Says there’s none

All RIGHT! Whoo! Are there any LEGAL THEORISTS in tonight???
OK then. (Hi Rob!)
Here are some thoughts on regulation and the law. This is a slightly abbreviated version of a paper I gave at a seminar earlier this year, which I’m planning to write up at greater length for publication.
I’d like to examine the conditions which [...]

In the hot sun

Obsolete has an excellent, if inevitably depressing, analysis of the latest from Louise Casey. I was particularly struck by one line in particular: apparently Casey thinks it’s important
to get the public more engaged in tackling crime and to stop the erosion of community spirit.
Oh-oh – Broken Windows alert. Criminologists have spent years of their lives [...]

All those numbers

I like a good fallacy; I managed to get the Base Rate Fallacy, the Hawthorne Effect and Goodhart’s Law into one lecture I gave recently. So I was intrigued to run across this passage in Jock Young’s 2004 essay “Voodoo Criminology and the numbers game” (you can find a draft in pdf form here):
Legions of [...]

Better call up the cops

My academic background is in sociology, sort of – you could also call it politics, or contemporary history, or European studies. One thing it wasn’t is criminology. So I have a lot of sympathy with the academics cited here, lamenting the decline of sociology at the expense of criminology. (I met one of them – [...]

Then don’t think twice

I haven’t got much of a comments policy. Any spam that makes it through the filters will be deleted, that’s a given. Apart from that, there are a few types of comment that I don’t like – people commenting for the sake of plugging their own blogs (human spam); anonymous comments; ad hominem attacks; anonymous [...]

The sound of the keys as they clink

Back here, I wrote:
my children are far closer to being ‘colour-blind’ than I’ll ever be. The other day my son got picked on in the swimming pool; we asked him to describe the kids who did it, and when we asked him whether they had brown skin he said “yes, but why do you ask?” [...]

Snap into position

Here are three scenarios; see if you can spot the differences between them.
More people were found guilty of car theft in the first nine months of 2005 than in the whole of 2004.
One of four things has happened. The police and the courts are functioning as before but there’s more car theft going on; the [...]

Never argue with a rozzer

In all the recent blogging around the ‘Respect Agenda’ (Justin and TP have been particularly good), one point that hasn’t been made is that all this is nothing new. Or rather, it’s nothing new to New Labour. This government has passed huge amounts of law-and-order legislation, much of which has been devoted to taking responsibilities [...]

Doing the best things

So, Blair’s responded to the May 5th result by announcing his intention to move yet further Right, and backed it up with new Cabinet appointments. Which is disappointing in itself, as well as representing two fingers to all those of us who chose left-wing alternatives to Labour. Given the scale of the left-alternative diaspora and [...]

You’re lucky I’m there

This excellent post from Jarndyce brought Norman Brennan to my attention. Brennan runs the Victims of Crime Trust, who operate on the basis that our criminal justice system is currently biased against the victims of crime. Jarndyce shows just what offensive and dangerous nonsense this is. What I hadn’t taken in, though, is that Brennan [...]