Crime and Justice

Crime and Justice
Chris Bisset

discretion
Where are the discretion points in the criminal justice system?
Arrest
Charge
Commence Proceedings
Nature of Proceedings
Conviction
Sentencing
Parole Board

Debates
Accountability vs. Efficiency
Public Participation vs expertise
Sanctions
Victim vs Society
Fear

The police
Community Policing
Zero Tolerance
Problem-orientated policing
Over-policing vsunder policing
Corruption
Discretion

ELECTIONS vs appointment
All have same elements:
Look at faults of elections
Role of the public in participating
Role of Victims in participation

Public Prosecutors
Elect them or Appoint them?
Accountability
Performance
Selection

Judges
Elect them?

juries
Arguments Against
Juries are incapable of understanding complex technical information
The rule of law should guide judicial decisions
Juries contain biases and are not truly representative
Juries slow the justice system
Arguments For
Provides legitimacy to decisions
Allows for unbiased assessment of questions of fact
Allows for a check on state power exercised through the legislature
Gives the law a moral code

Sanctions
Aspirations: DRDRP
Purposes: Reduce crime and be fair
Fairness vs. Reducing crime
Short Term protection vs. Long term
Average perspective vs. informed perspective

Why are victim’s important in debates
Double Victimisation
Willingness to report
Vigilantism

Compelling participation in trials
Why might someone chose not to press charges?
Good?
Bad?

Attitudes to criminal justice
• Broadcast and tabloid media provide the major source of information for most members of the public about crime and justice. Almost 80 percent of respondents rate TV, radio and newspapers as fairly or very important sources of information.
The proportion of Australians who agree that stiffer sentences are needed has gradually declined from a peak of 84.8 percent in 1987 to 71.7 percent in 2007.
The majority of Australians have little or no confidence in the prison system to rehabilitate prisoners (87.7%), as a form of punishment (59.2%), in deterring future offending (84.7%) or in teaching prisoners skills (63.8%).
The desire for harsher sentences was significantly positively associated with the self-rated importance of television and radio, for informing views of crime. The relationship between desire for stiffer sentences and beliefs about crime trends over the past two years was also examined using Spearman’s rho correlations. The desire for stiffer sentences was significantly positively associated with beliefs that crime was increasing (rho=.35, p<.001) and perceptions of the number of crimes reported to the police that involved violence (rho=.30, p<.001).

fear
Of zombies

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Crime and Justice

by Monash Association of Debaters

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