Jon Spencer

Crime on the Internet: Its Presentation and Representation

The internet is a rapidly expanding communication medium. It has generated considerable anxiety in relation to what is perceived as the easy availability of pornography and other sexually explicit material. There is a considerable amount of police-based internet activity which constructs crime in particular ways. This article explores the way in which crime is constructed on the internet through police pages and goes on to highlight some of the questions which this raises for criminology.

'Trying to get it right': What prison staff say about implementing race relations policy

Race Relations in English and Welsh prisons have a history of critical events and flawed management. There is evidence that at the policy level the Prison Service has responded to policy directives to improve race relations. This article is based on research that examined the relationship between national legislation, Prison Service policy and practice. The focus of the article is the views of operational Prison Service staff, revealing the complexities in implementing race relations policy in the testing prison environment. The article concludes that the policies implemented by the Prison Service appear, theoretically, to be a rational and appropriate means of achieving positive race relations. Operationally the Prison Service has experienced the challenges of the prison setting, the need for proper resources and the stresses and strains in meeting the demands of its own race relations policy.

Understanding the Marketisation of the Probation Service Through an Interpretative Policy Framework

The government’s plan for the management of offenders, Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) (Ministry of Justice, 2013a) outlines a structure where only those assessed as high risk are managed in the public sector and sets out a process for bidding to provide criminal justice services within a market environment. This agenda builds on the intentions set out in Breaking the Cycle (Ministry of Justice, 2010) to extend the principles of payment by results (PbR) to all providers of services for offenders. In the TR agenda, the government is moving from a position of relative stability in an area not recently attracting significant public concern towards a policy that has little evidence base. It is a policy decision fraught with pitfalls that could expose the government to a high-profile policy failure especially if previously effective systems are dismantled and reoffending increases.