Different Forms of Discrimination in the Criminal Justice System

Focusing on discretion by the police, criminal justice practitioners and the courts at different stages in the criminal justice process, this chapter explores whether their judgements and decisions contribute to the overrepresentation of those from black, minority ethnic and lower social status backgrounds in the criminal justice system. The chapter asks whether overrepresentation is due to alleged discrimination or reflects typical patterns of offending, and the policy implications. The structure of the chapter is first to present the most recent official data about overrepresentation taking note of recent trends. Contrasting this data with self-reported offending data shows that the overrepresentation of some ethnic groups in the criminal justice system is not a true picture of their actual offending. Second, I argue that an exclusive focus on ethnicity ignores social determinants such as socio-economic status and in any case the ethnic categories used to compare criminal justice outcomes are too crude. Third, I argue that residual discrimination by the police and the courts varies between and within jurisdictions and neighbourhoods, and by their ethnic and social class makeup. Fourth, because discretion is least visible and discrimination most likely at the police stage of criminal justice, police stop and searches are examined. Fifth, the conclusions examine police reform since the Lawrence Inquiry before broadening the discussion to wider structural issues of policy and reform

Racially motivated offending and targeted interventions

This research aimed to identify the prevalence of racially motivated offending among young people in England and Wales and to shed light on the response to racially motivated offending within the youth justice system

Who are these youths? Language in the service of policy

In the 1990s policy relating to children and young people who offend developed as a result of the interplay of political imperatives and populist demands. The ‘responsibilisation’ of young offenders and the ‘no excuses’ culture of youth justice have been ‘marketed’ through a discourse which evidences linguistic changes. This article focuses on one particular area of policy change, that relating to the prosecutorial decision, to show how particular images of children were both reflected and constructed through a changing selection of words to describe the non-adult suspect and offender. In such minutiae of discourse can be found not only the signifiers of public attitudinal and policy change but also the means by which undesirable policy developments can be challenged

Scumbags! An ethnography of the interactions between street-based youth and police officers

The interactions between young, disadvantaged, urban men and the rank-and-file officers who police them should be understood as layered structural, cultural and emotional phenomena. Using data from a multi-dimensional ethnographic project, this paper demonstrates that structural issues manifest in cultural scripts which place both groups in confrontation with each other. Within a tightly bound geographic district, competitiveness between them can be animated by intense emotionality. Frustration, humiliation, disdain and the potential for elation push both parties into behaviours that cannot be understood through discretion and confidence models of decision-making alone. Ultimately, through recognising how questions of inclusion/exclusion play out in simultaneously structural, cultural and emotive ways, the problems generated by negative interactions between the two groups might be meaningfully understood

What is Probable Cause, and Why Should We Care?: The Costs, Benefits, and Meaning of Individualized Suspicion

Taslitz defines probable cause as having four components: one quantitative, one qualitative, one temporal, and one moral. He focuses on the last of these components. Individualized suspicion, the US Supreme Court has suggested, is perhaps the most important of the four components of probable cause. That is a position with which he heartily agree. The other three components each play only a supporting role. But individualized suspicion is the beating heart that gives probable cause its vitality

Culture and concept design : a study of international teams

This paper explores the relationship between culture and performance in concept design. Economic globalisation has meant that the management of global teams has become of strategic importance in product development. Cultural diversity is a key factor in such teams, and this work seeks to better understand the effect this can have on two key aspects of the concept design process: concept generation and concept selection. To this end, a group of 32 students from 17 countries all over the world were divided into culturally diverse teams and asked to perform a short design exercise. A version of the Gallery Method allowed two kinds of activity to be monitored – the individual development of concepts and the collective filtering and selection of them. The effect of culture on these processes was the focus of the work. Using Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, the output from the sessions were reviewed according to national boundaries. The results indicate that individualism and masculinity had the most discernable effect on concept generation and concept selection respectively

On the role of artistic freedoms in protecting fundamental human rights

This was a paper written to be spoken at the Human Rights Conference 2020: Lawyers without Borders Student Division Aberdeen University, March 2020. It was accompanied by 15 Power point slides, which cannot be reproduced in the hard copy paper for reasons of copyright. The paper responds to the question, 'Do artistic freedoms contribute to the protection of fundamental Human Rights'. With examples and with reference to cultural policy research discourse, I argue that the freedoms of 'art' are intimately connected to human rights, and that where human rights are contextualised by 'culture' (and cultural rights) we begin to understand the significance of the 'human' in human rights

Criminal narrative experience: relating emotions to offence narrative roles during crime commission

A neglected area of research within criminality has been that of the experience of the offence for the offender. The present study investigates the emotions and narrative roles that are experienced by an offender while committing a broad range of crimes and proposes a model of Criminal Narrative Experience (CNE). Hypotheses were derived from the Circumplex of Emotions (Russell, 1997), Frye (1957), Narrative Theory (McAdams, 1988) and its link with Investigative Psychology (Canter, 1994). The analysis was based on 120 cases. Convicted for a variety of crimes, incarcerated criminals were interviewed and the data were subjected to Smallest Space Analysis (SSA). Four themes of Criminal Narrative Experience (CNE) were identified: Elated Hero, Calm Professional, Distressed Revenger and Depressed Victim in line with the recent theoretical framework posited for Narrative Offence Roles (Youngs & Canter, 2012). The theoretical implications for understanding crime on the basis of the Criminal Narrative Experience (CNE) as well as practical implications are discussed

Proportionality In Constitutional Law: Why Everywhere But Here?

Legal scholar and author Bernhard Schlink presents the Herbert L. Bernstein Memorial Lecture in Comparative Law. Professor Schlink is both a respected legal scholar and the acclaimed author of a number of popular works of fiction, including the novel The Reader. His lecture focuses on proportionality in German and American constitutional law