Expert Evidence,Judicial Reasoning,and the Family Courts Information Pilot

The Family Courts Information Pilot took a modest step towards open justice in Children Act cases by publishing 161 judgments of the County Courts and Family Proceedings Courts. Combining socio‐legal and philosophical analysis on lines inspired by the work of Habermas, this article examines the epistemology of expert testimony implicit in the judgments. What emerges is a form of reasoning based on ‘inference to the best explanation’: judges seek to show that the best explanation for experts saying what they do is that they have good reasons for their opinions. While this approach is not blindly deferential, it has serious limitations in cases where the only experts are local authority social workers and the guardian, and an awareness of these limitations is one reason for the courts' willingness to allow other experts to be instructed. The article also criticizes the analysis of the courts’ use of experts by the recent Family Justice Review.     

Moral strangers or fellow travellers? Contemporary perspectives on offender rehabilitation

This article is a response to the two previous articles in this issue (Polaschek, 2012, and McNeill, 2012), which make up the hot topic debate on offender rehabilitation.     

Assessing desistance in child molesters: a qualitative analysis

The aim of the study was to investigate the process of desistance from sexual crime by comparing two groups of child molesters: One group was deemed to be desisting, while men in the other group were deemed as being still potentially active offenders. Men in the desisting group reported being optimistic for the future, reported an enhanced sense of personal agency and a more internalized locus of control, and identified treatment as being a turning point in their lives. In comparison, men in the active group were found to be more pessimistic and were more likely to blame external events, or situations, for their problems. One of the most striking findings of the research was that the desisting group had found a place within a social group or network, unlike the still potentially active offenders who all described a life of social isolation and alienation.     

Child sexual abuse material in child-centred institutions: situational crime prevention approaches

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on the potential for child-centred institutions to use situational crime prevention (SCP) strategies to prevent or reduce child sexual abuse material (CSAM) offending as a distinct form of child sexual abuse (CSA). We discuss the failure of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Australia to address the potential for CSAM offending to occur in child-centred institutions. Our premise is that CSAM offending is markedly shaped by the situation in which it occurs, rather than by any pre-existing preparedness to offend sexually against children. In this context, SCP for CSAM offending must be considered as part of overall strategies to combat CSA in institutional settings. However, we acknowledge that effective implementation of SCP in this area is not straightforward. We consider some of the challenges in implementing SCP at an institutional level.     

The Impact of Funding Modalities on the Performance of Indigenous Organisations

Governments’ choice of funding modality can produce powerful incentives for organisations to perform in preferred ways, but it can also divert limited resources, narrow accountability, and undermine capability. Through literature review and interviews, the research explored the international literature on public finance management in developing country contexts, and compared this to case studies of Indigenous organisations. The situation in Australia was found to differ in three ways: (1) performance indicators are imposed, rather than negotiated; (2) few existing public funding modalities reward performance or provide incentives; and (3) funding arrangements do not generally require receiving organisations to be accountable to their constituents. Stability and durability of funding modalities, and clarity in functions and jurisdictional boundaries, were also found to positively influence performance. Further research is required to design new performance frameworks that build around the organisation, rather than the grant, with indicators of governance capability and downward accountability to constituents.     

Toward a Demographic Understanding of Incarceration Disparities: Race,Ethnicity, and Age Structure

Objectives

Non-Hispanic blacks and Hispanics in the United States are more likely to be incarcerated than non-Hispanic whites. The risk of incarceration also varies with age, and there are striking differences in age distributions across racial/ethnic groups. Guided by these trends, the present study examines the extent to which differences in age structure account for incarceration disparities across racial and ethnic groups.

Methods

We apply two techniques commonly employed in the field of demography, age-standardization and decomposition, to data provided by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the 2010 decennial census to assess the contribution of age structure to racial and ethnic disparities in incarceration.

Findings

The non-Hispanic black and Hispanic incarceration rates in 2010 would have been 13–20 % lower if these groups had age structures identical to that of the non-Hispanic white population. Moreover, age structure accounts for 20 % of the Hispanic/white disparity and 8 % of the black/white disparity.

Conclusion

The comparison of crude incarceration rates across racial/ethnic groups may not be ideal because these groups boast strikingly different age structures. Since the risk of imprisonment is tied to age, criminologists should consider adjusting for age structure when comparing rates of incarceration across groups.