CrimNet

17 September 2024

Current Issues in Criminal Justice (CICJ) provides detailed analysis of national and international issues by a range of outstanding contributors. It includes contemporary comments, with discussion at the cutting edge of the crime and justice debate, as well as reviews of recently released books.

CICJ accepts submissions on a rolling basis.

Editor: Professor Colin King, member of the Sydney Institute of Criminology

You can access current (Volume 36 (3), 2024) and previous issues of Current Issues in Criminal Justice here.

If you have a book suitable for review by CICJ, please email the books editor, Celine Van Golde at celine.vangolde@sydney.edu.au 

For more updates, follow CICJ on X here.

In-person event

Much ink has been spilled over what the proper aims of sentencing should be, and it seems that different aims have become more or less prominent over time. The rehabilitative aim gave way to more retributive approaches in the 1970s in many countries and perhaps to approaches with more focus on dangerousness in recent times. But how well are the aims of sentencing realised in practice?

This Beyond Punishment Seminar will consider how the aims of sentencing as contained in the law matches up with reality of actual criminal justice practices. So, does rehabilitation really have a significant place in current approaches to criminal sanctions? How is this impacted by issues of funding or discretion? Is the reality of the response to offending largely punitive and how much does it reduce the capacity to reoffend? Do the sentences imposed by the courts or the experiences of sanction really deter? If there is discrepancy between stated aims and the practice how should this discrepancy be addressed, and which parts of the discrepancy are most troubling?

This seminar will address these and other questions.

Panellists

The Honourable Justice Yehia was appointed to the Supreme Court in June 2022 having served as a District Court Judge for 8 years. In addition to her service as a judge of the District and Supreme Courts, her Honour holds a number of positions including Board member and previous Chair of Diverse Women in Law, Board member of the AIJA, Chair of the Ngara Yura Committee and member of the Bugmy Bar Book Committee. Her Honour is also a member of the Judicial Commission’s Sentencing Bench Book Committee and became an Adjunct Professor at the UNSW Law School in 2023, where she teaches an advanced course on sentencing law.

Jennifer Galouzis is the Assistant Commissioner of Strategy & Policy, Corrective Services NSW. Currently in the final year of her PhD at the University of Melbourne, her research focuses on "A rehabilitative prison environment: Accountability, complexity and the possibility of therapeutic prisons." With over 20 years of experience in prison and correctional research, Jennifer’s work encompasses the ecology of prison environments, the social and cultural climate of prisons, and the measurement of prison performance. She has published in the areas of rehabilitative design, preventing prison violence, sex offender treatment, and the role of corrective services in reducing reoffending

The Honourable Geoffrey Bellew SC was appointed Senior Counsel in 2006 and in 2011 he was appointed a Justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. He served continually as a Judge of the Common Law Division until February 2023. Upon his retirement Mr Bellew was appointed by the Attorney-General as the Chairperson of the State Parole Authority. He is the author of a number of texts published by Lexis Nexis, including Uniform Evidence Law, Principles and Context, a substantive text on the law of evidence. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Law, a member of the Law Advisory Board, and a sessional lecturer, at Notre Dame University, Sydney.

Dr Mindy Sotiri is Executive Director, Justice Reform Initiative and has worked in criminal justice system settings as an advocate, community sector practitioner, academic, and researcher for more than twenty-five years. During this time, much of her work has been focused on advocacy around decarceration and building sustainable community-based and community led pathways outside of prison settings. Mindy completed her PhD in 2003 (looking at the purpose of imprisonment in NSW); completed a Churchill Fellowship in 2016 (looking at evidence based community led re-entry and post-release programs) and is a senior visiting fellow at UNSW.

Chair

Dr Allan McCay is Co-director of the Sydney Institute of Criminology and an Academic Fellow at the University of Sydney's Law School. He coordinates the Legal Research units at the Sydney Law School, and lectures in Criminal Law. Much of his work as focused on neuroscience, neurotechnology, and the criminal law. He is also interested in free will and punishment, ethical issues related to emerging neurotechnologies, and the future of legal work. His first coedited book Free Will and the Law: New Perspectives is published by Routledge (2019) and his second, Neurointerventions and the Law: Regulating Human Mental Capacity is published by Oxford University Press (2020).

Tuesday 8 October 2024

Time: 6-8pm

Venue: Sydney Law School, Law Foyer, Level 2, New Law Building (F10), University of Sydney, Camperdown campus

CPD Points = 2 points

Please register here.

Many argue that AI provides significant opportunities to boost productivity and improve services. Yet, its rapid development has made it difficult to grapple with the potential risks and challenges that it poses to human rights and social justice. In this episode, LLB V students Sarah Koegel and Oliver McCue talk to Professor Kimberlee Weatherall about some of the knotty issues concerning the interaction between AI and regulatory frameworks within the law.

Kimberlee Weatherall is a Professor of Law at the University of Sydney, specialising in the relationship between law and technology and intellectual property. Her current research focuses on the law relating to the collection, ownership, use and governance of data about and related to people, including privacy law, with the goal of ensuring that data collection, use and linkage, and data and predictive analytics are developed in a way that is fair, transparent, accountable, and beneficial to people and society. She is currently a member of the Australian Computer Society’s Technical Advisory Board on Artificial Intelligence Ethics and Fellow at the Gradient Institute.

Listen here.

The Council has released its final report in its review of sentencing for firearms, knives and other weapons offences in NSW.

Please read here.

The  sentencing of offenders and judicial decision-making in that area are complex processes influenced by a multitude of factors intended to achieve various purposes and evaluated according to different, often controversial criteria. The factors that influence sentencing and evaluations of its effectiveness begin with penal ideologies on punishment and its purposes, usually translated into more detailed principles related to sentencing. Those ideologies commonly stem from the traditional contrast between the retributive stance of repaying the offender for the wrongdoing with penalties proportionate to the offence and a utilitarian or consequentialist emphasis on preventing future crimes and reoffending. Moreover, there have been various attempts to bring the two frameworks together in a constructive way, or to break the mould entirely and look at other punishment rationales. Those penal ideologies may have an enormous impact on sentencing decisions, and changes to them may radically reshape sentencing outcomes.

Sentencing always takes place in a specific legal system that considers the purposes of punishment and sentencing principles: various types of guidelines, the circumstances surrounding the offence and the offender, lists of mitigating and aggravating circumstances, etc. These regulations usually arise from some more or less consistent underlying penal ideology. In general, legal regulations on sentencing may assume that judges have broad discretionary powers, stressing the individualisation of the sentence, or may attempt to provide more or less detailed guidelines limiting this discretion, thus stressing the uniformity of sentencing decisions. Even broad judicial discretionary powers do not exclude attempts at structuring that discretion in a certain way. At the same time, such attempts may deprive judges of the possibility to individualise sentences. Therefore, structuring judicial discretion is a crucial issue in regulating the sentencing process. Various attempts to manage judicial decision-making have emerged in recent years in many countries, commonly referred to as “principled sentencing”.

It is necessary to stress that a country’s political situation and political atmosphere may also influence sentencing outcomes. There are many examples of political change having a significant impact on sentencing theory and practice. This may happen via legislative change, but changes may also occur without specific legislative action: via changing social attitudes, opinions, etc. reflected in judicial attitudes and opinions. Despite the fact that sentencing offenders is often heavily regulated, personal circumstances may have a significant impact on sentencing decisions. This results from the fact that individual judicial attitudes and opinions on crime, punishment, sentencing, etc. may not be excluded from the factors that influence sentencing decisions.

These are only a few very general, selected considerations on sentencing theory and practice issues that we wish to consider in the upcoming special volume of Archives of Criminology. We welcome contributions exploring a broad range of (theoretical or practical) penological, criminological and legal underpinnings to sentencing. Among the more detailed issues to be eventually discussed in the volume, the editors would like to mention the following examples:

•the mix of retributive, utilitarian and restorative considerations in modern penal systems, its development and impact

•the concepts of general prevention and deterrence as aims of sentencing, especially in light of empirical findings in the field

•the concepts and practical implications of proportionality in sentencing and individualisation of punishment

•principled sentencing as a specific approach to structuring sentencing decisions

•legislative and other techniques to structure sentencing discretion

•empirical evaluations of sentencing processes and outcomes

•the procedural aspects of sentencing

•legislative and non-legislative influences on sentencing, or the factors that influence judicial sentencing processes and decisions

•the justification of sentencing decisions as an element of the broader issue of justifying judicial decisions

•judicial attitudes towards and opinions on punishment and sentencing in the context of their impact on sentencing decisions

•comparative studies of sentencing

•description and analysis of historical developments in sentencing.

All types of studies on the broad category of sentencing are welcome: analyses of theoretical penological issues, legal analyses and empirical studies.

Basic information

Archives of Criminology is the most prominent Polish journal in the field of criminology. Published by the Department of Criminology at the Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Science, it dates back to the 1930s. It is published twice a year with a substantial proportion of English-language papers. It is indexed in a variety of databases, most recently included in Scopus. More information about Archives of Criminology is available on the journal’s website: https://czasopisma.inp.pan.pl/index.php/ak.

We are looking for papers to address the broad spectrum of issues related to sentencing: theoretical developments, including justifications of punishment and its functions and the legal and criminological aspects of sentencing – especially particular types of offenders (e.g. dangerous offenders, recidivists, petty offenders, first-time offenders and perpetrators of specific types of offences) – as well as the results of empirical research on sentencing, including statistical analyses of sentencing outcomes, judicial decision-making, justification of sentencing decisions, etc.

The team of editors:
Prof. Krzysztof Krajewski, Department of Criminology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland
Prof. Mojca Plesničar, Institute of Criminology, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Dr Jakub Drapál, Department of Criminal Law, Charles University, Prague, Czechia

The publication will be made available with open access.

Important dates:

30 September 2024 – deadline for submitting abstracts (200–300 words)
31 March 2025 – deadline for submitting texts
January/February 2026 – publication

Entries are limited to between 7,000 and 9,000 words, inclusive of the bibliography.

Abstracts should be submitted through the online form

Guest editors
Krzysztof Krajewski: krzysztof.krajewski@uj.edu.pl
Mojca Plesničar: mojca.plesnicar@pf.uni-lj.si
Jakub Drápal: drapalja@prf.cuni.cz

Journal’s Editors
Editor-in-chief: Prof. Witold Klaus: witold.klaus@gmail.com
Executive editors:
Dr Justyna Włodarczyk-Madejska: wlodarczyk.madejska@gmail.com
Dr Monika Szulecka: monika.szulecka@inp.pan.pl

Author: Anthony Morgan

We examined the effect of money laundering on the harm associated with organised crime by using linked data on organised crime groups known to law enforcement from the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and suspicious transactions reported to the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre. Involvement in money laundering by an organised crime group, and an increase in the amount of money laundered, increased the probability of organised crime and the amount of crime-related harm to the community. The increase in money laundering preceded the increase in crime-related harm, suggesting the harm was due to the reinvestment of illicit funds in future criminal enterprises. These findings suggest that reducing the amount of money laundered by organised crime groups would limit their ability to reinvest illicit funds in future criminal enterprises.

Please read here.

Authors: Jason Payne and Anthony Morgan

In this study we used criminal history data for three birth cohorts in New South Wales to estimate the prevalence of recorded family and domestic violence offending.

Using an accelerated longitudinal design, we estimate that 6.3 percent of people born in New South Wales had been proceeded against by police for a family and domestic violence offence by age 37. The rate was significantly higher for men: 9.6 percent of men— one in 10—had been proceeded against for a family and domestic violence offence, compared with 3.0 percent of women (one in 33).

Overall, 1.2 percent of people born in New South Wales were responsible for more than 50 percent of recorded family and domestic violence offences. Further, family and domestic violence offenders accounted for nearly half of all recorded offences by people in the birth cohort.

This is the first estimate of the prevalence of recorded family and domestic violence offending in a population sample in Australia. This is an important step towards increasing the visibility of family and domestic violence perpetrators.

Please read here.

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