Abstracts
The Complexities of Supply and Demand: Intimacy, Sexual Labour and Commerce
Davis (1937:744) in the American Sociological Review poses the conundrum of prostitution: ‘Why is it that a practice so thoroughly disapproved, so widely outlawed in Western civilization, can yet flourish so universally’. In an age where the criminalisation of buying and selling sex is favoured in some European states, this lecture uses empirical findings of two qualitative studies of sex markets to address this global question. The first study, an ethnography, examines the indoor brothel and escort markets investigates the informal regulation of the sex markets and strategies of risk management in the professional and personal lives of female sex workers. The second study, based on interviews with men who buy sex in brothels and from escorts, explores the reasons for buying sexual services, and the dynamics between sex workers, clients and the regulatory regimes. Merging these findings, the lecture discusses the complex roles of intimacy, sexual and emotional labour and commerce that are entwined in some commercial relationships between sex workers and their clients. The contradictions of the contemporary sex industry are explored through micro-level understandings of relationships to explain macro questions of the transformation of structure, gender, sexuality and informal economies in contemporary society. In an age of intense commodification of sexuality, yet at the same time strong state messages against the respectability and legitimacy of the sex industry, the structural reasons for the proliferation of the sex industry as a supply and demand economy are examined.
The Contested Nature of Risk Factor Research
There are two distinct sides of the debate concerning the generation and application of knowledge through risk factor research (RFR):
1. An increasingly large number of researchers worldwide who have pursued quantitative, 'factorised’ explanations of risk and their political and policy-making advocates;
2. A small, disparate group of academics who have sought to challenge, criticise and oppose the RFR movement and the nature and extent to which this research has informed YJ policy and practice.
These two camps contest both the methodological robustness and practical and policy utility of RFR. Proponents accentuate the scientific methodology, empirical basis, widespread and sustained validation, replicability and universality of risk factors as robust, conclusive research-based evidence with significant advantages for guiding policy and practice. Opponents question the methodological, ethical and political bases of RFR and doubt the validity of the conclusions drawn – asserting that factorisation/reductionism oversimplifies risk, individualises responsibility for risk factors and stigmatises young people rather than helps them. However, RFR has continued to spread and replicate itself largely without reference to the arguments of critics, which have gone unheard and unheeded by researchers and politicians.
I argue that RFR has potential benefits, not least in affording a practical, real-world methodology for testing theoretical premises, identifying promising targets for intervention and applying knowledge of risk factors within these interventions, but that these strengths have been overstated and misrepresented by proponents, crudely understood by policy makers and politicians and clumsily implemented in policies and programmes. On the other hand, critics have tended to proffer generalised critiques based, often, on anti-positivist philosophy, morals, ethics and politics rather than questions of the quality of RFR, its practical utility or critical interpretations of research findings. Consequently, the RFR paradigm, the research, its conclusions and the central literature are desperately in need of critical analysis.
Punishing Persistent Offenders
The Role of Previous Convictions at Sentencing
After the seriousness of the offence, an offender’s criminal record is the most important factor determining sentencing outcome. This has been true for many generations and applies across a variety of sentencing systems. The Criminal Justice Act 2003 has placed the consideration of previous convictions at sentencing on a statutory footing. Utilitarian sentencers justify the use of previous convictions by noting the predictive power of an offender’s record. Desert theorists however are divided on the issue. Some retributive theorists argue that previous convictions should play no role at sentencing. Others argue that the principle of the progressive loss of mitigation should apply: first offenders should receive a sentencing discount which is withdrawn once they have accumulated three or four convictions. Thereafter previous convictions should play no further role in determining sentence severity. This seminar will examine the issue from a number of perspectives. It will explore public reactions to the recidivist sentencing premium and will report the findings from interviews with offenders. The seminar concludes by attempting to explain the divergence between public/ professional opinion and retributive theories. Members of the public and criminal justice adopt a much broader conception of blameworthiness that incorporates factors excluded by narrow retributive models of sentencing. The seminar draws upon the volume Punishing Persistent Offenders published by Oxford University Press in 2008.
Criminal careers, risk factors & desistance
Some findings and observations from qualitative research with young people growing up in poor neighbourhoods
Together with colleagues from the University of Teesside’s Youth Research Group, Robert MacDonald has undertaken a series of biographically-focused, qualitative and, in part, longitudinal studies of youth transitions in poor neighbourhoods in England. These studies were not predominantly about crime, nor were they informed primarily by criminological theory. Nevertheless their broad and longer term view of young people’s lives allows for discussion of how and why some individuals develop criminal careers (and how and why other 'similar’ young people do not). In particular, the paper will offer a critical perspective on risk factor approaches to the prediction of criminal careers. It will also reflect on what the studies tell us – and cannot tell us – about the factors that aid criminal desistance.
Comparative criminology in a globalised world
Comparative criminology is changing. ‘Classic’ comparative research tended to explore unknown and relatively insulated territory. An example is David Downes’ work on the Netherlands. It sought to explain the rather unique Dutch penal policy, in order to provide ideas to British policy makers. This is classic comparative criminology: it aims to understand crime and social control within its own context but also with the aim to bring about cross-fertilisation.
Today probably all jurisdictions feel constant influence from international and global trends. Comparative criminal justice may have lost its cross-fertilisation function, and instead, international or global criminology tends to study these very processes of internationalisation and policy transfer. That requires a rethink of what comparative criminology is and does and its aims. What is comparative criminology for? I will examine these questions with specific reference to criminology in my native country, the Netherlands.
Reflections on the Status and Influence of Restorative Justice
In this presentation I will consider three matters:
- the status of restorative justice across European jurisdictions, where both the European Union and the Council of Ministers have expectations about the place of restorative justice within the public prosecutors’ and the judiciary’s repertoire of responses to crime
- the present statutory and soft law provision for restorative justice in England and Wales
- current research findings
The Torture Debate: a 'no brainer’?
Jeremy Bentham considered that torture could be justified on utilitarian grounds. Although torture is now prohibited in customary international law on essentially human rights grounds, events since 9/11 have resurrected the proposition, given credibility by the Bush administration, that extreme coercive methods of interrogation (for example, waterboarding, which most commenators would argue is torture) can be justified in certain circumstances, there is need, once again, to revisit the utilitarian arguments to which many security practitioners have always subscribed, albeit mostly sotto voce.
The Currency of Justice. Fines, Risks and Damages in Consumer Societies
Fines and damages constitute the principal sanctions used by civil, criminal and regulatory law. In part, this is because money sanctions make it possible for law to govern wide swathes of existence. The ‘its only money’ effect facilitates simplified and less costly procedures associated with fines and greatly enhances throughput of cases. Fines produce revenues that, across the board, more than pay the costs of justice. Damages overwhelmingly are paid by insurers – most often in out-of court settlements. In turn, liability insurance premiums are built into commodity prices. Something similar is true for the sometimes mammoth corporate fines. Fines and damages thus overwhelmingly are borne by consumers, creating a massive market in wrongs, or even a parallel form of social insurance scheme.
At the same time, especially as it doesn’t matter in law who pays money sanctions, we are talking about ‘the price’ of wrongdoing literally rather than figuratively. Money sanctions work like prices, and as economists have it they put friction in the system. Thereby fines and damages primarily regulate and modulate flows and distributions of unwanted and harmful actions rather than punish individual wrongs and extinguish immorality. Through the monetary currency of ‘justice’ law has become a vast risk management system consistent with consumer societies. Appropriately, across the vast majority of cases, the limits of monetary governance are patrolled not so much by imprisonment and the loss of liberty as by the suspension of a specific and usually purchasable license – which works through the loss of a specific freedom to consume and thereby targets the specific freedom that generates unwanted risk.
Abandoning the already abandoned: UK prostitution policy reform and the bio-political turn in governance
This presentation poses a simple question: how can we explain the 21st century, British obsession with regulating prostitution. It traces the proliferation of policy, guidance and governmental interventions regulating prostitution, noting the ways in which this expanding policy field creates every more finely differentiated categories of sex workers. Placing these reforms within wider sociological contexts, this presentation details some of the difficulties contained in contemporary feminist, criminological and sociological explanations of the reforms. By drawing on the concept of bio-political governance, this presentation then argues that an analysis of the prostitution policy reforms raises important questions about shifts in the mode of governing ‘vulnerable’ populations away from prudentialism towards catastrophe, emergency management. With that, this paper will conclude by arguing that contemporary policy reforms work to identify those categories of sex workers for whom coercive, punitive regulation is warranted and those categories for whom the only to be done is to abandon them ‘to their fate’.
Psychological Aspects of Malingering in Criminal Matters
Criminal defendants are often observed to feign or exaggerate psychological symptoms, for the purpose of establishing a defence of insanity or perhaps evading prosecution altogether due to a finding of incompetency to stand trial. This presentation will examine DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) and ICD (International Classification of Diseases) perspectives on the diagnosis of Malingering, discuss relevant symptoms within the broader context of dissimulation, and review the forensic assessment process with reference to actual case examples. Particular emphasis will be placed upon the implications of a finding of Malingering for forensic decision-making and ultimate criminal disposition.
Hostels Greenhouses or Warehouses ? Rehabilitation, surveillance and the unintended consequences of a risk driven policy for practice(s) on the ground
The diminished profile of rehabilitation and resettlement in the discourse and practice of Approved Premises (Probation Hostels) provides a rich source around which the theorist, policy maker or practitioner can consider the impact of risk driven practices on both the rehabilitative agenda and the practical realities of implementing a public protection driven approach. It will be argued that an increasingly risk driven approach may not only be undermining of rehabilitative practice but may also present a less effective approach to risk assessment and risk management. Rather than being a case of care versus control, hostels may benefit from a revised alternative penology which is risk aware but not risk averse. Policy and policy drivers which become removed from the relational interface of practice may end up having unintended consequences that in fact undermine the very ‘correction’ they served to instigate i.e. a more accountable and effective approach to working with offenders in the community.
Creative Arts and the Cultural Politics of Penal Reform: the early years of the Barlinnie Special Unit, 1973-1981
The Barlinnie Special Unit (1973 -1996) was and remains a significant milestone in Scottish penal policy, but has been ambivalently remembered. To some it was a legendary institution, which, through the use of creative arts enabled the rehabilitation of some of Scotland’s most violent prisoners, particularly Jimmy Boyle, but which, after his departure in 1980, became a mere shadow of its former self, and a lost opportunity to reform the wider penal system. To others its early years represented a moment when penal authority was inadvertently ceded to critical and manipulative prisoners – Boyle especially – and their unduly liberal champions in the social work and arts communities, which was fortunately retrieved, never allowed to happen again and considered best forgotten. To many contemporary penal practitioners, even in Scotland, it has either been forgotten, or was never known – and if it is remembered at all it is more through the testimony of prisoners who experienced it, than through any official (or professional) account. This paper will explore the cultural politics of this particular penal reform and suggest that the Unit be given the prominent place in the Scottish penal heritage that it has long deserved, but never quite achieved.
