News

Kim Wade, Melissa Colloff and Sophie Nightingale - CJC members from the Psychology department - attended the 11th biennial meeting of the Society of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition (SARMAC), an organisation which aims to enhance collaboration between basic and applied researchers in the areas of memory and cognition and explore the intersections of the psychological science of memory and 'real-world' domains such as law. The meeting took place 25-27 June 2015 in Victoria, Canada.

Sophie Nightingale, Kim Wade and Derrick Watson, presented a paper on 'Identifying manipulated images'; Melissa Colloff and Kim Wade presented a paper on 'A large-scale experiment on presenting suspects with distinctive facial features in lineups'; Kim Wade and Robert Nash, presented a paper on 'Cost is more important than reliability when deciding how to verify autobiographical memories'.

Prior to the meeting, Sophie and Melissa both won awards for their posters at the Warwick Postgraduate Research Showcase which took place on 10 June 2015. Congratulations to them!

Victor Tadros will be a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School for the Fall Semester 2015-16. Whilst there, he will teach Criminal Law and a reading group on Just War Theory.

For the first time in France, on Wednesday 24 June 2015, the Court of Appeal in Paris held the French State responsible for police action in carrying out identity checks that were held to be discriminatory and ordered it to pay €1,500 in compensation to five individuals.

Jackie Hodgson and Laurène Soubise have written a blog post about 'Written records, police stops and judicial review' in France, comparing the French situation with police checks in England and Wales.

The CJC has been in the news on several occasions this week. Our report on Prisoners' Penfriends work was mentioned on Phys.Org ('Study reveals potential value of prison pen pal scheme to rehabilitation of offenders') on 23 June and by ITV News ('Prison pen pal scheme aids the rehabilitation of convicted offenders') on 24 June. Then on Thursday 25 June, Jackie Hodgson was interviewed on the BBC Coventry & Warwickshire's breakfast show to present the report. You can listen again to Jackie's interview at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02sz0n0 (from 01:08:00). The report was launched in the House of Lords on the same day: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/research/centres/cjc/impact/policy/

The CJC is delighted to have been awarded funding by the ESRC to host an event as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science on Saturday 14 November 2015.

The CJC multi-format event aims to bring together different perspectives on the experience of punishment, in order to raise awareness of, promote social science research on and generate debate on prisoner wellbeing and its consequences to criminal justice policy and practice. The full-day event will encourage an interactive open debate between academics and non-academics through drawing on a range of perspectives on the topic, from that of those responsible for formulating and implementing prison policy, and that of social scientists researching punishment and criminal justice, to that of those with first-hand, lived experiences of punishment within prisons. Interactive sessions will include: screening and discussion of the film ‘Herman’s House’ (a movie about the communication between an architect and a life prisoner in the US); a workshop run by the Empty Cages Collective about the conditions and experience of imprisonment in England and Wales; and an exhibition of prisoners’ creative self-expression (letters, photography, paintings, etc.) followed by discussion.