to move on and reinvest their emotions. Incomplete grief tasks can cause complicated or unresolved grief (Shear and Shair, 2005) which occurs when normal grief symptoms become acute and persistent and interfere with day to day functioning. Complicated grief can result in physical symptoms and is linked to higher levels of suicidal ideation, increased risk of depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (Kristjanson et al., 2006).
If it was the riots across English cities that defined the British summer of 2011, then the summer of 2012 – featuring a Royal Jubilee and the London Olympics – was meant to showcase a thoroughly more stable and law-abiding Britain. Yet by June it seemed as if the Great British Summer of 2012 would be remembered for a remarkable and seemingly unending series of cases that exposed the corruption rotting at the core of the British establishment.
To make sense of last summer's riots it is important to put them in historical perspective. A comparison with the 1981 riots in Brixton, Liverpool and elsewhere and with the 2001 riots in Bradford ...
