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Introduction

The nature of hacking

Since the publication of The age of criminal responsibility (Urbas 2000), some jurisdictions have revised their legislation, confirming a trend over the last 20 years to uniformity in age limits for criminal responsibility. In the Australian Capital Territory, the Criminal Code 2002 Div 2.3.1 now deals with the criminal responsibility of children. From 1 July 2005 in Victoria, the age jurisdiction of the criminal division of the Children's Court has increased from 17 to 18 years.

Has violence in the workplace increased? Some sectors of the community believe that it has. Certainly the headlines on this page illustrate the justifiable anxieties of some of our public contact workers. Many public transport workers have been verbally or physically abused by the travelling public. For example, earlier this year a Canberra bus driver suffered a heart attack and died following an altercation with a man who refused to pay a bus fare. Banking staff have to cope with irate, aggressive customers as well as the prospect of facing a professional, violent criminal.

The word arson came into English law from Middle French about the same time as the Great Fire of London in 1688. It had two elements; the first was malicious damage to property and the second was a threat to the state by burning important symbols of the established order. For example, the burning of haystacks was as a symbol of rural unrest and was specifically mentioned in the legislation. It still remains in most current Australian legislation.

The idea of deterrence is one of the oldest and most basic concepts of crime prevention. Put simply, the idea of deterrence is that if you do something wrong and are caught, then the subsequent punishment will deter you from doing that wrong again. The fear of future punishment therefore discourages or deters transgressing of social norms expressed through the law.

Foreword | The benefits associated with focusing strategies and interventions on family violence offenders early in their offending careers are well established. Yet accurately identifying first-time family violence perpetrators is difficult because of the high under-reporting of family violence. This study involved the analysis of police narratives completed for first-time family violence perpetrators, as identified through police offence records to determine their accuracy in identifying first-time family violence offenders.

Foreword | It is common practice to assess the risk of family violence recidivism and the efficacy of perpetrator treatment outcomes by taking into account the offending histories of offenders. However, the relationship between the frequency of family violence offending and other types of offending has not been fully explored. This study provides a snapshot of the six year offending histories of a cohort of Tasmanian family violence perpetrators. What emerges is a clear association between the frequency of family violence incidents and a history of other offending.

Foreword | Arson is a crime that is often committed by young people. An important strategy for preventing deliberate firesetting is intervention with young people who show an unhealthy interest in fire. Fire services in all Australian jurisdictions conduct juvenile arson intervention programs for such young people. These programs are usually run by specially trained firefighters, are carried out in the home of the young person with the involvement of the parents, and focus on the young person's behaviour and their family environment.

Communities That Care (CTC) is a socio-developmental model of community crime prevention planning. It draws on the risk and protective factor theory that arose from studies showing associations between certain conditions in a child's life and the likelihood of them later engaging in problem behaviour.

Proceedings of a conference held 30 November - 2 December 1992, Wellington, New Zealand

Contents

• Contributors
• Glossary of Maori terms
• Preface

Corrections

• Opening address
  The Honourable Douglas Graham
• Privatising prisons: principle and practice
  Richard W. Harding
• Some liberal and radical responses to privatising the penal system in Britain
  Mick Ryan
• History of contract management in Queensland corrections
  Stan Macionis and Ross Millican
• The challenge of change

People smuggling and trafficking in persons have had a considerable public profile in the past decade. Both involve the movement of people and the difference between them is not always well understood by the general public. This brief examines the difference between people smuggling and trafficking in persons by looking at the variations in principle and practice.

Foreword | A feature of criminal justice policy in the latter half of the twentieth century was a rise in the victims' rights movement. Various measures were introduced to improve the treatment of victims in the criminal justice system. One way in which victims became involved in correctional procedures was by making submissions to parole boards concerning release decisions affecting those who perpetrated offences against them.

Fraud against the Commonwealth is defined as ‘dishonestly obtaining a benefit or causing a loss, by deception or other means’. This definition is set out in the current Commonwealth Resource Management Guide (no. 201) Preventing, detecting and dealing with fraud, issued by the Australian Government Minister for Justice (2014).

Gangs exist within and outside schools, though not all delinquent behaviour is gang activity and not all gang activity involves crime or deviance. An earlier Trends and Issues paper (no. 237) stated that an important part of gang research is to explore ways of stopping criminal gangs from forming and/or growing. A working definition of a criminal gang for the present discussion is one in which a group sees itself as a "gang", and is perceived by others around it as a "gang", primarily because of its illegal activities.