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News and Notes |
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Welcome to the September 2013 edition of
Mannheim Matters.
There is more sad news to announce
with the death of Terry Morris. An appreciation of Terry has been
written by Robert Reiner and is included in this edition.
Happier news is
welcoming Meredith Rossner to LSE who is feature in our Meet column.
If you have any news items or
features you wish to include please email Jennifer Brown:
J.Brown5@lse.ac.uk
I am also updating the web site, so
if you have any new material you would like featured, please send to
me
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The Mannheim Centre Home Page
Upcoming Events
Mannheim Centre Staff Members
Mannheim Centre Research Students |
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Meet ... Meredith
Rossner |
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 I
am very pleased to be joining the LSE as a lecturer in criminology
in the Department of Law. Readers of this newsletter are well
aware of the illustrious history of criminology and the Mannheim
centre, and I am look forward to contributing where I can. I arrive
in London after four years in Sydney as a research fellow at the
University of Western Sydney, where I developed a love of sunshine
and good coffee (why did I move to London again?). Prior to that, I
was living in Philadelphia, where I completed my PhD in Criminology
and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
My research focuses
on exploring the roles of emotions and micro-level interactions in
the justice process. I view justice as a ritual that works to enact
and re-enact identity, build or diminish solidarity, and bind or
alienate us to society. As such, I am interested in all types of
encounters found in the criminal justice system. My research so far
has focused primarily on court and sentencing rituals old and new,
including in depth examinations of restorative justice processes,
the dynamics of a trial, and jury deliberations.
My book, Just
Emotions: Rituals of Restorative Justice (Clarendon studies in
Criminology, Oxford University Press, out this month!) pulls apart
restorative justice conferences between victims and offenders to
determine the core elements of a successful process. I am currently
in the middle of collaborating on a new book that takes a critical
examination of how restorative justice does or doesn’t fit within
contemporary justice contexts, and the at times uneasy relationships
between restorative justice and police, courts, and corrections.
I first became
interested in emotions and restorative justice in 2001 when I worked
in London as a Research Assistant for a Home Office study of
restorative justice run by the Metropolitan Police. Staging a
conference between victims, offenders, families, and friends, while
ensuring cooperation from the police, prisons, and courts taught me
about the delicate balancing act involved in pulling off successful
justice rituals. This project also ignited my passion for
criminological research, and led me to embark on a career as an
academic. When I returned to graduate studies at Penn, I was
exposed to great thinkers in the sociology of emotions, social
interaction, and criminology, such as Randy Collins, Larry Sherman,
and Kathy Edin, who helped me to articulate a theory of how emotions
and rituals work in justice settings.
More recently, I have
broadened my interests to a wider range of encounters in the justice
process, including courtroom interactions and jury deliberations. I
am particularly interested in the role of lay people in the justice
process and how they negotiate meaning and status when they
participate in these rituals. Influenced by scholars such as Erving
Goffman, I see great value in an empirical examination of the
micro-elements of how we do justice.
I have been enjoying
living in London, where a microsociologist can entertain herself for
hours observing how people get on with their life. I have been
taking my dog with me on long walks through our new neighbourhood,
and have been endlessly fascinated by the diversity of people,
activities, and objects we have come across. I have also been aided
by my recent acquisition of a bicycle- a valuable tool for someone
interested in urban life. Cycling around town is incredibly freeing
(if you can avoid aggressive drivers and find quiet streets) and is
helping me adjust to my new surroundings. I am a keen cyclist and
heartily promote efforts to get everyone on a bike!
I look forward to
meeting more of my LSE colleagues, please point me to the best place
for a coffee ritual!
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Police
Practice Journals
Police
oriented Journals |
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If
you have material that has a practice orientation you
might like to consider the following journals.
The International
Journal of Police Science and Management publishes
original empirical work, conceptual articles and
theoretical overviews or reviews, as well as articles on
good practice or practice evaluation. It seeks to
encourage practitioners as well as academics to submit
material for publication with a view to advancing
knowledge, disseminating good practice and fostering the
scientific study of the police and policing. The
principal objective of the journal is to facilitate
international exchange, stimulate debate and to
encourage closer bonds between academic research into
the criminal justice system and the practicalities of
its day-to-day management of criminal justice
organisations including, but not necessarily confined
to, the police. Topics such as police operational
techniques, crime pattern analysis, crime investigation
management, accountability, performance measurement,
interagency cooperation and public attitude surveys are
welcome.
The Police Journal
discusses the issues at the heart of policing and offers
practical advice on how to tackle them. Written by
experts and read by the decision-makers, it offers
commentary on a wide range of subjects: police
procedure, IT, crime statistics, current practices, and
new laws affecting policy.
Policing: a Journal of
Policy and Practice is an in-depth journal aimed at
senior police officers, researchers, policy makers and
academics offering critical comment and analysis of
current policy and practice, comparative international
practices, legal and political developments and academic
research. Articles are peer-reviewed and cover a wide
range of subjects from policing styles, training and
education and specialist operations to diversity,
accountability and human rights. The Journal has an
international readership and author base. It draws on
examples of good practice from around the world and
examines current academic research, assessing how that
research can be applied both strategically and at ground
level.
College of Policing
Research Map
"We would like to take
this opportunity to invite you to share details of
ongoing research with the Policing and Crime Reduction
Research Map, developed by the College of Policing and
hosted on the website from 3 October 2013. The Map will
provide an overview of relevant ongoing research in the
UK via summaries of projects shared by researchers, at
Masters Level and above. Academic institutions will be
added to the Map when we receive a research submission
via the online form. A register of both completed and
ongoing randomised control trials in forces is included.
We have developed the map to assist researchers,
decision-makers and practitioners to locate other
academics, practitioners and research groups that are
undertaking work in areas of mutual interest –
decreasing the risk of duplication and increasing the
potential for collaboration – and to identify potential
knowledge gaps in policing and crime reduction related
research.
We anticipate that a new
interactive version of the research map will be
available in spring 2014 and we will be seeking the
views of contributors and research map users about its
future development. We would like to invite you to
encourage colleagues and students to share summaries of
relevant research for the map. As research projects are
completed and published we remove details of them from
the map and seek permission to include final reports and
dissertations in the National Police Library
collection. Any questions should be directed to
research.map@college.pnn.police.uk"
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People |
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Professor Terence Morris
A tribute by Professor
Robert Reiner
I am sure
all who are associated with the Mannheim Centre will be very sad to
hear of the death of its first Director, Professor Terence Morris.
He got the Centre of to a flying start, and we are deeply in his
debt. Professor Morris had been at the LSE as an undergraduate and
graduate student, and had been supervised by Hermann Mannheim as one
of his last graduate students. Subsequently, Professor Morris taught
in the Sociology Department of LSE from 1955-95.
Professor
Morris was a leading pioneer of sociological criminology in Britain,
and published many seminal scholarly books and papers that will
continue to influence future generations as a lasting legacy. The
book of his PhD,
The Criminal Area: a study in social ecology (1957), was
based on ethnographic work on youth delinquency in Croydon.
Influenced by the Chicago School of urban sociology, it paved the
way in Britain for the now flourishing tradition of analysing
deviance in spatial terms.
Professor
Morris’ second book,
Pentonville: the sociology of an English prison (with
Pauline Morris and Barbara Barer, published in1963) was a
ground-breaking study of a British prison, and remains influential
and relevant for present debates, as was shown by the contributions
to a Mannheim Centre seminar held to mark the 40th anniversary of
the work. The speakers comprised many of the major experts on penal
policy today, including Professors David Downes, Alison Liebling,
Elaine Player, Philip Bean, Rod Morgan and Barry Mitchell, and all
testified to the huge achievement of the Pentonville study and its
continuing influence. There were also celebrations of Professor
Morris’ work on delinquent subcultures (by Professor Dick Hobbs),
and on homicide (by Sir Louis Blom Cooper QC). Professor Morris also
wrote an account of the genesis of the book, accompanied by a
fascinating slide-show of pictures which can be found on the
Mannheim website. There is a more detailed account of the event by
Professor Jennifer Brown, including the contributions by Professor
Morris and Sir Louis Blom Cooper in the March 2012
Mannheim Matters Newsletter, available on this website.
Professor Morris continued to publish major scholarly works until
recently, including a trilogy of books and many articles developing
a celebrated and influential critical analysis of homicide and the
law, written with Sir Louis Blom Cooper: A
Calendar of Murder (1964),
With Malice Aforethought: a study of the crime and punishment for
homicide (2004), and
Fine Lines and Distinctions: Murder, Manslaughter and the Taking of
Human Life (2011). Professor Morris’ prolific writing
also included a lively and informative study of post-war criminal
justice policy
Crime and Criminal Justice Since 1945 (1989), and too
many other works to detail here.
Professor Morris was a ‘public criminologist’ long before the
concept was coined. He was for many years an active member of the
Howard League for Penal Reform, serving on its executive and as one
of its vice-presidents. He was actively involved in the campaign for
the abolition of capital punishment. He served as a member of the
Longford Committee, which advised Harold Wilson on penal and legal
reform prior to his election victory in 1964. Professor Morris
worked as a Justice of the Peace in London from 1967-91. He sat as
a chairman at Tower Bridge and Camberwell Green magistrates' courts
and in the family courts, and was on the council of the Magistrates'
Association. He was a founding member of the British Society of
Criminology, and the Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence.
In addition to his scholarship and public works, Professor Morris
was a gifted and inspiring teacher. This was warmly acknowledged by
many of his former students (now Professors in their own right) at
the Mannheim event in his honour. I remember him myself as a student
on his Deviance course during my MSc in Sociology year here at LSE
in 1968. He was the model of a social science intellectual as I had
imagined one to be: witty, sophisticated, liberal, a mine of
information who seemed to have read everything, with a sharp
incisive analytic insight. The impact of Professor Morris’ work will
live on.
Robert Reiner
Emeritus Professor of Criminology
Law dept., LSE
July 10 2013
Professor Andrew Ashworth
The What If? pamphlet
published by Professor Andrew Ashworth on abolishing imprisonment
for property offenders attracted much attention. The Howard League
for Penal Reform's website attracted more than 2,000 hits on
the day of the launch and there were more than 100 downloads
of the pamphlet. There was a flurry of media interest.
Professor Ashworth also
appeared on Channel 5 News, and spoke to BBC Breakfast, the BBC
Radio 4 Today programme, BBC Radio Five Live and BBC Radio London.
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PPostgraduate
updated
Update |
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Johannes
Reiken recently successfully defended his doctoral thesis and will
be writing a short piece
 on
his return from Bogota where he is working with the Colombian
national Police school.
Johannes used helmet
mounted video cameras to capture actual encounters between the
police and the public. He undertook secondary analysis of these
recordings and also interviewed officers based on the visual
material to get a very detailed account of their practice.
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Recent
Events |
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Mannheim/BSC Wednesday Seminar
 The
last seminar of the 2012/13 series was David Wilson, Birmingham City
University 'What we can learn from the history of British serial
killing' There have been 29 serial killers in Britain since 1903
(compared to 558 in the United States). Of these only one woman
acted alone (the nurse Beverly Allitt) and two, Myra Hindley and
Rosemary West killed in a partnership. There are 5 broad goups of
victims, the elderly, gay men, babies and infants, young people who
had left home and prostitutes. |
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Hermann Mannheim quote of the month |
In
1948 Hermann Mannheim published
“Juvenile Delinquency in an English
Middletown.” He writes (page
3) in response to methodological criticisms of an earlier study,
rather pertinent given the present debate about the positioning of
the experimental approach (Randomised Control Trials) and more
qualitative methods-the subject of the next what if debate.
“It would be a mistake, however, to
assume that the alternative lies exclusively between statistical
mass enquiry and the prolonged study of a very few individuals
cases. This would mean ignoring the existence of a third, and
certainly no less promising, line of approach: the sociological
study of delinquency on regional lines, usually described as the
ecology of delinquency".
Furthermore he offered this opinion " Hardly any of these
[earlier] investigations can claim to have given that complete
picture of the relationship between the local delinquency position
and social and economic factors".
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From The Archives |
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Forthcoming Events |
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Monday 9th October 2013
6.15pm -8pm
32 Lincoln’s Inn
B.07
Mannheim/BSC Seminar series
Unheimlichkeit, Alienated and Integrated
Identities and Criminal Existence(s)
Speaker: Anthony Amatrudo
(Middlesex University)
Wednesday 16th October 2013
6.30pm – 8pm
Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House
Law Matters Public Lecture
Imprisoning the
mentally disordered: a manifest injustice?
Speaker: Professor Jill Peay (LSE Department of
Law)
Respondents: Anita Dockley (Research Director of the Howard
League for Penal Reform); Dr Tim Exworthy (Clinical Director &
Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist at St Andrew’s Hospital)
Chair:
Professor Conor Gearty (LSE Department of Law)
Prisons are populated by offenders with various forms of mental disorder
– how does the law justify this, does their presence undermine the
legitimate purposes of imprisonment and should anything be done? With an
expert record of researching and advising widely on the issue of mental
health and its relation to law, LSE academic
Professor Jill Peay delivers the first special lecture in the ‘Law
Matters’ series.
Monday 25th November 2013
5.30-8.00 pm
Senior Common Room, Old Building
Book launch Senior Common
Room, the companion edited collection of academic papers
supporting the Independent Commission into the Future of Policing
chaired by Lord John Stevens. Lord Stevens and Professor Robert Reiner
will say a few words, so come and meet the chapter authors who include
Ian Loader, Martin Innes, Karen Bullock, Gloria Laycock, Nick Tilley,
and our very own Kevin Stenson.
The book is in 6 parts and
discusses privatisation, policing legitimacy, police occupational
culture, partnership working, counter terrorism, hate crime, police
professionalism and governance. It also has a chapter on the
transformation of the RUC into the PSNI by Aogan Mulcahy and an account
of the creation of the National Police Service for Scotland by Nick
Fife.
There is an essay on
procedural justice by Ben Bradford, Jon Jackson and Mike Hough which
forms a key resource to an major plank of the Commission's report.
Kevin's chapter with Dan Silverman was also heavily drawn upon in the
Commission's deliberations about the role of the recently elected police
and crime commissioners
Wednesday 27 November 2013
The IRR
and the Mannheim Centre for the Study of Criminology and
Criminal Justice (LSE) are hosting a meeting to discuss
family campaigns against the state to discover the truth
about the deaths of loved ones.
The main
speaker is Phil Scraton, author of Hillsborough: The
Truth, who was a member of the
Hillsborough Independent Panel, and the primary
author of its ground-breaking report. He will be talking
about the fight of the ninety-six families of those who
died in the Hillsborough disaster against powerful
institutional interests that stood in the way of the
truth.This will be followed by a discussion including
contributions from members of black families whose
relatives have died in police custody.
This event marks the launch of the October 2013
edition of Race & Class, featuring Phil
Scraton’s retrospective of the Hillsborough families’
fight for justice, ‘The legacy of Hillsborough:
liberating truth, challenging power’.The evening will be
chaired by Robert Reiner, Emeritus Professor of
Criminology at LSE and Lord Herman Ouseley, member of
the Institute of Race Relations’ Council of Management
and the chair of
Kick it Out.
Hillsborough:
resisting injustice, recovering truth is on Wednesday 27 November 2013, 7-9pm at
the London School of Economics, Clements House (CLM
2.02, Second floor), Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE.
Booking is essential: email
events@irr.org.uk.
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To Do in London |
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In
the year that Gabrielle Turnquest , at eighteen years of
age, became the youngest person called to the bar,
over a hundred years have passed since Christabel
Pankhurst came top in her LLB examinations taken at Manchester
University and was unable to practice. In January 1922
Ivy Williams joined the Inner Temple at the age of 42, she had
studied law at Oxford and London 20 years earlier but –
because of restrictions on female students – had not
received her degree from Oxford until 1920. In May 1922
she was the first woman to be called to the
English Bar. Her appointment marked the end of a lengthy
campaign for women to be recognised by the legal
profession. This lecture by Christabel Pankhurst
advocated that women were equally able to practice law
as men. Currently 34% of barristers are women as are 24% of
judges.