Land Theft as Rural Eco-Crime

Land grabbing in various forms is happening in many different parts of this globe. This involves ‘outsiders’ - nation-states as well as corporations - colluding with local domestic elites to radically alter existing land ownership and land uses. Contemporary forms of land theft take place under the guise of acquiring land for food and biofuels, and through imposition of resource extraction activities such as logging and mining. They also occur when land is sealed up for the purposes of carbon sequestration and for conservation. From the point of view of environmental justice, such land reconfigurations represent ‘theft’ insofar as they challenge the basic ways of life and subsistence abilities of traditional land owners. These stakeholders are generally vulnerable to land grabs by powerful interests, leading to immediate and longer term hardship. For green criminology, activity which diminishes social equity in the provision of healthy sustainable environments can be considered a type of eco-crime

Environmental harm and crime prevention

This paper discusses what can be learned from traditional crime prevention to reduce and prevent environmental harm. It underlines how a problem-solving approach involves tailoring interventions and strategies based on the source and type of harm, and according to place, scale and the perceived threat

Convict(ed) Women—Then and Now: Lessons of History for Today

This paper explores the lives of convict women transported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in the 1800’s, with the aim to better understand the process of desistance and reintegration for contemporary female offenders. Through an analysis of the penal systems which operated during the era of transportation, this research draws on historiography to highlight the importance of understanding the past in order to inform the future. This critical reflection on the history-criminology nexus reveals the impact that societal attitudes and social context have on criminal justice practice and policy, and ultimately an ex-offender’s chances of becoming a valued member of their community. Select transcripts of the lives of 1800’s convicts are used to humanise the statistics; statistics which suggest shared experiences of trauma across both cohorts of women despite 175 years of separation between them

The Ethics of Innovation in Criminal Justice

This chapter presents a bounded analysis of the nature and impact of innovation in criminal justice contexts. Implicit within this reflexive critique are some evocative questions. What constitutes innovation and who or what is being reformed? What makes advances in criminal justice just? According to whom and to benefit whom? Calls for criminal justice reform and public service innovation continue to saturate public, professional and academic discourses in many jurisdictions. Yet, while support for change in principle may be widely observed, it is not matched by a commensurate level of consensus regarding the forms and directions changes might take in practice, and why. In this chapter, we present one possible schema whereby innovation in criminal justice contexts can be analysed in a more systematic fashion. Specifically, after describing ‘social innovation' as the central concept of interest here, we start to test its possibilities by interrogating it in terms of what Siedman (2010) calls strategies of amelioration, disruption and transformation, and accommodation. In doing this, we reflect on the extent to which creative and pioneering forms of social innovation may be used not only to benefit the people involved, but also the extent to which they ameliorate, disrupt and transform, or accommodate macro-processes of mass supervision and hyper-incarceration. Against the backdrop of contemporary criminal justice systems and penal cultures, we use this schema to demonstrate that innovation is not morally or politically neutral. In other words, not all that is ‘innovative' is necessarily good or just (Graham and White, 2014). Questions about the forms and functions (‘what', ‘where' and ‘how') of innovation in criminal justice should not be divorced from questions about its architects and beneficiaries, including their intentions and ideologies (‘who' and ‘why'). Attention is drawn to issues of power and politics in considering which ‘innovative' justice initiatives are genuinely predicated on a logic of reform, and those which paradoxically propagate the status quo or mask the sources and effects of the carceral problems they are supposed to resolve

Remote Sensing and Artificial Intelligence in the Mine Action Sector

Remote sensing and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are included in discussions of how technology and innovation can improve humanitarian action and international peacekeeping. These technologies have the potential to improve the capacity to assess needs and to monitor changes on the ground and can be useful for both the mine action (MA) and broader humanitarian sectors. Even though remote sensing and AI are not the silver bullet in MA and come with several challenges (e.g., operational and data protection), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining (GICHD) believe that the integration of remote sensing and AI into the MA sector will enhance evidence-based decision making, aiding in determining priorities for surveying and clearance of contaminated areas and enabling the scarce recourses available for MA activities worldwide to be appropriately directed and used as efficiently as possible. On the 20th and 22nd of April, ICRC and GICHD co-hosted a webinar on remote sensing and AI in the mine action sector. The following is a review of the key benefits and challenges discussed during the two days

IL NESSO ECOCIDIO-GENOCIDIO. UN APPROCCIO DI GREEN CRIMINOLOGY

L’impatto e le conseguenze dei crimini e dei danni ambientali globali stanno diventando sempre più devastanti. L’inquinamento, lo sfruttamento delle specie animali e vegetali, la distruzione di ecosistemi e paesaggi stanno cambiando profondamente il mondo in cui viviamo. Specifiche comunità sono colpite, almeno inizialmente, più di altre. In particolare, lepopolazioni indigene vedono la loro cultura e i loro mezzi di sostentamento direttamente minacciati a causa dello sfruttamentodelle risorse naturali e della distruzione dell’habitat da parte delle corporation. Danni ambientali di questa natura costituisconoper molti una forma di genocidio. Questo articolo esplora dove e come si manifesta il nesso genocidio-ecocidio, considerando fattori quali la dimensione geografica, quella temporale, lo status sociale e il ruolo degli Stati-nazione

Analysis of prehistoric brown earth paleosols under the podzol soils of Exmoor, UK

The deforestation of the upland landscapes in southwest Britain during prehistory is an established archaeological narrative, documenting human impacts on the environment and questioning the relationship of prehistoric societies to the upland landscapes they inhabited. Allied to the paleoenvironmental analyses of pollen sequences, which have provided the evidence of this change, there has been some investigation of prehistoric paleosols fossilized under principally Bronze Age archaeological monuments. These analyses identified brown earth soils that were originally associated with temperate deciduous woodland, on occasion showing evidence of human impacts such as tilling. However, the number of analyses of these paleosols has been limited. This study presents the first analysis of a series of pre‐podzol brown earth paleosols on Exmoor, UK, two of which are associated with colluvial soil erosion sediments before the formation of peat. This study indicates these paleosols are spatially extensive and have considerable potential to inform a more nuanced understanding of prehistoric human impacts on the upland environments of the early‐mid Holocene and assess human agency in driving ecosystem change