Richard G Fox

Someone to Watch Over Us: Back to the Panopticon?

Are we becoming a surveillance society? Sophisticated devices and techniques have greatly enhanced the capacity of government to intrude into the lives of citizens. Many of the new forms of surveillance are well suited to the networked society. Technology now allows the compilation, storage, matching, analysis and dissemination of personal data at high speed and low cost. But the private sector is also involved. Simply by participating in modern commerce, individuals are significantly eroding their own privacy. While there may be broad public support for the preventive role of many forms of overt surveillance, there are also serious weaknesses in the legislative frameworks within which the monitoring of citizens by overt and covert means takes place. There are concerns about accountability, fairness and the effects on the privacy rights of those who may be unwittingly caught up in the process. The new forms of surveillance are evocative of the old in the use of surveillance as an exercise of power and discipline.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Australia's Confiscation Laws

For more than a decade Australian jurisdictions have enthusiastically embraced wide-reaching laws for the forfeiture and confiscation of the proceeds of crime. These were offered as new and potent weapons against organised crime. Despite the lack of evidence regarding its effectiveness, this type of legislation has become progressively more severe. This paper enquires how such legislation has been applied in practice over the past ten years, whether it has been properly targeted, whether it has achieved its intended deterrent effect, and whether the enactment of ever more draconian measures is the appropriate policy response.

Competition in sentencing: The rehabilitative model versus the punitive model

Modem law allows for both rehabilitative and punitive approaches to the sentencing of offenders. This article explores the differences between these underlying models and their implications for sentencing policy, taking the law in Victoria as a current example. It points out that the concept of proportionality as an overarching sentencing principle imposes restraints on treatment as well as punishment In a climate of increased punitiveness, it is argued that the rehabilitative model seems to be losing out despite its potential value.

Ranking offence seriousness in reviewing statutory maximum penalties

Some ranking of the relative seriousness of criminal conduct for the purpose of allocating statutory penalties is needed. A number of different approaches are possible. This article examines those based on assessments of harm and culpability; analysis of current judicial sentencing practices; and public opinion research. It discusses problems inherent in each of these approaches. A combination of techniques is applied to some 500 Victorian offences, both serious and trivial, in order to produce a revised ranking of statutory offences for the purpose of rationalising their accompanying sanctions.

The Australian Institute of Criminology: How Should the Council Spend the Fund?

WITH POLITE patience the editorials in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology have detailed the progress of the planned Australian Institute of Criminology over these past 3i years. Perhaps it is impolitic, at this stage, to criticise this long anticipated venture in Federal State co-operation in ertmmologtcal research lest it be thought that criticism be seen as biting the feeding hand. Yet the recent appointment of an acting Director of the Institute, the announcement of the membership of the Criminology Research Council, and the appearance-rot advertisements calling for applications for a criminologist-sociologist for the Institutes staff, all indicate that the Institute, though now viable, is nevertheless at a critical stage of its development. The decisions of the Directorate, the Board of Management (when appointed) and the Criminology Research Council in relation to the initial allocation of the Criminology Research Fund will, incidentally, shape and set the manner in which the Institutes long-term goals are to be achieved and the form of its relationship with other criminology research bodies in Australia.