Criminal Justice in Australia - Public Punitiveness - Criminal Law Essay Writing Assignment Help

Internal Code: 1HIGH

Criminal Justice in Australia

Task: The increasingly punitive policies witnessed across the English-speaking western world over the last 15 years have enjoyed wide popularity and are typically seen as ‘vote winners’. But politics and the reality of public opinion are not as closely linked as is often assumed. Often public attitudes are based on the faulty or incomplete information. Legislation introduced on the basis of such misinformation can never deliver the outcomes in terms of public safety that are promised or expected. Although there are differences in the level of punitiveness of nations around the world, comparative studies of western nations usually reveal the United States as the most punitive (based on measures of convictions, sentence lengths and rates of imprisonment) and Sweden and Switzerland the least punitive (Blumstein, Tonry, & Van Ness, 2005). There is ample evidence that the level of punitiveness of criminal justice practice in English-speaking nations is increasing. Various authors (e.g., Roberts, Stalans, Indermaur, & Hough, 2003; Brown, Brown, Hallsworth, & Morrison, 2005) have documented the increasingly punitive penal policies in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Australia. This ‘new punitiveness’ (Pratt, 2005) and ‘culture of control’ (Garland, 2001) has been attributed to an ‘a range of complex forces ... some structural and global, others local’ (Roberts et al., 2003:75) with a basis in ‘the broad social anxieties besting the middle class in this period’ (Roberts et al., 2003: 75) as well as the influence of an increasingly simplified tabloid media.