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Meet ... Chris
Leeson |
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 Fellowship Programme Manager, The Griffins Society.
The response to the issue of crime
and how offenders are treated is I believe the hallmark of a truly
civil society; one in which the levels of punishment and control are
limited to that which is absolutely necessary and not arbitrarily or
randomly applied. The quality of penal policy in the UK
has been a preoccupation of campaigners and politicians alike over
centuries and the tensions created between political and media
influence and professional and public demands, have never been more
complex.
I took on managing the Griffins
Society a little over seven months ago, coming to the organization
at one of the most challenging times for charitable and voluntary
groups working in the UK, but perhaps particularly for those in
criminal justice. The Griffins is no exception. The fact
that we deal in research rather than providing front-line services
poses particular difficulties for accessing support when funding
sources are so hard pressed. There are major challenges
ahead.
My own route to the Griffins role is
perhaps a rather unusual one. As a teenager I had been attending a
summer school course on industrial archaeology in North Wales.
A highlight of the week was a presentation by a producer from the
BBC’s science series, Horizon and I found myself sitting in the dark
captivated by the first underwater film from the rediscovered wreck
of the Mary Rose. The unedited footage was very grainy
and difficult to make out, but it captured my imagination and
confirmed for me what I wanted to do. Not to be a marine
archaeologist, but a film-maker of science documentaries. Some
years later and with a degree in Applied Biology under my belt, I
embarked on a 20 year career as a script writer and director of
documentaries and corporate TV programmes. A chance encounter
in the early 1990s led to the making of two programmes for the Home
Office about the probation service and there began my introduction
to the world of criminal justice.
Since those early years it is the
communication of ideas that has been at the heart of what I do and
that holds the most importance and excitement for me.
Probation was certainly a challenge for anyone interested in the
problems of communicating complex ideas! From the autumn
of 2001, a shift in career to become the communications manager for
the newly established national employers’ organizations, the
Probation Boards’ Association (PBA) meant I entered full-time into
the world of probation politics.
One of the first things I became
aware of was the tendency for politicians of all political colours
to vie with each other to talk tough on crime, particularly around
election time. Combined with the lack of any cross-party consensus
on crime, an adversarial-style of politics and a four-year political
cycle, the chances for formulating long-term solutions to crime felt
slim. Something that I believe is still true today. One of the
major casualties of ‘talking tough’ is the reduction of a very
complex issue to a set of simplistic media sound-bites. Not
surprisingly this is something that causes havoc for those wanting
an informed and intelligent debate about exactly how we deal with
these issues.
A major preoccupation for me at the
PBA was to try and broaden the debate about criminal justice beyond
the confines of those immediately involved in it. Through the
vehicle of an annual lecture economist Will Hutton, global historian
Felipe Fernandez Armesto, Lord Puttnam and Sir Digby Jones, the then
Director General of the CBI were invited to turn their gaze away
from their traditional specialism’s and engage with criminal justice
with quite fascinating results.
One of the biggest challenges – both
then and now - was the issue of public knowledge about criminal
justice. Several large-scale national polls from the 1990s had
shown that public knowledge was extremely poor. One of the
most interesting projects I was involved in while at the PBA was
called ‘Local Crime: Community Sentence’. LCCS was a
partnership between the PBA and the Magistrates’ Association aimed
at raising the level of public understanding about community
sentences and the role of probation and sentencers. Nationally-based, the project involved sentencers and probation
staff giving case-study-based, interactive presentations to
community groups. It was piloted in 2003 and by 2006, 16
probation areas had joined the project and over 4,000 members of the
public had taken part. With evaluation built into the process
the results showed categorically that the public were far less
punitive then the press and politicians suggested and perhaps
unsurprisingly, the key to a more informed debate was knowledge;
the greater the understanding, the less punitive the response.
The cry from policy makers and
politicians is, ‘where’s the evidence?’ How do we know, ‘what
works?’ That is a question that working with Griffins is an
opportunity to engage with. To encourage criminal justice
professionals to engage in front-line research to help move towards
that vision of a more equitable society that I’m convinced everybody
wants, even if they don’t necessarily agree on how we get there.
The coming year will be challenging,
but it will also be a time to take stock of how far Griffins has
come - this academic year the society will celebrate its tenth
anniversary as a research-based organization.
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The Centre For Critical And Major Incident Psychology |
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The Value
of Simulation Based Training In Reducing Decision Avoidance
Laurence Alison, Sara Waring & Michael Humann Centre For Critical
And Major Incident Research
The occurrence of events such as critical incidents, terrorist
attacks and environmental disasters may be few and far between in
most countries. However, the threat they pose to public safety and
national security can be devastating. In 2010 alone, thousands of
people were killed or injured in incidents such as the Haiti
earthquake, the Pakistan floods, the Chinese earthquake, or bombings
in Baghdad and Lahore, to name but a few. Additionally, whilst such
incidents are rare, the threat of terrorism appears to be growing,
creating an increased demand for developing expertise in crisis
management. Building resilience in national security and public
safety is ever more reliant on developing experts in crisis
management who can act quickly in making decisions and taking
action. Whilst academic research indicates that it takes ten years
of experience to develop expertise in any field (Elliot, 2005), the
rarity of these events presents a challenge for developing expertise
in managing crisis incidents. For such rare incidents, practitioners
cannot rely solely on field experience to foster expertise. But by
the same token, they cannot afford to manage events as novices
because making mistakes costs lives and leaves practitioners open to
the scrutiny of political and public audiences. Problems thus arise
as to how practitioners can be prepared for events that are either
rare or have never occurred but are likely to in the future and of
how such expertise may be accelerated.
The Centre for Critical and Major Incident Psychology: Collecting
Experiences
The Centre for Critical and Major Incident Psychology (CAMI) at the
University of Liverpool takes a pragmatic and naturalistic approach,
working with practitioners to develop solutions to practical
problems (Fishman, 2004). CAMI adopts the perspective that there is
no substitute for conducting studies with ‘real world’ participants,
those professionals who actually undertake the job on a day to day
basis (Eyre & Alison, 2007). In line with this approach, research at
CAMI is founded on the experiences of many thousands of professional
participants from the UK and overseas (US, Canada, Australia,
Singapore, India, China, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands,
Romania, Norway, Sweden). Through the use of electronic debriefs,
the experiences of numerous practitioners managing some of the most
high profile critical incidents occurring in the UK over the last
decade have been collated. Events have ranged from weather-related
incidents such as the 2004 tsunami, to the counter-terrorism
operations of the 7/7 London bombings in 2005. This database
provides a collection of knowledge from numerous practitioners
relating to how they communicate, assess risk and formulate
decisions in complex and hazardous environments. In essence, this is
a database of pooled experiences across a variety of critical
incidents that together paint a picture of more than 10 years worth
of experience in critical incident management. This database can be
analysed to highlight potential pitfalls and develop training that
specifically targets areas of importance. In this way, a
reciprocally beneficial relationship may be forged between academics
and practitioners that will serve to improve the management of these
rare events. CAMI is already involved in forging such relationships
internationally through feeding back findings of focus groups and
research to practitioners to assist with learning (see also
http://www.hydrafoundation.org).
Click here to see the full article. |
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NEWS |
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People
 Professor
Jennifer Brown was invited by Lord John Stevens to be his deputy on
the Independent Commission into the Future of Policing. This is an
ambitious and wide ranging review. You can access the
Commission's
web site for more information
More more details of the Commission’s
remit and working method contact Jennifer at
J.Brown5@lse.ac.uk
Publications
Jennifer Brown
Cole, T., and Brown, J. What do
senior police officers want from behavioural investigative advisors.
In Rainbow, L., and Alison, L. (eds.) Professionalising
offender profiling; forensics and investigative psychology in
practice. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge 2011
Jon Jackson
European Social Survey (2011). 'Trust
in Justice: Topline Findings from the European Social Survey', ESS
Topline Results Series #1. By Jackson, J., Hough, M., Bradford, B.,
Pooler, T. M., Hohl, K. and Kuha, J.
Jackson, J. (2011). 'Revisiting Risk
Sensitivity in the Fear of Crime', Journal of Research in Crime and
Delinquency, 48, 513-537.
Jackson, J., Bradford, B., Hough, M.,
Kuha, J., Stares, S. R., Widdop, S., Fitzgerald, R., Yordanova, M.
and Galev, T. (2011). 'Developing European Indicators of Trust in
Justice', European Journal of Criminology, 8, 4, 267-285.
Gray, E., Jackson, J. and Farrall, S.
(2011). 'Feelings and Functions in the Fear of Crime: Applying a New
Approach to Victimisation Insecurity', British Journal of
Criminology, 51, 1, 79-94.
Hummelsheim, D., Hirtenlehner, H.,
Jackson, J. and Oberwittler, D. (2011). 'Social Insecurities and
Fear of Crime: A Cross-National Study on the Impact of Welfare State
Policies on Crime-Related Anxieties', European Sociological Review,
27, 3, 327-345.
Peter Ramsay
Preparation
Offences, Security Interests, Political Freedom' in A Duff, L
Farmer, S Marshall, M Renzo and V Tadros (eds), Structures of
Criminal Law (Oxford University Press : 2011)
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Post-grad
Update |
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What if...
On 24 January 2012 Gloria and I had a
pleasure to attend the reception at the House of Lords. The
reception was carried out by the Baroness Hamwee, The Howard League
for Penal Reform and the Mannheim Center at the London School of
Economics. The event was carried out in order to celebrate the
publication of the first in a series of pamphlets that aims to
challenge conventional thinking on penal issues. The pamphlet series
is the first arising out of a partnership between the Howard League
for Penal Reform and the Mannheim Centre at the London School of
Economics.
The first pamphlet focuses on policing and has been written by
Professor Robert Reiner. It is entitled in praise of fire brigade
policing: Contra common sense conceptions of the police role. At the
event Professor Reiner spoke briefly to the argument propounded in
the pamphlet. The speech of Professor Robert Reiner indeed had a lot
of insight in policing and its future. After the short speech, there
was a Q & A session. All the questions are quite meaningful and most
are supporting the view of Professor Robert Reiner.
When the Q & A session finished. Baroness Hamwee was so kind
that she lead us to visit the House of Lord. She led us to walk
through the staircases and the library to the place where the MPs
have debates. The topic of that day is on legal aim. We have listen
to the debate for a short while before we go back to the room. We
both found the House of Lord is very beautiful and really have the
atmosphere to have all the debates.
Aleksandra Majchrzak and Gloria Ng
'Meet the
Crims' Project
Janet Foster’s students have been
completing their interviews for the 'Meet the Crims' project, which involves
on-camera interviews with Manheim stalwarts Robert Reiner, David Downes
and other influential criminologists to record
their reflections for posterity. The undergraduate students prepared interview
questions about their subject’s research areas with the help of
Mannheim PhD students Daniel Bear, Johannes Rieken, and Anna Matczak. The tapes will be
edited and then made available through the web site. |
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Recent
Events |
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Book launch
12th December Handbook
on Sexual Violence
Professor Liz Kelly
discussed her concept of the continuum of violence which she
developed from her PhD research in the late 1980s. She felt it a
testament to the research which she conducted with victim-survivors
of sexual violence that it has stood the test of time and was
re-visited as a recurring theme in the Handbook. A mixed
gathering of the Handbook’s contributors, practitioners and students
enjoyed some festive mince pies and mulled wine to celebrate
publication of the book.
Mannheim/BSC Wednesday Seminar
7 December 2011 Dr Leonidas
Cheliotis (Queen Mary University of London)
“Erich Fromm and the
Political Economy of Punishment: A Freudo-Marxist Approach to
Neoliberal Penality”
18 January 2012 Professor Penny
Green (University of Westminster)
“State crime”
15 February 2012
Frances Crook (Howard League)
"Why can't we have a
radical penal policy?"
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Hermann Mannheim quote of the month |
 “ It is one of few
generally accepted tenets of Criminology that the delinquent rate of
women is far behind that of men; as to the actual differences and,
in particular, the reasons for it there exists, however, both
disagreement and lack of knowledge. One might feel tempted to shirk
the issue by saying that considering the lowness of the female
delinquency figures it is hardly worthwhile bothering about the
whole phenomenon. Nothing could be more erroneous. Apart from the
many pitfalls which the statistics of female delinquency and their
interpretation present, a delinquent woman is more likely to
influence others adversely than her male counterpart."
Mannheim. H. (1940)
Social Aspects of Crime in England Between the Wars. London: George
Allen & Unwin p334.
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From The Archives |
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Forthcoming Events |
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14th March BSC and Mannheim Seminar series
Dr Rachel Condry (St Hilda’s College, Oxford)
“'Adolescent
to parent violence and the politics of visibility'
Location: London School of Economics,
NAB
(New Academic Building), Room 1.07
Time:
6.30-8.00pm
26th March What if …? A series of challenging
pamphlets
The Howard League for Penal Reform and the Mannheim Centre at the London
School of Economics would like to invite you to the next seminar in the
series which focuses on the role of the magistracy on Monday 26th March at
6pm in at the London School of Economics in Clement House, CLM.3.02.
Frances
Crook, Chief Executive of the Howard League has agreed to be the author of
the pamphlet which has a working title of: Community magistrates
delivering community justice.
The premise of the pamphlets is
to challenge conventional thinking about various aspects of the penal
system. We want to work with established and well thought of thinkers,
academics and practitioners to develop innovative, and perhaps
controversial, ideas that can work as a stimulus to new policy initiatives
and ultimately achieve change.
We are keen to test, challenge
and improve the ideas to be promulgated in the pamphlet. To achieve
this the author, in this case Frances Crook, will subject her ideas to ‘peer
review’ at this invitee seminar, with the ideas initially subject to
scrutiny by a couple of discussants. We are pleased to announce that
the discussants will be John Fassenfelt, Chairman of the Magistrates’
Association, Professor Barry Godfrey, University of Keele and Professor
Julian Roberts, Oxford University. The event will be chaired by Professor
Frances Heidensohn from the LSE.
Information about this event is available at
the Howard League's website. In the days before the event a
short exposition of Frances Crook’s ideas will also be available. Places
are limited, and if you would like to attend this event you can
book a
place here.
4th
April Beyond Pentonville
It
is now nearly a century and a half since the opening of Her Majesty’s
Prison Pentonville and half a century since the publication of the Morris’
seminal sociological study of it. The Mannheim Centre is delighted to be
hosting a special seminar in honour of Emeritus Professor Terry Morris , the
Centre’s first director, to celebrate and reflect on this important study.
Chair: Emeritus Professor David Downes
Speakers: Professor Alison Liebling and
Louis Blom Cooper QC
Panel Discussion
Thai Theatre
New Academic Building
Time: 2.30-8.00pm
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To Do in London |
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