News

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.

This week, Ana Aliverti is organising a series of blog posts on Migration, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice on the blog Border Criminologies. This themed week’s blogs will explore different aspects of the intersections between migration, criminal law, and criminal justice.

As social institutions are being shaped by unprecedented levels of human movement and the attendant set of controls, criminal justice systems in many developed countries are required to deal with a fast-changing population. This drastic demographic change unsettles the basic premises under which the criminal law and the criminal justice system functions. Perhaps the most important assumption is that the mandates of the criminal law chiefly address the members of a political community (their citizens) who at least in principle have a say in law-making and a duty to abide by it. State punishment is equally underpinned by such assumption. Yet, on a daily basis, the criminal courts are increasingly called to pass judgments on individuals who are excluded from political participation and are deemed to be territorially pushed out through the operation of stringent deportation regimes.

Together, the contributions for this themed week reflect on some of the most troubling aspects of the exclusionary edge of citizenship and its relevance to understanding the contemporary contours of punitive power.

You can find the first installment of the week, a post by Ana, here: http://bordercriminologies.law.ox.ac.uk/crime-justice-and-migration/

Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF), Professors Jackie Hodgson and Roger Leng are conducting a research study “Securing a fair trial through excluding evidence? A comparative perspective” . The project runs from 2015-2017 and is a collaboration between the Criminal Justice Centre at Warwick and scholars from Switzerland, Germany, China, Taiwan and Singapore.

More details on the project is available at: CJC Comparative Research