Laboratory Experiments: A Meaningful Contribution to Restorative Justice Research?

Advocates of restorative justice (RJ) argue that the process offers a more effective means of responding to crime than the formal criminal justice system, and many studies have evaluated RJ positively across a variety of outcome measures, particularly in comparison to court based procedures. However, the RJ literature contains few studies that directly test the factors affecting RJ participants’ behaviours and experiences, so little is known about the specific factors that influence how, and for whom, RJ works. In this paper, we argue that the expanded use of experimental laboratory methodologies will broaden and strengthen our understanding of the basic mechanisms by which RJ operates. We describe some ways in which experimental laboratory research may enhance understandings of apology in restorative settings as well as public support for RJ, and we emphasise the need and the potential to overcome barriers of artificiality in laboratory settings. This analysis of laboratory methodologies and the field of RJ research indicates that creative and well-designed experimental laboratory studies can advance knowledge in this area, allowing researchers to investigate how particular components of RJ contribute to the success or failure of RJ processes.     

What Happens to Anti-Racism When We Are Post Race?

Despite the resistance from radical antiracist formations, autonomously organised by racialized minorities and migrants themselves, that can be witnessed in many spaces, the success with which antiracism has been both appropriated and relativized by the state as well as hegemonic activist voices poses a significant threat. The politics of diversity and the consensus around the notion that western societies are post-race contribute to portraying the critique of racism from people of colour as inaccurate, alienating and counter-productive to the achievement of social cohesion. The necessity of dismantling the idea of race as suggested by antiracist activists and scholars has been subverted in the deconstruction of the experience of racism by an ‘antiracialist’—rather than a more radical antiracist—agenda intent on relativizing the struggle against racism as one among many. The consequence of this in the context of postracialism is for racism itself to be departicularized and dissociated from its historical roots. Antiracism needs to reclaim the risk, that Goldberg argues is inherent to it, and rescue it from being universalised into meaninglessness.     

Risk Factors and Pathways to Imprisonment among Incarcerated Women in Victoria, 1860–1920

Criminological studies have found that men’s and women’s pathways to imprisonment differ, with risk factors such as substance abuse, mental illness, socioeconomic circumstances and past victimisation more strongly associated with female prisoners. However, limited quantitative or longitudinal research exists on how the risk factors associated with female offending may have shifted over time. This article investigates the criminal careers and pathways to imprisonment of 6,042 women incarcerated in Victoria between 1860 and 1920, and the risk factors associated with subsequent recidivism. The findings suggest that, while many of today’s risk factors were present historically, there have been notable shifts across time.     

Shackled: Female Convicts at Moreton Bay, 1826–1839.

Shackled: Female Convicts at Moreton Bay, 1826–1839. By Jennifer Harrison (Collins Street East, Anchor Books Australia, 2016), pp.x + 271. Twenty‐three Illustrations. Three Tables. AU$34.95 (pb).     

‘Wayward Girls and Wicked Women’: Two Centuries of ‘Semi-Penal’ Control

This paper explores the way in which unruly or `deviant' women have historically been subjected to various strategies and mechanisms of control, designed to regulate and reform them back to the acceptable and appropriate standards of femininity from which they were perceived to have strayed. In particular the way in which `semi-penal' institutions were utilised for this purpose is examined. It is argued that `semi-penal' institutions such as refuges, reformatories and homes, occupied a unique position within the social control continuum, somewhere between the formal regulation of the prison and the informal control of the domestic or communal sphere. What made them particularly unique was the way in which they managed to combine both formal and informal methods of control in order to produce feminising regimes, aimed at reforming recalcitrant women into respectable, gendered subjects. In addition, these institutions had the effect of `widening the net' of control for women, establishing an all-encompassing system of surveillance which was at once punitive and reformative. To facilitate this analysis, five groups of women have been identified; prostitutes, criminals, the `wayward', inebriates and the `feeble-minded'. The specific methods utilised to control and reform each of these groups will be discussed along with the themes of continuity which serve to synthesize the history of the treatment of such women. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.