ORCID Profile
0000-0002-5270-8719
Current Organisations
University of Western Australia
,
University of Tasmania
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Criminology | Access to Justice | Forensic Psychology | Causes and Prevention of Crime
Criminal Justice | Crime Prevention | Rehabilitation and Correctional Services |
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 28-08-2014
Abstract: This article examines jurors’ views on sentencing from trials returning guilty verdicts where the offender has been sentenced to a wholly suspended sentence or where jurors have suggested a wholly suspended sentence as the most appropriate sentencing outcome. It challenges the poor public image of suspended sentences and provides further evidence that informed judgement on sentencing issues reveals a public that is not as punitive as is commonly portrayed. However, rather than claiming that the findings support the intrinsic worth of wholly suspended sentences, it is suggested that they indicate a desire to avoid immediate prison sentences in many cases. In other words it shows there is considerable support for non-custodial options in the kinds of cases that attract wholly suspended sentences, even in the case of some crimes of violence.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 04-2012
Abstract: The idea of reducing public punitiveness through providing information and encouraging deliberation has attracted considerable interest. However, there remains no solid evidence of durable changes in attitude. The study presented here provides a test of the hypothesis that information combined with deliberation can affect general measures of punitiveness, confidence in the courts and acceptance of alternatives to imprisonment (the three dependent variables). The study involved a pre-test, post-test experimental design. Participants were randomly allocated to either an intervention group or a control condition. Statistically significant changes in the dependent variables were observed immediately following the intervention but these changes were not sustained when measured at follow-up nine months later. Further, at the time of the follow-up the differences between the control group scores and the intervention group scores were not significantly different. The observed changes immediately following the intervention are seen to be a function of the changed relationship of the respondent to the task. The implications of the results for integrating public perspectives into policy are discussed. It is argued that rather than a focus on public education, a more productive direction is to focus on the way the public is engaged on matters concerning punishment.
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Date: 2013
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 31-10-2019
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 11-09-2021
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-07-2020
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 16-03-2012
Abstract: This paper examines the critical issue of public confidence in sentencing, and presents findings from Phase I of an Australia-wide sentencing and public confidence project. Phase I comprised a nationally representative telephone survey of 6005 participants. The majority of respondents expressed high levels of punitiveness and were dissatisfied with sentences imposed by the courts. Despite this, many were strongly supportive of the use of alternatives to imprisonment for a range of offences. These nuanced views raise questions regarding the efficacy of gauging public opinion using opinion poll style questions indeed the expected outcome from this first phase of the four phase sentencing and public confidence project. The following phases of this project, reported on elsewhere, examined the effects of various interventions on the robustness and nature of these views initially expressed in a standard ‘top of the head’ opinion poll.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 29-06-2016
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 04-2012
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2020
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 08-2014
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 14-02-2023
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 07-2020
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 12-2011
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 31-10-2021
Abstract: Law and ethics require that risk assessment should be cross-culturally valid and fair, but Australian research in this regard is underdeveloped. A logical first step in progressing the work required to build a strong evidence base on culturally sensitive risk assessment in Australia is to determine the expert views of those in the field. We interviewed 13 Australian evaluators who assess Indigenous sexual offenders’ reci ism risk to determine their perceptions of the risk assessment instruments they use and the attributes they believe evaluators doing cross-cultural assessments should have. Our central findings are that evaluators use the available instruments because they believe that the same factors predict sexual reci ism for Indigenous and non-Indigenous offenders, but that they do so cautiously knowing the limitations of the instruments. Evaluators nevertheless want more research data to guide them when they use the available instruments to assess people from cultures that differ from those of people in the normative s le. Participants acknowledge that the unique challenges of assessing Indigenous sexual offenders require non-Indigenous evaluators to be culturally competent and confident. These findings should be valuable to evaluators and those who train or supervise evaluators and/or intend to establish or improve the validity of risk instruments in Australia.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 10-11-2019
Abstract: In recent times, parliaments have introduced legislation directing judges to take defined purposes into account when sentencing. At the same time, judges and politicians also acknowledge that sentencing should vindicate the values of the community. This article compares the views on the purposes of sentencing of three major participants in the criminal justice system: legislators who pass sentencing statutes, judges who impose and justify sentences and jurors who represent the community. A total of 987 Australian jurors in the Victorian Jury Sentencing Study (2013–2015) were asked to sentence the offender in their trial and to choose the purpose that best justified the sentence. The judges’ sentencing remarks were coded and the results were compared with the jurors’ surveys. The research shows that, in this jurisdiction, the views of the judges, the jurors and the legislators are not always well aligned. Judges relied on general deterrence much more than jurors and jurors selected incapacitation as the primary purpose in only about a fifth of ‘serious offender’ cases where parliament has provided that community protection must be the principal purpose.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 12-09-2022
Abstract: A plea of guilty is a long-accepted factor mitigating sentence in many countries, including Australia, although academic debate over the merits and application of the discount is ongoing. This paper presents findings from a national Australian study on public opinion on the guilty plea sentencing discount, with a particular focus on sexual offences. Survey data were drawn from 989 jurors in cases that resulted in a guilty verdict and 450 unempanelled jurors and 306 online respondents who were provided with vignettes based on real cases. A third of the respondents would have supported a discount in their case if the offender had pleaded guilty. In contrast, more than one half of the respondents surveyed, who had received a vignette with a guilty plea scenario, supported an increment in sentence if the offender had gone to trial. There was more support for a discount in cases involving non-sexual violent offences versus sexual offences and adult versus child victims. Where a discount was supported, this most commonly was a reduction in the length of custodial sentence, with online respondents allocating the least generous discounts. Willingness to accept a sentencing discount was predicted by a range of variables including gender, education, punitive attitudes, offence type and offence seriousness. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for sentencing law and practice.
Publisher: Victoria University
Date: 17-10-2015
Abstract: Reci ism is typically embraced as the sole or primary outcome measure of success for offender intervention programs. Focusing specifically on tertiary prevention approaches for juvenile offenders, this article firstly argues that there are significant limitations in using rates of reci ism as the primary outcome measure of program success. This article describes the Risk-Needs-Responsivity model and the Good Lives Model as ex les of models which can be used to inform the selection of appropriate outcome measures for program evaluation. This article provides three ex les of recent outcome evaluation studies which sought to determine the effectiveness of post-sentencing tertiary intervention programs for juvenile offenders using a broad range of indicators of success. Finally, this article suggests alternative outcome measures that might be usefully incorporated in future program design, as well as the monitoring and evaluation of existing programs.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 21-07-2015
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 04-2013
DOI: 10.1002/ASI.22816
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 06-2013
Publisher: University of Illinois Libraries
Date: 20-01-2013
Abstract: Recent research has indicated that cybercrime thrives when a corrupt social, economic, and political environment emerges such that law enforcement impact is minimised and key elements of crime prevention are absent. In this paper, using a snowball methodology we analyse patterns of ownership of “child model” sites which generate profits from advertising and/or subscriptions. While the material may not be traditional “pornography” in content, it is arguably exploitative. An open question is how the material compares to “beauty pageant” and other highly stylised mainstream photography that depicts children in adult situations, and whether access to all such material should be restricted.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2019
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 20-06-2018
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 12-2011
Abstract: Changes to sentencing legislation are often introduced or justified on the basis of satisfying public opinion. If sentencing policy is a reflection of public opinion we should see a concordance between different sentencing policies and public opinion. This paper provides a comparison between Australian States and Territories in terms of two key measures of public attitude concerning sentencing: confidence in sentencing and punitiveness. These results are based on acomprehensive telephone survey ( N = 6005) of Australian adults which utilized a stratified random s le of households from the Electronic White Pages. It was found that there were only minor differences in the key measures of public attitude despite the notable differences between the States and Territories of Australia with respect to sentencing policy. Differences in public attitudes across jurisdictions were small, accounting for less than 2 per cent of variation in confidence in sentencing and punitive attitudes scores. In addition, despite the predicted moderately negative association between confidence in sentencing and punitiveness, neither of these variables was related in any systematic way to jurisdictional differences in imprisonment rates. The major implication of these findings is that the wide differences in sentencing practice and policy between jurisdictions in Australia are not linked to differences in public attitudes, supporting Beckett's (1997) argument that sentencing policy is better understood as a function of political initiative rather than a direct articulation of public attitude.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 08-12-2020
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 11-2015
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 26-12-2012
Abstract: Preferences of 800 randomly selected Australians for retributive and utilitarian sentencing purposes were examined in response to brief crime scenarios where offender age, offence type and offender history were systematically varied. Respondents selected rehabilitation as the most important purpose for first-time, young and burglary offenders. Punishment was endorsed as most important for repeat, adult and serious assault offenders. Multinomial logistic regression analysis revealed that offence history was a stronger predictor of public preferences than offender age or offence type the odds of choosing rehabilitation compared with punishment were significantly increased by a factor of 6.1 for cases involving first-time offenders. It appears that when given specific cases to consider, the public takes an approach akin to that taken by the sentencing courts as they weigh up the importance of the various purposes for the case at hand. Public preferences are thus broadly consistent with current law and sentencing practice.
Start Date: 2011
End Date: 2011
Funder: University of Western Australia
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 2007
End Date: 2007
Funder: beyondblue
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 2008
End Date: 2008
Funder: Australian Rotary Health Research Fund
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 2014
End Date: 2017
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 2018
End Date: 2018
Funder: University of Tasmania
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 2016
End Date: 2018
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 06-2015
End Date: 12-2020
Amount: $636,590.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded Activity