Andrew Ashworth continues to pursue his research interests in sentencing, criminal law, the pre-trial process, and related aspects of European human rights law. In the last 2 years he has completed new editions of his books on 'Principles of Criminal Law' (6th ed., 2009), 'Sentencing and Criminal Justice' (5th ed., 2010) and, with Mike Redmayne, The Criminal Process (4th ed., 2010), and he is currently working on the third edition of 'Human Rights and Criminal Justice', jointly with Ben Emmerson, Alison Macdonald and others.

His main research interest is the three-year study of Preventive Justice generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This project aims to re-assess the foundations for the range of coercive measures that states now take in the name of crime prevention and public protection. The project is directed by Professor Andrew Ashworth and Professor Lucia Zedner, Corpus Christi College. They are joined by a Post-Doctoral Research Officer, Dr Patrick Tomlin who is based at the Centre for Criminology and holds a non-stipendiary Junior Research Fellowship at Corpus Christi College for the three years of the project.

The main objective of the project is to develop an account of the principles and values that should guide and limit the state’s use of preventive techniques that involve coercion. Although the rationales for and justifications of state punishment have been explored extensively, the scope, limits and principles of preventive justice have attracted little doctrinal or conceptual analysis, save in respect of measures to prevent terrorism. This project will re-assess the foundations for the range of coercive measures that states now take in the name of prevention and public protection—for example, the extension of criminal liability to merely preparatory acts, the extensions of liability for offences associated with terrorism, and the development of civil-criminal hybrid orders such as ASBOs, Control Orders, Serious Crime Prevention Orders, etc. The project will accomplish this by means of a cross-disciplinary approach that builds on the expertise of the two principal investigators in history, criminology, criminal law and legal theory, that draws in the perspectives of the post-doctoral research officer and his expertise in political philosophy, and that includes a cross-jurisdictional approach developed with the collaboration of scholars from other legal cultures.

There are good reasons to justify the state in authorizing the use of coercion to protect the public from harm. But recent years have witnessed a proliferation of preventive measures that alter the parameters of criminal liability and blur the historic division between the criminal and civil law, allowing the civil law to be used for criminal law purposes but without the protections normally provided to defendants. Not only is the ambit of preparatory crimes being extended, but new legal forms are being developed in the name of prevention. Thus measures such as the ASBO and similar orders have been structured as a new species of hybrid or two-step measure, imposed in civil proceedings but backed by severe criminal sanctions for breach. Insofar as civil preventive measures are burdensome in ways analogous to punishment, or render those subject to them liable to punishment on breach, then adequate justification and principled limits to their deployment need to be constructed. Moreover, higher up the scale are incapacitative measures such as Control Orders and the sentence of Imprisonment for Public Protection, which are based on judgments of dangerousness. We will examine whether these and other measures are justified, whether they blur the proper boundaries between criminal and civil constraints, or whether they signal a larger change in the architecture of security.

Four streams of investigation are envisaged. First we will develop a taxonomy of coercive preventive measures in and on the margins of the criminal process. Secondly, we will explore the explanatory frameworks that underpin their development, particularly writings on political theory. Thirdly, we will examine the doctrinal legal issues raised by the drive to prevent harms before they occur, examining the foundations for pre-inchoate offences, endangerment offences, and so forth. Fourthly, we aim to develop a normative framework for preventive justice.

Prevention is too readily represented in the literature as a serendipitous bi-product of the criminal law, as an uninteresting supplement to punishment, or as a conceptual anomaly in the punitive toolbox. The project will address a deficiency in legal and political thought about a core, but previously little explored, facet of the exercise of state power. Of particular interest is the central paradox that although preventive measures are justified in the name of security they tend to undermine individual liberty or to call into question a much older conception of security - the security of the individual from the state. Through engagement with these theoretical issues, our objective is to develop a set of principles and values that will underpin a normative framework for all forms of coercive preventive measure, and thereby to develop scholarship in a new direction – preventive justice.

Mary Bosworth is interested in the ways in which prisons and detention centres uphold notions of race, gender and citizenship, and how those who are confined negotiate their daily lives behind bars.  She is currently conducting an ethnographic study of life in immigration detention.  Her project, which involves spending some months in a range of immigration removal centres in the UK and Greece interviewing staff and detainees, seeks to understand the particular nature of immigration detention as well as its purpose and effects.   

She is co-organising a conference on border control with Prof. Katja Aas from the University of Oslo in April, 2012.  Details of that even can be found at:  http://www.law.ox.ac.uk/conferences/borders/index.php

Ben's research focuses primarily on issues of trust and legitimacy as these apply to the police and the wider criminal justice system. International and cross-national comparisons of these issues are a growing research interest, and his work has a particular emphasis on procedural justice theory and the intersection of social-psychological and sociological explanatory paradigms. He has collaborated with the London Metropolitan Police and the National Policing Improvement Agency on several research projects concerned with improving police understanding of public opinions and priorities.

Professor Hoyle is currently conducting research on 'Decisions and Discretion at the Criminal Cases Review Commission'. She is carrying out an in-depth study of the exercise of discretion by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) and, at a later stage, by the Court of Appeal. This research will investigate how the CCRC exercises its discretionary powers in deciding whether to refer possible miscarriages of justice for re-hearing by the Court of Appeal Criminal Division (CA), and how the CA structures its own decision making in response to those referrals.

This study starts from the premise that the ‘Real Possibility Test’ (RPT) is neither rigid nor uncomplicated, but has to be determined on a case-by-case basis, drawing in various cultural and structural variables. It will examine its application through the whole investigation and decision making process from triage to referral.

Liora Lazarus is currently working on a number of interlinked projects, all of which are informed by a socio-legal and comparative perspective on law and rights.

The right to security and the juridification of security

Liora is developing her existing work on mapping the right to security, with a view to furthering our understanding of the legal right to security across jurisdictions and internationally. Coming from a skeptical position on the individual right to security, she argues for a narrow and workable legal conception which does not risk incorporating all other valuable human goods. This ongoing project therefore seeks to explore the normative, socio-political and legal foundations, as well as implications, of the growing political assertions of the ‘right to security’, and importantly of the establishment of a legal right to security. It comparatively analyses the development of the right to security by courts around the world in both domestic and international settings, and traces this development alongside the growing political rhetoric driving the assertion of the right to security. Moreover the research seeks to unearth the normative implications of grounding human rights in an overarching claim to a right to security, and the social implications for collective security of creating a legally enforceable and actionable individual claim to security. Finally, the project explores the effect of placing the notion of security in a juridical setting.

Civic Identity and Human Rights

This research explores the relationship between constitutional rights and civic identity in a number of countries. It seeks to place rights and liberties in a deep social setting, by exploring the relationship between the rights and liberties articulated, and the civic identities, or self-understanding of such an identity, of those to whom rights and liberties apply. The project will first seek to propose a theoretical framework in which to understand the notion of civic identity. It will then seek to argue that rights and liberties are constituted by, and constitutive of, the civic identities of people in particular places at particular times. In essence the project will ask whether rights are merely claims which we understand to be transcendent and outside of our respective identities and subjectivities, or whether, in fact they express something particular about us.

Rights and Responsibilities

Liora is embarking on a second report for the Ministry of Justice, with Benjamin Goold, on the concept of responsibilities in constitutional law. This report will develop an analytical framework in which to consider the formulation of constitutional responsibilities and how rights and responsibilities might relate under a British Bill of Rights. The report will draw on existing theoretical analyses of rights and responsibilities. It will also elaborate on these analyses by selective examples from the jurisprudence of jurisdictions where constitutional responsibilities exist.

The Right to Good Governance

Liora is also beginning to explore arguments for a human right to good governance, negatively understood as the right against corruption. This project, very much in its incipient stages, is inspired both by political concerns about corruption in her home country, South Africa, but is also linked to her reflections while working within the University on governance reform.

Ian Loader is currently working on the following projects:

1. The consumption of security

I am currently writing a book (with Benjamin Goold and Angelica Thumala) drawing on research we recently conducted on security consumption funded by The Leverhulme Trust. The book has the working title The Consumption of Security: Democracy’s Dirty Secret (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)

The book’s concern is to treat the consumption of security as consumption and to investigate and analyse it sociologically in these terms. It is not a study of the security industry per se but rather an account of the hopes and fantasies, as well as the doubts, fears and repulsions, which gather around the trade in that industry’s products. It is not primarily concerned with whether or not guards, alarms, CCTV, access control systems, tracking devices and the like work to reduce crime but is instead looking to understand what these goods mean. What placedo security goods occupy in the popular imagination? What is their moral and social significance in the mentalities and sensibilities of those who buy and sell them, or those who are implicated in their exchange?

We conducted a sociological enquiry into the consumption of security commodities. We spent two years between 2007 and 2009 talking to some of those who produce and sell such commodities, to those who consume them or have considered doing so, and to those who act as intermediaries in markets for security things. We also engaged in a close reading of the security industry’s “trade press,” as well as the images and representations that surround the production and marketing of security products.

Our analysis of this material addresses the social narratives, myths and codes that are attached to the idea of selling security, as well as the trajectories and meanings of the goods that are traded when ‘security’ is bought and sold. Our research was deliberately situated in a specific place—England—and is to some extent about the ways in which security exchange is entangled with the moral conflicts and self-understandings of English society and culture. But this analysis of local meaning is also one that invites—even demands—comparative enquiry, and we fold into our account what is known about the practice and meaning of security consumption in other settings.

Our research focused on particular categories and types of security commodity, drawn from the multitude of products that are sold by what has become a diverse and money-making industry. The analysis is concerned with why CCTV has in England become a banal technology that is now taken for granted. What, moreover, are the limits of that banality? Why have gated communities largely failed in England, and what does this tells us about the cultural embeddedness of security objects? We examine the emergence, marketing and reception of GPS tracking devices, as well as how these might reconfigure relations between employers and workers, between parents and their children, or between patients and carers. We ask what it means for a home to be secure, and using the example of the Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV), we ask if non-security goods can be colonized by security imagery and associations.

Our detailed, empirical investigation into the social trajectories, meanings and uses of specific security objects is conducted with a larger ambition in mind. We construct a cultural sociology of the things that individuals and organizations consume in a bid to secure their person, property or interests, with a view to understanding the ordering work—the part they play in governing conduct, shaping subjectivities and reproducing social relations and inequalities—that is done by those things. We believe that a patient, situated focus on the ordinary as well as the extraordinary, the durable as well as the novel, and the banal as well as the contested aspects of the security trade sheds new light on some intriguing and profound questions about the pursuit of security, and on what that pursuit can tell us about the condition of contemporary liberal democracies.

We argue that the selling of security in England is characterised by conflict and moral ambiguity, and is a practice constantly in search of justification. Some champion the trade in security with unbridled enthusiasm, or greet it with passive acceptance, or embrace the protective fantasies on offer. Others are beset by doubt and ambivalence about whether something as constitutive of political community as security can and should be exchanged and about the proper limits of that exchange. It is an activity met with dim awareness and silence among some people. At the same time, it gives others occasion to ponder the relations that obtain between security objects and other things that they morally or aesthetically value, and to reflect on what the buying and selling of security signals about the condition and likely futures of one’s society.

All this seems to indicate that a certain uneasiness, or discomfort, attends the consumption of security in a society where ‘the provision of collective security’ remains central to the social imaginary. It hints that security selling, or aspects of it, may be a tainted trade. Yet this ambivalence typically fails to puncture the quiet and banal ubiquity that surrounds so many of the markets in security actors and things. We were struck not only by the pervasive centrality of security commodities to the regulation of social life but by the resounding lack of noise—the relative neglect, inattention and absence of public discourse—that accompanies the cultural and ordering work of commodified security. Why is it that many of the things that govern conduct and order the social world seem to escape public notice and political contestation? Have we become bewitched by the uses and control of state violence in ways that have obscured other processes of quiet ordering? Is private security liberal democracy’s ‘dirty little secret’?

2.  Crime, punishment and democratic politics

I am also continuing to work with Professor Richard Sparks (University of Edinburgh) on questions pertaining to the relation between crime, crime control and politics. These themes have interested us for several years and our work on them has most recently come together in a book called Public Criminology? (Routledge, 2010).  

In that book, we argued that questions of crime, order and justice are – and should be – settled though political contest and debate, in which knowledge is but one stream of influence and its producers but one set of actors.  We sought to stimulate reflection and debate about how criminologists might best contribute to public and political debate about crime and justice and argued that criminology’s civic role can most coherently be interpreted as one of contributing to a better politics of crime and its regulation. Our aim, in so doing, was to focus criminological attention and engagement on certain key questions: once we have acknowledged crime and punishment to be properly political issues what special contribution can criminologicalknowledge make to shaping responses to them?  What in a democracy is the public value of criminology?  What is the collective good that criminological enquiry seeks to promote?  What modes of intervention – and what institutional arrangements – can best realize that good?  

The objective of our future work on these questions is to think through how a better politics of crime ad its regulation can – in R. M. Unger’s phrase - be ‘made and imagined’ in the early years of the twentieth century.  This project requires a criminology that engages in earnest with the scale of material, technological, cultural and ideational change that has occurred over recent decades.  It also demands a more open orientation to the future than is suggested by the recovery of social democratic traditions alone, as well as a keener engagement by criminologists with the resources of contemporary political theory and analysis.  The substantive aim of moderating inequalities is one major task for such a programme but far from the only one.  We also confront testing questions about the forms of contemporary politics – about the spaces for deliberation and participation that we might hope to develop; about the supra-national and inter-cultural character of our most urgent challenges and so on.  In addressing these questions, we aim to construct a less defensive, more hopeful politics of crime and punishment than we have managed to construct hitherto.

Over the next few years, this project will give rise to several papers leading towards the writing of a book with the working title Crime, Punishment and Democratic Politics.

Preventive Justice Project

This is a three-year study of Preventive Justice generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This project will re-assess the foundations for the range of coercive measures that states now take in the name of crime prevention and public protection. The project is directed by two members of the Centre: Professor Andrew Ashworth, All Souls College, and Professor Lucia Zedner, Corpus Christi College. They are joined by a Post-Doctoral Research Officer, Dr Patrick Tomlin who will be based at the Centre and hold a non-stipendiary Junior Research Fellowship at Corpus Christi College for the three years of the project.

The main objective of the project is to develop an account of the principles and values that should guide and limit the state’s use of preventive techniques that involve coercion. Although the rationales for and justifications of state punishment have been explored extensively, the scope, limits and principles of preventive justice have attracted little doctrinal or conceptual analysis, save in respect of measures to prevent terrorism. This project will re-assess the foundations for the range of coercive measures that states now take in the name of prevention and public protection—for example, the extension of criminal liability to merely preparatory acts, the extensions of liability for offences associated with terrorism, and the development of civil-criminal hybrid orders such as ASBOs, Control Orders, Serious Crime Prevention Orders, etc. The project will accomplish this by means of a cross-disciplinary approach that builds on the expertise of the two principal investigators in history, criminology, criminal law and legal theory, that draws in the perspectives of the post-doctoral research officer and his expertise in political philosophy, and that includes a cross-jurisdictional approach developed with the collaboration of scholars from other legal cultures.

There are good reasons to justify the state in authorizing the use of coercion to protect the public from harm. But recent years have witnessed a proliferation of preventive measures that alter the parameters of criminal liability and blur the historic division between the criminal and civil law, allowing the civil law to be used for criminal law purposes but without the protections normally provided to defendants. Not only is the ambit of preparatory crimes being extended, but new legal forms are being developed in the name of prevention. Thus measures such as the ASBO and similar orders have been structured as a new species of hybrid or two-step measure, imposed in civil proceedings but backed by severe criminal sanctions for breach. Insofar as civil preventive measures are burdensome in ways analogous to punishment, or render those subject to them liable to punishment on breach, then adequate justification and principled limits to their deployment need to be constructed. Moreover, higher up the scale are incapacitative measures such as Control Orders and the sentence of Imprisonment for Public Protection, which are based on judgments of dangerousness. We will examine whether these and other measures are justified, whether they blur the proper boundaries between criminal and civil constraints, or whether they signal a larger change in the architecture of security.

Four streams of investigation are envisaged. First we will develop a taxonomy of coercive preventive measures in and on the margins of the criminal process. Secondly, we will explore the explanatory frameworks that underpin their development, particularly writings on political theory. Thirdly, we will examine the doctrinal legal issues raised by the drive to prevent harms before they occur, examining the foundations for pre-inchoate offences, endangerment offences, and so forth. Fourthly, we aim to develop a normative framework for preventive justice.

Prevention is too readily represented in the literature as a serendipitous bi-product of the criminal law, as an uninteresting supplement to punishment, or as a conceptual anomaly in the punitive toolbox. The project will address a deficiency in legal and political thought about a core, but previously little explored, facet of the exercise of state power. Of particular interest is the central paradox that although preventive measures are justified in the name of security they tend to undermine individual liberty or to call into question a much older conception of security - the security of the individual from the state. Through engagement with these theoretical issues, our objective is to develop a set of principles and values that will underpin a normative framework for all forms of coercive preventive measure, and thereby to develop scholarship in a new direction – preventive justice.