Interdisciplinary Justice Research

Keynote Address: On Giving a Damn

John C. Crank — Fri, 20 May 2016 00:00:00 -0500

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Practicing Justice by Practicing Method: A Brief Rethinking of Feminist Analytics of Obscenity and Indecency Law in Canada

Richard Jochelson, Kirsten Kramar — Fri, 20 May 2016 00:00:00 -0500

This paper briefly explores the feminist responses to several Supreme Court obscenity and indecency rulings in the Canadian context. The authors argue that the feminist academic debates, have, to some extent, been absorbed into the legal debate, and lost some of their foundational impetuses. The authors thus argue for a rethinking of the critical arguments in the context of obscenity law in Canada, and suggest that methodological approaches that are descriptive in tone might provide an interesting counterpoint to the activist debates. The authors suggest that the governmentality methodology might be one such appropriate descriptive vehicle for analyses.

Teaching Intelligence Analysis: Field vs. Academia

Sandy Wilson, Vanessa Chopyk, Angela Whyte — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0500

In response to growth in organized crime, transnational crime, and national security offences, policing strategies have evolved. The field of criminal intelligence has emerged to combat these increasingly sophisticated criminal activities. Criminal intelligence analysis is the foundation of intelligence in policing and the authors have 23 collective years of experience in the field. The authors have developed and delivered numerous courses and lectures in criminal intelligence analysis to analysts, investigators, and managers in law enforcement. They have also created and conducted a "Criminal Intelligence Analysis" course in the Criminal Justice Department at the University of Winnipeg. This paper examines the similarities, differences, and challenges associated with teaching intelligence analysis in law enforcement and in academia. The relationship between the academic and practical world in terms of creating teaching material and best practices is also explored. Lastly, the benefits and challenges of team teaching in both environments are addressed.

Domestic Violence and Immigrant Women's Access to Services in Edmonton, Alberta

Wendy Aujla — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0500

Domestic violence is a growing concern in Canada because immigrant women?s abuse situation in many ways is very different from most other women. Some immigrant women often struggle to cope with the abusive situation in Canada because they lack knowledge of shelters and other resources available to them.

This study recognizes to what extent local Edmonton shelters or organizations are accessible to immigrant women and how individuals in the field understand the strengths and challenges of accessibility.

Four in-depth interviews with a front-line worker, program coordinator, and two executive directors from three different organizations were conducted in 2009. Participants disclose their experiences and impressions as someone who has worked in the field. A textual analysis approach of the three organizations' websites is used to determine what messages are portrayed about the services offered to provide support to immigrant women who may or may not speak English. Four key themes emerge from this study: knowledge of immigrant women?s needs, working together, programs and services, and accessibility. This research study contributes to the development of support programs by identifying how shelters or organizations make themselves accessible.

"Little Red Riding Hood" Crime Films: Criminal Themes and Critical Variations

Pauline Greenhill, Steven Kohm — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0500

Over the past century, crime films have reflected and at times countered conventional and professional wisdom about crime?s causes and appropriate societal reactions to criminal transgression. Since the 1990s, Western crime films reflect not only changing cinematic styles but also hardening political discourses around individual criminal responsibility, and growing public fear of random violence and predatory strangers. The narrative structure and imagery of "Little Red Riding Hood" trenchantly encapsulates these trends. The tale conventionally warns about the timeless dangers of predatory violence and the monsters (animals) lurking to prey on the innocent and the weak. But in a neo-liberal era characterized by retreating and downsized state agencies of social welfare and security, it can also be cast as a lesson in self-reliance and the necessity for private action to forestall crime. The familiar story provides a convenient cultural referent to elucidate social, political and criminological shifts around issues of crime and crime control at the end of the twentieth century. Films we examine include Freeway (Dir. Matthew Bright, 1996), The Wolves of Kromer (Dir. Will Gould, 1998), Promenons-nous dans les bois/Deep in the Woods (Dir. Lionel Delplanque, 2000), Little Erin Merryweather (Dir. David Morwick, 2003), Red Riding Hood (Dir. Giacomo Cimini, 2003), The Woodsman (Dir. Nicole Kassell, 2003), and Hard Candy (Dir. David Slade, 2005). All explore the unfolding of crimes, their investigation, and/or their consequences. They consider institutional and societal reactions to crime and transgression, including criminal trials, incarceration, parole, and vigilantism.

Disproportionate Minority Contact Among Juvenile Offenders: A Plan for Assessment in Cass County, North Dakota

Courtney A. Waid — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0500

The problem of racial disproportionality in the juvenile justice system has led to much discussion among researchers and policy makers alike. This discussion has generated a critical question: What are the sources of this disproportionality? Many researchers and juvenile justice policy commentators note that police interactions with youth are important to understanding Disproportionate Minority Contact (DMC). This research note details the history of the DMC initiative in the United States and outlines a plan for assessment of the issue in Cass County, North Dakota.

Economic Models in the Context of Heroin Substitution Programs

Sabrina Heyde — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0500

Despite widespread disapproval of harm reduction strategies, and heroin substitution programs in particular, evidence from the Vancouver and Swiss trials both indicate that these public health measures are positively correlated with a decrease in the incidence of drug use and high treatment retention rates, as well as a reduction in crime and an increase in employment rates.

This paper examines the predictions of two widely accepted economic theories in the context of these harm reduction programs: the rational choice theory and the behavioural economic theory and explains how neither economic model can account for the empirical findings of the heroin substitution trials on its own. Rather, the observed trends are more thoroughly explained through a consideration of both rational choice theory and behavioural economic theory.

While predictions of the rational choice theory are consistent with empirical findings that peripheral societal costs associated with illicit drug use generally decrease in response to heroin substitution programs, it fails to account for other trends associated with illicit drug use. Behavioural economics thus helps to explain the other empirical data that have emerged from studies of heroin substitution programs. Therefore, a complete economics theory of addiction requires some acknowledgement that both of these theories of economics are valid and operate together. Finally, as heroin substitution takes place among persons already addicted to illicit drugs, one limitation of this analysis is its inability to be directly applied to the issue of legalization.

Decolonizing Research

Jennifer Keith — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0500

Indigenous Knowledge systems, given the space and opportunity can make a valuable contribution to western pedagogy. However, in the realm of academia, western knowledge has been privileged and is the most accepted way of thinking, knowing and doing. To incorporate Indigenous Knowledge, researchers must decolonize their research. Acknowledging and incorporating Indigenous ontology, epistemology and methodology, or decolonizing research, results is research findings that are more reflective of the current Canadian reality.

Rituals of Retribution: From the Traditional to the Contemporary

Paul Redekop — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0500

Durkheim saw public rituals of punishment as acts of emphatic denunciation that provided a focus for the outrage and righteous indignation of the moral community. Foucault saw the public execution as an 'act of terror' inflicted on the body of the criminal, to be replaced by a "gentler" treatment of the soul of the offender as well as the body, made possible by the penal system. It will be argued first of all that public execution was abolished, not for humanitarian reasons, but because these public degradation ceremonies could no longer be counted on to induce the desired combination of indignation and awe, as audiences became more sophisticated and therefore capable of questioning the process, and even of sympathizing with the persons being executed. Secondly, it will be demonstrated that public execution has now been replaced by the contemporary revenge drama, represented by the "Dirty Harry" movies and others that enact contemporary rituals of punishment to arouse these emotions of outrage, indignation and fear, while controlling for the possibility of any alternative perspectives that would undermine these kinds of reactions.

The New Tough on Crime: A Restorative Justice Perspective

Colleen Pawlychka — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0500

Film is one of the primary methods employed by the contemporary restorative justice movement in an attempt to broaden its appeal and acceptance. This paper, which provides an excerpt of a larger thesis study, examines the framing of restorative justice in training, educational and informational film. Utilizing the frame alignment processes of frame amplification, extension and transformation offered by Snow et al. (1986), this paper discusses how the movement extends its primary framework to include a ?tough on crime? approach through film, thus broadening its appeal and enhancing its potential for acceptance and implementation.

The Metaphysical Underpinnings of Capital Punishment: A Preliminary Investigation

Mark A. Davidson — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0500

The combination of conservative ideology, an increasingly repressive political discourse, and a Federal government comprised of politicians who support capital punishment, has created an environment in which the chances of the reinstatement of capital punishment are increasing. Politicians will likely call a referendum on capital punishment following the commission of a brutal act of violence, and the debate will be charged with esoteric notions of evil infecting an otherwise pristine social body. Those of us who oppose the penalty will likely respond with rational arguments about the inefficacy of capital punishment to quell violence, and attempt to meet a discourse of a metaphysical evil with the discourse of scientific criminology. Our position can only be strengthened by understanding the psycho-social aspects of support for the death penalty. Do current means of executing convicts draw upon religious iconography? Is capital punishment a rational legal response to a rights violation, or a spiritual practice that appears to benefit both the killers and the killed? And is there a connection between the death penalty and ancient forms of human sacrifice which sought to satisfy the urge for violence by banishing violence to proscribed arenas, thus maintaining social stability?

As it stands, the Federal government could be seen as nudging us towards the reinstitution of the death penalty. Our Minister of Justice has openly called for the "return of capital punishment" (Boswell, 2009). In 1999, the Reform Party -- which is effectively in power now -- introduced a death penalty bill (Bill C-335). As Public Safety Minister, Stockwell Day refused to seek clemency for a Canadian on death row in the U.S. In response, the Canadian Bar Association resolved that the government is implying "that the DP may be appropriate for some Canadians" (2009). And when Canada recently refused to cosponsor a U.N. Resolution calling for a worldwide moratorium on capital punishment, Amnesty's Canadian Secretary General asserted that "Canada is taking a step backwards," that is, towards re-institution (CBC, 2007).

Those of us who oppose state killing could find ourselves arguing against those who would like to see Sodium Thiopental and Potassium Chloride replace treatment programs in prisons. But reasoned argument alone will not be sufficient to counter an attempt to reinstate the death penalty in Canada, primarily because the death penalty is not only, or even primarily, a rational legal response to a rule violation. On a social level, it is more similar to the ancient practice of human sacrifice, which was a form of ritualistic killing. In this respect, state execution is more of a cathartic sacrament that allows society to mobilise a collective attack on a victim it perceives to be an infectious element in need of purging from society. It accomplishes a result similar to that of the ancient practice, namely, the stabilisation of the social order by reinforcing the transcendental intuitions that connected individuals through a shared cosmology (Girard, 1972, p.287).

Beheading Aboard a Greyhound Bus: Security Politics, Bloodlust Justice, and the Mass Consumption of Criminalized Cannibalism

Heidi Rimke — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0500

The article provides a critical transdisciplinary theoretical framework for analyzing the July 2008 cannibalization case that occurred on a greyhound bus bound for Winnipeg Manitoba. The criminalized image of the monster as a political technology of neoliberalism is examined within the context of two contemporary social forces: psychopolitics or the pathological individualization characteristic of a culture dominated by ?psy? discourses that simultaneously depoliticize the political while capitalizing on the emotional, especially fear, resentment, paranoia, and anger; and, the post-911 fetishization of security. Rather than normalizing securitization and normativizing psychocentrism, the chapter provides a sociopolitical analysis of emotional practices of power productive of neoliberal subjectivities inextricably intertwined with the governance of populations under capitalism. As such, the article offers an understanding of ?spectacular insecurity? by analyzing the discourses and emotional politics intrinsic to maintaining the insecuritized society thus justifying the growth of security regimes. By critically interrogating the spectacle of the screen the essay demonstrates how the social production and consumption of fear and terror are central to dominant and dominating ?law and order? discourses that produce neoliberal insecurities.

Critical Analysis of the Practice of Auricular Acupuncture on Mentally Ill Inmates Viewed through the Conceptual Lens of Governmentality

Janna Young — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0500

Utilizing a Foucauldian analysis of ?governmentality? as an analytical framework, the purpose of this paper is to ?understand the historical conditions of existence upon which contemporary practices depend, particularly those that seem most puzzling and unsettling? (Garland, 2001, pg. 2). The case study used as an example of a contemporary crime control practice is the performance of auricular acupuncture on mentally ill inmates in correctional settings. It is argued here that this practice is indicative of a neo-liberal governmental rationality because of the responsibilization of the participating inmates and the construction of them as active agents of self-change. The approach taken to analyze and problematize this contemporary criminal justice practice employed in this paper parallels the approach used by Foucault; genealogy. By facilitating an understanding of the historical, political, and social forces that participated in the emergence and maintenance of present-day practices, a genealogical account uses crime control history to understand the present. In addition to contextualizing the emergence of the practice of auricular acupuncture in institutional settings, the practice is also problematized for aligning with the broader political ethos of neo-liberal rationalities of governance. Lastly, a critique of the approach and implications for broader conceptions of justice are also included. In sum, it is argued that the governmental rationalities and technologies of governance exemplified in the practice of auricular acupuncture on mentally ill inmate populations represent a paradigm shift within substance of and justification for the governance of criminal justice.

Introduction

Steven A. Kohm, Michael Weinrath — Fri, 20 May 2016 00:00:00 -0500