Foreword | Indigenous over-representation in the justice system is a challenge facing Australian society. Recently, it has been suggested that increased use of diversionary processes could reduce Indigenous over-representation. Reported in this paper are the findings of a project examining the 1990 offender cohorts’ contact with the Queensland juvenile justice system.
Previous research has explored the use of particular weapons in crime and the characteristics of weapons offences, but the reasons for owning and carrying weapons, and the sources of those weapons have not been examined. Nor have there been many studies examining the possible link between drug use and weapons, in particular firearms (Sheley 1994). Using data collected as part of the DUMA program, this paper examines the extent to which police detainees self-reported:
The Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) has announced important new funding that will support Australian academics to undertake cutting edge crime and justice research.
AIC Director Heather Cook looks forward to seeing the work of these 7 new projects come to fruition under the Criminology Research Grants (CRG) program, all of which have been selected by the Criminology Research Advisory Council.
Sexual abuse of children by other children or adolescents constitutes approximately 40 to 90 percent of sexual offending against children. This paper examines the nature and causes of adolescent intrafamilial sex offending and which treatment approaches are likely to be successful. Using the results of a four-year study in Western Australia, it provides an overview of intrafamilial adolescent sex offenders (IASOs), what is known about them and how they can be conceptualised. Findings show that IASOs have greater developmental trauma and family dysfunction than adult sex offenders.
Foreword | While it has been established that there is an intergenerational transmission of criminal behaviour (ie crime can run through generations in families), the role of gender in the intergenerational transfer of criminality has not been fully explored. The impact of a father’s criminality on the subsequent offending of his sons and grandsons has been established, but the impact of a father's criminality on the offending of his daughter and the impact of a mother's criminal history on the offending of her sons and/or daughters is less clear.
Issue 14 of the BushFIRE arson bulletin focused on a new report from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in the UK (Palmer, Caulfield & Hollin 2005) examining interventions used with arsonists and young firesetters. This issue looks at the types of interventions discussed in the report. Palmer et al. identified two basic approaches used in intervention programs: educational and psychosocial.
Foreword | Public policy initiatives to redress parental child sexual offenders have been hindered by the absence of an offending profile that characterises this core group of intrafamilial offenders. Drawing on data from a sample of 213 offenders, this study augments knowledge about sex offender typologies by identifying ten key descriptive features of parental offenders.
Foreword | Legal threshold quantities for drug trafficking, over which possession of an illicit drug is deemed ‘trafficking’ as opposed to ‘personal use’ are used in most Australian states and territories. Yet, in spite of known risks from adopting such thresholds, most notably of unjustified conviction of users as traffickers, the capacity of Australian legal thresholds to deliver proportional sanctioning has been subject to limited research.
Foreword | The public tends to assume that trafficking in persons is associated with the forced recruitment of women for sexual exploitation by highly organised, criminal gangs. In reality, the modus operandi and individuals involved in trafficking crimes are diverse. Trafficking in persons can and does occur in a range of industries and sectors, and it affects women, men and children. Furthermore, this crime can and has been perpetrated by relatively unsophisticated offenders, including individuals acting alone or with one other person, such as a spouse.
Foreword | This seminal study, which was funded by the Criminology Research Council, is the first reported study to use jurors in real trials to gauge public opinion about sentences and sentencing. Using jurors is a way of investigating the views of members of the public who are as fully informed of the facts of the case and the background of the offender as the judge. Based upon jurors’ responses from 138 trials, the study found that more than half of the jurors surveyed suggested a more lenient sentence than the trial judge imposed.
Foreword | Community justice programs such as the Red Hook Court in New York and the Neighbourhood Justice Centre in the City of Yarra in Melbourne represent an innovative approach to a range of crime and safety issues by engaging the community in identifying problems and generating solutions. However, as with many small-scale or specialist court programs, community courts have found it difficult to provide robust outcome evaluation data to demonstrate their effectiveness.
Research suggests that individuals with a mental illness and/or intellectual disability are over-represented at all stages in the criminal justice system (Butler & Alnutt 2003). As such, it appears that traditional criminal justice responses may not be as effective with this offender group. Alternative criminal justice processes that have attracted the attention of policymakers are specialist mental health courts and diversion programs.