Law, Punishment, and Societ y, Penal Policy and Criminal Sentencing
Imprisoned on the Border: Subjects and Objects of the State in Two Norwegian Prisons
In Justice and Security in the 21st Century: Rights, Risks and the Rule of Law
"La volonté de soigner : d’un singulier désir de soin dans les politiques pénales""
Published in in Lefève, C., Worms., F. (dir.), La philosophie du soin, PUF, Paris, 2010
Cet article envisage la manière dont le soin psychiatrique se trouve mêlé de plus en plus profondément aux pratiques... more Cet article envisage la manière dont le soin psychiatrique se trouve mêlé de plus en plus profondément aux pratiques pénales, depuis la prison jusqu’en post-carcéral, transformant ainsi le sens même du "soin" et celui de la "peine" et bousculant les frontières de l'un comme de l'autre. On y montre les diverses fonctions que le soin vient occuper au cœur des politiques pénales : instance de redoublement des mécanismes légaux, visant à intervenir à un niveau où ni la loi, ni les normes disciplinaires n’ont de prises ; instance de repérage et de sanction de ces écarts infra-légaux, en les recodant comme facteurs pronostiques de dangerosité ; instance de suivi indéterminé.
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Investigating the relationship between justice-vengeance motivations and punitive sentencing recommendations
(2011) Co-authored with Dr. Mary Thomson, GCU; Prof. David Cooke, GCU; Dr. Kathy Charles, Napier University
Purpose: The present research investigated the relationship between underlying justice and vengeance motivations and... more
Purpose: The present research investigated the relationship between underlying justice and vengeance motivations and sentencing recommendations made by expert clinicians, semi-experts and lay-people. It was hypothesised that the semi-experts would recommend significantly different sentence lengths from those recommended by the expert and lay-person groups, in line with previous research findings. It was also hypothesised that justice and vengeance motivations would be related to punitive sentencing recommendations, and that these would not be the same across the three levels of expertise.
Method: An independent groups design was utilised in the main analysis, with participants belonging to three distinct levels of clinical experience (experts, semi-experts, and lay-people). A questionnaire was administered, with participants being measured on levels of justice and vengeance motivations, and asked to recommend appropriate sentence lengths based on nine separate crime-scenarios. These co-variables were correlated and the correlation coefficients were compared across the three levels of expertise.
Results: The former hypothesis was not upheld. Findings do, however, support the latter hypothesis, with the key finding indicating that for both justice and vengeance motivations in punitive judgement, it is the lay-participants who appear distinct from the experts and semi-experts.
Conclusions: The current findings emphasise that while expert and lay-person judgements may often appear to be the same, different processes and motivations underlying clinical judgements are occurring at the different stages of expertise. With the differences in the relationships between justice and vengeance motivations and judgements found in the current research, it is argued that expert and lay judgements that appear to be the same are, in fact, distinguishable and are related to quite different underlying motivations and decision making processes.