A Keele Criminologist, in partnership with Staffordshire County Council, has recently been successful in obtaining £20,000 to fund an evaluation of a road safety intervention. Dr Helen Wells, of the Research Institute for Law, Politics and Justice, along with members of the Road Safety & Sustainable Travel Unit at Staffordshire County Council were awarded the funds as part of the RoSPA/BNFL scholarship competition, designed to fund projects which offered 'to carry out research into safety and accident prevention that will produce defined, practical and influential outcomes to help save lives and prevent injuries.' The evaluation project was one of three funded projects selected from over 30 shortlisted applications and the award of the money was made at a lavish awards dinner in Birmingham last month. The RoSPA scholarship scheme was funded by a bequest of £500,000 from BNFL (British Nuclear Fuels Limited), and is intended to run for the next seven to ten years.
The joint project aims to evaluate the effectiveness of a crucial element of the Council’s Young Driver Programme – a resource to improve relationships between the parent, young driver, and professional driving instructor during the young driver’s learning period.
Young drivers are over-represented in road casualty statistics. Drivers aged between 16 and 25 years old accounted for 26 per cent of all car drivers killed or seriously injured in 2007 whilst constituting only 13% of the UK population. However, increasing driving experience before the driving test has been shown to reduce the risk of an accident. Private practice involving the parent and young driver is a common way of increasing experience and exposure.
The Cohort II study published by the DfT last year revealed that out of 10, 000 new drivers, 59% had embarked on private practice sessions with relatives or friend. The quality of such private advice however is variable with one survey revealing that 31% of 18-29 year olds had picked up ‘bad habits’ from their parents during practice sessions.
Staffordshire County Council’s Road Safety & Sustainable Travel Unit has developed a Coaching Programme aimed at mentoring young people through the learning process. A Resource Pack provided as part of the programme intends to align parental advice with that of the learner’s Approved Driving Instructor (ADI), and to assist parents in managing private practice. The pack focuses on the relationship between the young driver, their parents, and their ADI.
The aim of the Resource Pack is to improve the relationship between the parent, young driver and ADI, to have a positive impact on the young drivers’ driving practices, leading to a reduction in risk-taking behaviour and, consequently, to a reduction in the numbers of young drivers involved in road crashes. The evaluation will take place over the next 6-8 months.
Tuesday, 16 June 2009
Friday, 5 June 2009
Background to the Dano Sonnex case
By Professor Anne Worrall
The former Chief Inspector of Probation, Rod Morgan, said in The Guardian today (5 June 2009) that the killing of two French students had become the ‘Baby P of Probation’. What did he mean? In the past few years, probation officers have been subject to the kind of media attention that was previously reserved for child protection social workers. When known offenders, under the supervision of probation officers, commit what are termed serious further offences, there is an understandable public demand to blame someone (other than the offenders) for not doing their jobs properly. This has been happening to social workers for decades ever since the death of Maria Colwell at the hands of her stepfather in 1973. But until recently probation officers have escaped this scrutiny because, historically, their job has been viewed (inaccurately) as being more about ‘advising, assisting and befriending’ offenders than about controlling them and protecting the public from them. Probation officers have always attempted to balance the ‘care’ and ‘control’ aspects of their work but the emphasis on ‘control’ has increased sharply in the past 10 years and particularly in the past 5 years since the formation in 2004 of the National Offender Management Service, which has combined the Prison Service and the National Probation Service in an attempt to provide ‘end-to-end’ or ‘seamless’ management of offenders through their imprisonment and eventual release on supervision in the community.
When this ‘seamlessness’ unravels so dramatically as it has done in the Dano Sonnex case, it is right that we should ask how this ‘was allowed’ to happen and how these crimes might have been prevented. There have been several reports on the case (see the Ministry of Justice website) and they point to a number of errors of judgement and poor communications. Sonnex went to prison in 2003 for a violent offence and was initially considered to be very disruptive and dangerous. He applied for parole (early release) twice and was refused twice by the Parole Board. He was released at the latest possible legal date and subject to a licence supervised by the Probation Service. But by that time he had calmed down in prison and, on release, was assessed as being of medium risk to the public. If he had been assessed as high risk, he would have received more intensive supervision under ">Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) but that didn’t happen. Nevertheless, his probation officer became sufficiently concerned about his behaviour that she initiated procedures to have him recalled to prison for breaching his licence. Her managers delayed signing this off as they wanted more information and, meanwhile, he appeared in court for a relatively minor non-violent offence. The magistrates had to adjourn the case because it was not ready to proceed but they thought he would be recalled to prison that day anyway, so granted him ‘technical’ bail. But the recall papers weren’t ready and he went free. When the recall papers were eventually completed, the police delayed acting upon them and failed to arrest him until it was too late. As one report points out, if any one of these errors had not happened, the French students would probably still be alive.
But this is not the first time this has happened to the
Probation Service. In 2005, two cases with similar characteristics to the Sonnex case resulted in similar media coverage – the case of Damien Hanson and Elliott White (who killed John Monckton while they were on prison licence supervision) and that of Anthony Rice (who killed Naomi Bryant while he was on prison licence supervision). All these cases raise serious questions about how realistic it is to aspire to the ‘seamless’ management of offenders. They raise questions about communication between various criminal justice agencies, about resources, about training and about the nature of risk assessment. But, more fundamentally, they raise questions about the overloading of our penal system with thousands of relatively minor offenders, resulting in the system being unable to devote sufficient attention to the few highly dangerous offenders who fall through the cracks with tragic consequences. As Rod Morgan says, ‘The big lesson from the Ferez and Bonomo case is that the attention of penal services needs to be reserved for offenders who merit it. The system is overloaded with offenders who don’t.'
The former Chief Inspector of Probation, Rod Morgan, said in The Guardian today (5 June 2009) that the killing of two French students had become the ‘Baby P of Probation’. What did he mean? In the past few years, probation officers have been subject to the kind of media attention that was previously reserved for child protection social workers. When known offenders, under the supervision of probation officers, commit what are termed serious further offences, there is an understandable public demand to blame someone (other than the offenders) for not doing their jobs properly. This has been happening to social workers for decades ever since the death of Maria Colwell at the hands of her stepfather in 1973. But until recently probation officers have escaped this scrutiny because, historically, their job has been viewed (inaccurately) as being more about ‘advising, assisting and befriending’ offenders than about controlling them and protecting the public from them. Probation officers have always attempted to balance the ‘care’ and ‘control’ aspects of their work but the emphasis on ‘control’ has increased sharply in the past 10 years and particularly in the past 5 years since the formation in 2004 of the National Offender Management Service, which has combined the Prison Service and the National Probation Service in an attempt to provide ‘end-to-end’ or ‘seamless’ management of offenders through their imprisonment and eventual release on supervision in the community.
When this ‘seamlessness’ unravels so dramatically as it has done in the Dano Sonnex case, it is right that we should ask how this ‘was allowed’ to happen and how these crimes might have been prevented. There have been several reports on the case (see the Ministry of Justice website) and they point to a number of errors of judgement and poor communications. Sonnex went to prison in 2003 for a violent offence and was initially considered to be very disruptive and dangerous. He applied for parole (early release) twice and was refused twice by the Parole Board. He was released at the latest possible legal date and subject to a licence supervised by the Probation Service. But by that time he had calmed down in prison and, on release, was assessed as being of medium risk to the public. If he had been assessed as high risk, he would have received more intensive supervision under ">Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) but that didn’t happen. Nevertheless, his probation officer became sufficiently concerned about his behaviour that she initiated procedures to have him recalled to prison for breaching his licence. Her managers delayed signing this off as they wanted more information and, meanwhile, he appeared in court for a relatively minor non-violent offence. The magistrates had to adjourn the case because it was not ready to proceed but they thought he would be recalled to prison that day anyway, so granted him ‘technical’ bail. But the recall papers weren’t ready and he went free. When the recall papers were eventually completed, the police delayed acting upon them and failed to arrest him until it was too late. As one report points out, if any one of these errors had not happened, the French students would probably still be alive.
But this is not the first time this has happened to the
Probation Service. In 2005, two cases with similar characteristics to the Sonnex case resulted in similar media coverage – the case of Damien Hanson and Elliott White (who killed John Monckton while they were on prison licence supervision) and that of Anthony Rice (who killed Naomi Bryant while he was on prison licence supervision). All these cases raise serious questions about how realistic it is to aspire to the ‘seamless’ management of offenders. They raise questions about communication between various criminal justice agencies, about resources, about training and about the nature of risk assessment. But, more fundamentally, they raise questions about the overloading of our penal system with thousands of relatively minor offenders, resulting in the system being unable to devote sufficient attention to the few highly dangerous offenders who fall through the cracks with tragic consequences. As Rod Morgan says, ‘The big lesson from the Ferez and Bonomo case is that the attention of penal services needs to be reserved for offenders who merit it. The system is overloaded with offenders who don’t.'
Thursday, 28 May 2009
Criminology students visit Ball State University, Indiana
Keele University's newsletter 'The Week at Keele' recently reported on an exchange visit by Criminology students to a University in the U.S. This was the return leg of the exchange programme, following the visit of 14 students from the U.S. to Keele in March.
The Week at Keele reported "12 very adventurous first year Criminology students spent a week at Ball State University (BSU) in Muncie, Indiana. The students were accompanied by Dr Annette Kratz, Head of the Centre for International Exchange &
Development, who took the opportunity to also visit Keele's other partner university in the area: Bowling Green University (BGSU) in Ohio. This was the return exchange visit to the incoming visit from 14 BSU students in March. BSU and BGSU were Keele's first exchange partners in 1992.
The students spent a packed week attending lectures on aspects of the legal and crime prevention system in the USA interspersed with practical activities involving ride-alongs with the local police; K9 demonstrations; watching a trial from the selection of the jury (which took 2.5 hours) to the judgment; job shadowing of probation officers and community correction officers; a tour of Pendleton Correctional Facility, a high-security prison, finishing with a visit to the local mall.
Professors Michael Brown and Taiping Ho from the BSU faculty accompanied the group throughout and could not have done more for the group and the students wish to thank them for a field trip of a lifetime. "It is something I will never forget" was the statement which sums it up best by one of the students."
You can read about the first leg of the exchange by clicking on the 'April' section of this blog.
Tuesday, 5 May 2009
A Sociology of Swine Flu?
How can we use sociology to understand the threat of swine flu? From a sociological perspective we could say that swine flu illustrates the problem of globalisation. For sociologists globalisation, which describes processes of interconnection between diverse peoples and places across the world, is made possible by high speed communication and transport networks. While these technologies have provided the world’s elites with great freedoms, they have also made their world feel like a far riskier place than it did before, simply because they expose them to not only local uncertainties, but also threats emanating from far off places.
Under these conditions the principle of communication, which may be seen to represent the positive side of globalisation, is transformed into the principle of contagion, which describes a form of communication which is neither positive nor voluntary, but rather suggests a mode of transmission that is threatening and dangerous to those who may become recipients of the transmitted object or organism. In our global age, there are various manifestations of threatening communication, including the transmission of toxic assets, which recently pushed the global economy to the brink, and global terrorism, which describes a form of terrorism rooted in the networks of global space.
However, the classic carrier of the concept of contagion remains the figure of the virus that today refers to both the computer virus, which threatens to cripple IT networks and bring our communicative world to a halt, and the microscopic organism, such as the AIDS, E-Bola, or Influenza virus, that menaces us through the principle of communication / contagion that is absolutely central to our global age. Although it is clear that the problem of swine flu is primarily a global one, three sources lead me to conclude that there are issues related to Mexico that can help us to understand the sociological and cultural significance of this new virus.
These three sources, which include a book on the idea of death in Mexican culture, an architectural study of criminality and immigration in the American-Mexican border region, and a Mexican movie on fear and paranoia in Mexico City, may appear completely unrelated to swine flu beyond the common ground of Mexico, but I think that each of these texts can shed light on the core sociological problematic illuminated by the virus. My second and third examples, Fernando Romero’s book 'Hyperborder' and Rodrigo Pla’s movie 'La Zona', illustrate the problem of boundaries, boundary transgression, fear, and anxiety in Mexico. These two texts are, therefore, not unrelated.
At the moment, the American-Mexican border region is a hot topic in American politics primarily because of the ways in which Mexican drug gangs have begun to spill over the border, exacerbating the problem of illegal immigration, and making the drugs problem in American worse than ever. In the context of this situation, which has seen Mexico City become one of the kidnapping capitals of the world, rich residents of Mexico’s urban leviathan hide behind the walls of fortified housing complexes. 'La Zona' tells the story of what happens when the paranoid residents of one of these gated complexes are confronted with a group of poor criminals who have infiltrated their space and decide to take the law into their own hands.
But what have these examples got to do with swine flu? The answer is that what both of these examples illustrate is the problem of paranoid social relations, the situation where communication is transformed into contagion, which is exemplified by the problem of swine flu. There is, of course, more to swine flu than paranoid social relations because what the microscopic virus attacks is the body in the infected person or organism. Although this may seem like a banal point, it is far from insignificant to the consideration of the sociology of swine flu in a global context, precisely because what processes of globalisation have produced over the last twenty or thirty years is a renewed focus on the biological body that has led to the resurgence of the sociology of the body and theories of bio-politics.
The reasons for this are not hard to understand. In the face of a completely open world, where national boundaries seem far less important, the individual is thrown back on their own container, the biological body, which becomes the interface between self and world. It is exactly this boundary that the virus threatens by infecting the closed body with microscopic foreign bodies that prevent it from functioning properly. Under these conditions it is not surprising that we become paranoid about viral infections. We struggle to maintain our self-identity because viral infection is the other side of processes of globalisation that threaten the sociological basis of our self-identity and swine flu is simply the latest manifestation of this condition.
Enter my first exemplary text: Claudio Lomnitz’s book 'Death and the Idea of Mexico'. Lomnitz tells us that death has always been key to understanding Mexican culture and that this has been the case since the Aztecs who were obsessed with death and sacrifice. From a sociological perspective, this explains why Mexico had to be the epicentre of swine flu, because what is Mexican experience of death about if it is not about the biological demise of the living body that directly parallels the psychological decline of the self under conditions of globalisation represented by the virus, and shows why viruses such as swine flu will continue to leap from animals to humans because what does this process of contagion across species illustrate but the collapse of the category of the human before a techno-medicalised world that reduces people to DNA code that can easily be manipulated in the name of post-humanity and a globalised capitalism that treats people like beasts to be exploited for profit under the sign of an economy of subhumanity?
Under these conditions the principle of communication, which may be seen to represent the positive side of globalisation, is transformed into the principle of contagion, which describes a form of communication which is neither positive nor voluntary, but rather suggests a mode of transmission that is threatening and dangerous to those who may become recipients of the transmitted object or organism. In our global age, there are various manifestations of threatening communication, including the transmission of toxic assets, which recently pushed the global economy to the brink, and global terrorism, which describes a form of terrorism rooted in the networks of global space.
However, the classic carrier of the concept of contagion remains the figure of the virus that today refers to both the computer virus, which threatens to cripple IT networks and bring our communicative world to a halt, and the microscopic organism, such as the AIDS, E-Bola, or Influenza virus, that menaces us through the principle of communication / contagion that is absolutely central to our global age. Although it is clear that the problem of swine flu is primarily a global one, three sources lead me to conclude that there are issues related to Mexico that can help us to understand the sociological and cultural significance of this new virus.
These three sources, which include a book on the idea of death in Mexican culture, an architectural study of criminality and immigration in the American-Mexican border region, and a Mexican movie on fear and paranoia in Mexico City, may appear completely unrelated to swine flu beyond the common ground of Mexico, but I think that each of these texts can shed light on the core sociological problematic illuminated by the virus. My second and third examples, Fernando Romero’s book 'Hyperborder' and Rodrigo Pla’s movie 'La Zona', illustrate the problem of boundaries, boundary transgression, fear, and anxiety in Mexico. These two texts are, therefore, not unrelated.
At the moment, the American-Mexican border region is a hot topic in American politics primarily because of the ways in which Mexican drug gangs have begun to spill over the border, exacerbating the problem of illegal immigration, and making the drugs problem in American worse than ever. In the context of this situation, which has seen Mexico City become one of the kidnapping capitals of the world, rich residents of Mexico’s urban leviathan hide behind the walls of fortified housing complexes. 'La Zona' tells the story of what happens when the paranoid residents of one of these gated complexes are confronted with a group of poor criminals who have infiltrated their space and decide to take the law into their own hands.
But what have these examples got to do with swine flu? The answer is that what both of these examples illustrate is the problem of paranoid social relations, the situation where communication is transformed into contagion, which is exemplified by the problem of swine flu. There is, of course, more to swine flu than paranoid social relations because what the microscopic virus attacks is the body in the infected person or organism. Although this may seem like a banal point, it is far from insignificant to the consideration of the sociology of swine flu in a global context, precisely because what processes of globalisation have produced over the last twenty or thirty years is a renewed focus on the biological body that has led to the resurgence of the sociology of the body and theories of bio-politics.
The reasons for this are not hard to understand. In the face of a completely open world, where national boundaries seem far less important, the individual is thrown back on their own container, the biological body, which becomes the interface between self and world. It is exactly this boundary that the virus threatens by infecting the closed body with microscopic foreign bodies that prevent it from functioning properly. Under these conditions it is not surprising that we become paranoid about viral infections. We struggle to maintain our self-identity because viral infection is the other side of processes of globalisation that threaten the sociological basis of our self-identity and swine flu is simply the latest manifestation of this condition.
Enter my first exemplary text: Claudio Lomnitz’s book 'Death and the Idea of Mexico'. Lomnitz tells us that death has always been key to understanding Mexican culture and that this has been the case since the Aztecs who were obsessed with death and sacrifice. From a sociological perspective, this explains why Mexico had to be the epicentre of swine flu, because what is Mexican experience of death about if it is not about the biological demise of the living body that directly parallels the psychological decline of the self under conditions of globalisation represented by the virus, and shows why viruses such as swine flu will continue to leap from animals to humans because what does this process of contagion across species illustrate but the collapse of the category of the human before a techno-medicalised world that reduces people to DNA code that can easily be manipulated in the name of post-humanity and a globalised capitalism that treats people like beasts to be exploited for profit under the sign of an economy of subhumanity?
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