Reflections on Irish Criminology: Conversations with Criminologists [1st ed.] 9783030605926, 9783030605933

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Reflections on Irish Criminology Conversations with Criminologists

Orla Lynch · Yasmine Ahmed Helen Russell · Kevin Hosford

Reflections on Irish Criminology

Orla Lynch · Yasmine Ahmed · Helen Russell · Kevin Hosford

Reflections on Irish Criminology Conversations with Criminologists

Orla Lynch Department of Sociology and Criminology University College Cork Cork, Ireland

Yasmine Ahmed Department of Sociology and Criminology University College Cork Cork, Ireland

Helen Russell Department of Sociology and Criminology University College Cork Cork, Ireland

Kevin Hosford Department of Sociology and Criminology University College Cork Cork, Ireland

ISBN 978-3-030-60592-6 ISBN 978-3-030-60593-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60593-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Contributor: Zoonar GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

Thank you to all the participants who gave so generously of their time to participate in these conversations. The original transcripts have been edited for clarity and brevity. All mistakes and omissions and (mis)interpretations are solely the fault of the authors.

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Contents

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Criminology in Ireland, the Rise of a Discipline

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In Conversation with Prof. Ian O’Donnell

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A Conversation with Dr Deirdre Healy

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In Conversation with Prof. Claire Hamilton

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In Conversation with Dr Jennifer O’Mahoney

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In Conversation with Dr Cheryl Lawther

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In Conversation with Prof. Shane Kilcommins

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In Conversation with Prof. Mary Rogan

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In Conversation with Dr Diarmuid Griffin

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In Conversation with Prof. Maggie O’Neill

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In Conversation with Prof. Shadd Maruna

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CONTENTS

Appendix A

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Appendix B

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Index

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About the Authors

Dr. Orla Lynch is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Asc. Dean of Graduate Studies at University College Cork, Ireland. Until 2015 she was the Director of Teaching and a Lecturer in Terrorism Studies at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Orla’s background is in International Security Studies and Applied Psychology; her primary training is as a social psychologist. She studied at both the University of St Andrews (M.Litt.) and University College Cork (Ph.D.). Orla is a fellow with Hedayah, Abu Dhabi and a Board member of RAN, Europe. She is also a RESOLVE Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, an Anniversary Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence and an Academic Advisor for WAVE Trauma Centre Belfast. Orla’s current research focuses on victimisation and political violence in relation to the direct victims of violence, but also the broader psycho-social impact of victimisation and the perpetrator–victim complex. To date, as PI, Orla has secured almost e1.7 million in EU research funding, and over two hundred thousand in IRCHSS, SRF and Enterprise Ireland f unding. Her recent books include Applying Psychology: The Case of Terrorism and Political Violence. (Blackwell with Carmel Joyce) Victims and Perpetrators of Terrorism: Exploring Identities, Roles and Narratives (Ed. Routledge, London) Victims of Terrorism, a comparative and interdisciplinary study (Ed. Palgrave, London) and International Perspectives on Terrorist Victimisation: An interdisciplinary approach (Ed. Routledge London).

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Yasmine Ahmed is a Ph.D. researcher and tutor at University College Cork (UCC), Ireland, where she currently teaches modules on the Psychology of Crime and Victimology to Criminology Students. She is also the Module Coordinator for the Post Graduate Diploma in Trauma studies in UCC. Yasmine studied Psychology (B.A.) at Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy, and achieved a Masters in Criminology (M.A.) at University College Cork. Her research examines Far-Right extremism using mixed methods and draws on the theoretical contributions from Framing theory, Narrative Theory and a WPR (‘What’s the problem represented to be’) integrated approach. Her work also explores how the academic literature diverges in its treatment of the far right and jihadi extremism. Her research interests also include the role of narratives of victimhood in the perpetuation of cycles of violence. Yasmine is involved with the RAN (Radicalisation Awareness Network) a European Commission initiative and recently secured a postgraduate bursary in UCC. Helen Russell holds a B.Sc. Government and an M.A. Criminology from University College Cork. Helen has worked as a research assistant and part time lecturer in UCC over the past five years where she teaches modules on Women, Coercive Confinement and Social Control in Ireland, Trauma, and Political Violence. She has experience working on research topics such as prisons, terrorism, radicalisation, politics and nonpolitical offending. Helen is currently a tutor with WAVE Trauma Centre Belfast where she teaches on the Post Graduate Diploma in Trauma Studies. In 2016 Helen was awarded the CACSSS Excellence Scholarship for her M.A. in Criminology. Kevin Hosford is a Ph.D. Candidate and tutor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at University College Cork. His doctoral research adopts a mixed methods approach to exploring and understanding concepts of Cyberterrorism and Hacktivism. Kevin previously completed a B.A. degree in criminology and holds certificates in Journalism, Media Production, and Computer Programming. Kevin has held a number of research assistant posts in Sociology and Criminology and recently contributed to the production of a joint Interpol, ECPAT report titled: Towards a global indicator on unidentified victims in child sexual exploitation material. His research interests include cultural

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

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and motivational dimensions of internet-based activism, understandings and constructions of the Darknet, and proactive approaches to digitalcriminality & Information Security.

CHAPTER 1

Criminology in Ireland, the Rise of a Discipline

Abstract The rise and rise of criminology in Ireland cannot be understood by focusing only on the traditional disciplinary boundaries of the field. As Prof. Maruna points out in this volume, we are all academic magpies and criminology is our rendezvous discipline; it is this eclecticism that gives Irish criminology its uniqueness. Most importantly, and a belief that is shared by all the participants in this book, is that criminology in Ireland is what it is and where it is because of the people; the researchers, the teachers, the service users, the practitioners and the students. In this volume we trace the lineage of some of Ireland’s criminologists, magpies and purists alike, from their undergraduate studies to their appointment as Chairs and Professors, we document their influences and their partnerships, their innovations and their ideologies. Through understanding where the contributors are coming from we understand better how and why they are where they are. Keywords Discipline · Criminology · Absentee · Ireland · Boundaries

The uniqueness of Irish criminology is best summed up by reference to the opening statement in one of the founding texts of the discipline (Brewer et al. 1997b).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 O. Lynch et al., Reflections on Irish Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60593-3_1

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References to Ireland, even when it is to ordinary crime, are best to begin with political history. (p. 1).

In the nearly twenty five years since this recommendation was made, it has become a reality and captures what Maruna and McEvoy (2015) call the intellectual ambitiousness that defines Irish criminology. Criminology in Ireland has grown from what was once termed Ireland’s absentee discipline (Kearns, 2020) to a multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary undertaking that re-imagines the work of international criminology from an Irish perspective. Speaking at a conference in Mount Joy Prison in 2020, Prof. Ian O’Donnell described criminology in Ireland as buoyant, having long thrown off the label of Ireland’s absentee discipline (Kearns, 2020). Having come a long way since its roots in the early 1970s where attempts to stimulate research in the area were rejected by statutory organisations, Ireland’s criminal justice agencies are now active creators and consumers of research albeit some more ardent than others. Similarly, Hamilton, Healy et al. (2015) in their seminal volume on criminology in Ireland point out it is time to reconsider the Cinderella status of Irish criminology, that as a discipline we have come of age. However, criminology if not in name, then certainly in intellectual spirit, has a long history on the island of Ireland. In 1993 Paul O’Mahony pointed out that there was no strong tradition of criminological or penological research in Ireland, namely because there was no university department of criminology at that time. However, despite this a diversity of individuals and disciplines contributed to and continue to contribute to what has become the discipline of criminology and this legacy uniquely defines the current scope and form of the field. To say there is an Irish criminolog y is perhaps inaccurate, but criminology in Ireland as a discipline is certainly unique. The field is very much informed by the history of the Island, defined by the violence and the politics of the Troubles, informed by our history of coercive confinement, and couched in an interdisciplinary tradition. However, until recently, Irish criminology as a disciplinary speciality rarely featured in the international criminology literature despite a rich and vibrant criminology community developing on the island (O’Donnell 2005). For example, according to a review of the European Journal of Criminology (Smith 2013) between 2004 and 2012 there were no

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contributions by Irish authors.1 However, given where we started from, we are not that far behind the curve. The first issue of the European Journal of Criminology was published in 2004 and it is reasonable to suggest that Ireland’s criminological awakening only occurred the 1990’s so we are quite similar to our European neighbours (Smith 2013). But unlike our European neighbours, criminology in Ireland was not seen as a resource by the state and was not funded as such, and so its developmental trajectory is both slower and more critical. Despite the total absence of state funding (O’Donnell 2005) or perhaps as a result of it, criminology in Ireland emerged thanks to the work of a few key individuals and a persistence that has led to the development of a vibrant and diverse academic criminology community on the island. The early work of Paul O’Mahony (1993), Ciaran McCullagh (1996), Ivana Bacik et al. (1998), Ian O’Donnell (1997), Caroline Fennell (1993), and John Brewer et al. (1997a) can reasonably be said to be the foundation stones for what was to come and more recently the work of Hamilton, Healy et al. (2015) cemented the discipline as a key part of Irish intellectual activity. In parallel to the research and theoretical outputs that propelled the field forward, a parallel growth in academic criminology programs and the emergence of criminology as a department or discipline in a number of Irish higher education institutions embedded criminology as a mainstay of Irish academia. A key moment for criminology in the Republic of Ireland was the development of the Institute of Criminology in 2000. Situated in the Faculty of Law at University College Dublin (UCD) the Institute had an emphasis on research and doctoral training and remains the only such research centre in the south of the country. It is important to recognise however, that the trajectory of the development of criminology in Ireland was not uniform. In 2005 O’Donnell pointed out that criminology in Northern Ireland has long had a presence with the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice in existence since 1995 and a number 1 This appears to be inaccurate, but the numbers contributing to the journal are still low. In 2005 Ian O’Donnell submitted Crime and justice in the Republic of Ireland. European Journal of Criminology, 2(1), 99–131 and in the same year Aodhan Mulcahy published The other lessons from Ireland, 29(2), 195–209 and in 2007 Barry Vaughan and Shane Kilcommins published The Europeanization of human rights: An obstacle to Authoritarian policing in Ireland? 4(4), 437–460. Of course, author based in Northern Ireland drawing on data from that region would have been categorised as British in this data analysis.

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of academic programmes being offered in both Queens University and the University of Ulster. However, Northern Ireland was still somewhat trailing criminology in Great Britain. Maruna and McEvoy (2015) point out that when Ken Pease was commissioned to review the criminological landscape of the region in 1992, he called it ‘quite bleak’ (p. 593), however, not as bleak as the Republic of Ireland. The impact of the Troubles was of course highly relevant for the emergence of criminology and the way in which criminal justice research developed in Northern Ireland, but this too was the case in the South— albeit somewhat less obvious, or at least less recognised. The fact that the 1988 Victimological survey of Northern Ireland stated the province had the lowest rate of victimisation of all European countries surveyed tells you something about the state of criminological research in the region. In the south, the impact of civil unrest on crime and punishment was largely overlooked. Brewer et al. (1997b) point out that in McCullough’s 1996 book on Crime in Ireland, one of the key foundational texts for Irish criminology, the North and the Troubles are hardly mentioned. In spite of both these issues, Maruna and McEvoy (2015) have jubilantly declared that things have now utterly changed ( p. 593) for the better. Since 2000, there has been a significant growth in criminology modules and programmes in both Northern Ireland and the republic. In 2015 Hamilton, Healy et al. pointed out that globally, criminology was booming and Ireland was slowly increasing its programme offerings. At the time, the authors counted over thirty programmes with criminological components, today that has increased to 18 programmes at level 8 QQI2 and above primarily focused on criminology (see appendix one) and 36 programmes with a criminology component at level 8 and above. In the Institutes of Technology (IRE) and Further Education Colleges (NI) there are approximately 20 programmes with a criminology component (level 7 or lower). These courses do not take into account the programmes (level 7 or lower, special purpose or CDP programmes) on offer by private, independent and not-for-profit colleges, nor do they account for adult or continuing education programmes on offer by Universities, nor Open University options. It is difficult to quantify the number of graduates, but based on average figures provided by the institutions themselves both North and South, there are between 900

2 see https://www.qqi.ie/.

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and 1000 students who enrol each year on criminology and criminology related (level 8 and above) programmes (see appendix one for details). While this progress represents a very positive development for the discipline of criminology, it does present the field with a dilemma; the need to balance the needs of an ever increasing student population with the limited research funding that is available and the limited opportunities that exist within academic to pursue research and teaching careers. In this volume O’Donnell (chapter two) points out that the burden of managing ever increasing numbers of programmes and students may well serve to stifle the opportunities for researchers to progress knowledge and critique of and in the field.

Situating Irish Criminology More in step with our European colleagues (as opposed to our American colleagues), criminology emerged in Ireland from a rich variety of disciplines and concerns; politics, sociology, history, psychology, human rights and philosophy. But importantly, Irish criminology is also about the practitioners, institutions and social practices that define this small and bounded field. This however is an issue discussed at length in this volume and one that sharply divides the discipline, both due to the highly contested issue of academic involvement in and with institutions of the state but also due to the politicisation of criminological output for the purpose of political legitimacy. On the other hand, and as witnessed in the contribution of Irish criminologists to various state institutions, having a voice is seen as vital, and many academics see their role as public intellectuals and their duty to bring evidence and best practice to the institutions and practitioners, both state and non-state, who are involved in criminal justice on the island. If we were to crudely define Irish criminology, its reliance on critical theory, qualitative methods and social theory are perhaps the most highly featured characteristics. Due in no small part to the absence of data, but also due to the etiological origins of social science in Ireland more generally (O’Donnell et al. 2008), this unique landscape here has moulded criminology in a particular fashion. Forms of imprisonment, the treatment of women, the role of the church in social censure, the Troubles and preceding periods of political violence and the dual system of administration on the island have all contributed to how we think about and write about criminology. In addition, issues of data management, data sharing

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and research funding have all had an impact on how we do criminological research in Ireland. However, despite political and ideological vagaries of the dual criminal justice system on the island of Ireland, the institutions and the instruments do not define this emerging academic field (Mulcahy 2005). There is a rich tradition of diversity of academic thought on the Island and this has emerged in the Irish criminological literature. Nowhere has this played out more than in the debates around the need for an official criminology and warnings against mirroring the criminology of the UK and the USA. Related to these warnings is the question of any relationship between criminology and practice; academic involvement in the doing of criminal justice is hotly contested. The diversity of ideas and positions on the island that range from abolitionist to positivist and Foucauldian to agentic theories, as might be expected, do not lend themselves to a coherent criminology, but these frameworks ensure Irish criminology is neither reactionary, simplistic, nor self-justifying (Smith 2013). However engagement with the institutions of the state, an activity that is seen by some as a duty in their role as criminologists and by others as a betrayal, does not necessarily mean the emergence of an official criminology. As demonstrated in the case of Scotland, a critical tradition can and has emerged within the state apparatus. For example according to McAra (2008) the Central Research Unit (CRU) created groundbreaking work in its own right, supported critical scholars, and enabled early career academics to access, critique and analyse data. This debate will no doubt continue and develop in Ireland as calls for funding and the long term support of criminological research heightens.

An Irish Criminology? When we ask if there is a distinctly Irish criminology, we should perhaps first ask is there a distinctly Irish system of and interpretation of justice. Going back to the nineteenth century, of course many elements of the Irish system of justice were in line with the English approach, but there has always been something distinctly Irish in the approach (Howlin 2013). This was in part due to perceptions of the savagery of the population and the ongoing and persistent political unrest in the jurisdiction (ibid.). Researchers point out that despite the role of the British in the development of the Irish Criminal Justice system, Ireland’s position as one of influence on British systems of Criminal Justice is sometimes unseen. Whether this relates to the early emergence of a centralised police force,

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the pioneering use of permanent paid magistrates or centralised public prosecutions process there was a distinctly Irish flavour to the emerging system of justice on the Island defined by centralisation and professionalisation (ibid.). More important perhaps than asking if there is an Irish criminology is to focus on what criminology from Ireland can offer to a wider audience. What lessons have we learnt, how have our influences played out and what can we offer to our academic neighbours in this field. Perhaps we might offer the lessons on policing in a state emerging from a post-colonial environment (Conway 2013), how rejection of centralised criminal justice systems was an active of anti-colonial resistance or how civil war and conflict impacted the institutions of the state, particularly around justice and policing (Brewer et al. 1997b). Of course we can talk about how state power was operationalised and controlled and how this impacted upon what was and was not deemed criminality, but also how parallel systems of control emerged, thereby saving the state from having to engage in those spaces (O’Mahony 1993). Importantly we can talk about how the Troubles and the dual system of administration impacted on criminology and criminal justice research on the island. The Irish and Northern Irish criminal justice system emerged as a result of the social conditions unique to Ireland and responses to that system, and broader social circumstances are of course a reaction to this uniqueness and these are the lessons we can export. We know of course that while we have exported our ideas and our experiences, we have also exported our people; a significant number of Irish criminology graduates go onto careers in UK institutions. In addition, practitioners have long been exported from the island. Expatriates who were former Royal Irish Constabulary police officers joined the ranks of police forces around the world and took up positions as civil servants, magistrates etc. in their new homes. Today, there remains significant Irish influence in international criminal justice (and related) organisations. For example Former Garda Commissioner Noirin O Sullivan served as Director of Strategic Partnerships for Europe at the International Association of Chiefs of Police and is currently UN assistant secretary general for the department of safety and security. Chief Supt Stephen Fanning, retired, was the first UN police commissioner and the architect of UN policing policy (Cusack 1996), hundreds of former Royal Ulster Constabulary took up positions in Iraq and Afghanistan (Clarke 2006). Gerry NcNally, the deputy director of the probation service is President of the Confederation of European Probation, Caron McCaffrey the Director

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General of the Irish Prison Service is a board member of Europris. Interestingly the Seychelles has a significant ex-Garda population. Garda chief superintendent (retd) Michael Fitzgerald became deputy commissioner of the police force, while Garda chief superintendent (retd) Liam Quinn became director of operations and training, Liam Coen, a former chief superintendent, was appointed to the crime wing of the country’s police force and Liam Hogan, another chief superintendent, became director of the Financial Investigation Unit. There are also Irish people in prominent positions in the Seychelles customs department and they have been instrumental in setting up a type of Criminal Assets Bureau on the islands (Clarke 2010).

Conversations with Criminologists The rise and rise of criminology in Ireland cannot be understood by focusing only on the traditional disciplinary boundaries of the field. As Prof. Maruna points out in this volume we are all academic magpies and criminology is our rendezvous discipline; it is this eclecticism that gives Irish criminology its uniqueness. Most importantly, and a belief that is shared by all the participants in this book is that criminology in Ireland is what it is and where it is because of the people; the researchers, the teachers, the service users, the practitioners and the students. In this volume we trace the lineage of some of Ireland’s criminologists, magpies and purists alike, from their undergraduate studies to their appointment as Chairs and Professors, we document their influences and their partnerships, their innovations and their ideologies. Through understanding where the contributors are coming from we understand better how and why they are where they are. In the ten conversations that follow we explore the experiences of a selection of individuals who make up the diverse criminology community on the Island of Ireland. We chose individuals from different disciplines, different academic traditions and eras and we included individuals from most of the universities in both the republic and Northern Ireland. The conversations in this book speak to both the diversity of Irish criminology but also speak to the idea discussed by Healy and Hamilton et al. (2015) of a unified criminology. In short—criminology in Ireland is best described as a community of researchers, practitioners, students and service users, informed by different traditions, ideologies, disciplines and approaches. This community is sustained by a highly valued annual

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all island conference, but not yet supported by a society, nor a dedicated journal. The development of more stable structures that will outlive the motivation of individual contributors and organisers is only a matter of time and given the phenomenal interest in criminology, and hopefully in years to come, a significant increase in the researcher population, criminology in Ireland will no doubt develop and change for the better.

References Bacik, I., Kell, Al., O’Connell, M., & Sinclair, H. (1998). Crime and poverty in Dublin. An analysis of the association between community deprivation, district court appearance and sentence severity. In I. Bacik & M. O’Connell (Eds.), Crime and poverty in Ireland. Dublin: Round Hall. Brewer, J. D., Lockhart, B., & Rodgers, P. (1997a). Crime in Ireland 1945–95: Here be Dragons. London: Clarendon. Brewer, J. D., Lockhart, B., & Rogers, P. (1997b). Crime in Ireland since the second world war. Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, xxvii, part iii. Clarke, L. (2006). Former RUC Officers for hire in hot spots. The times.co.uk. Available online at https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/former-ruc-officersfor-hire-in-hot-spots-mtwmv9stq7z. Accessed May 16, 2020. Clarke, J. (2010, December 18). The Seychelles: Trouble in paradise. The Irish Times. Available online at https://www.irishtimes.com/news/the-seychellestrouble-in-paradise-1.688183 Accessed May 16, 2020. Conway, V. (2013). Policing twentieth century Ireland: A history of an Garda Síochána. London: Routledge. Cusack, J. (1996). Garda Silver Fox picked for key UN policing role. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/garda-silver-fox-picked-for-key-unpolicing-role-1.21345. Accessed May 16, 2020. Fennell, C. (1993). Crime and crisis in Ireland: Justice by illusion. Cork: Cork University Press. Hamilton, C., Healy, D., Daly, Y., & Butler, M. (2015). Routledge handbook of Irish criminology. London: Routledge. Healy, D., Hamilton, C., Daly, Y., & Butler, M. (Eds.). (2015). Routledge handbook of Irish criminology. London: Routledge. Howlin, N. (2013). Nineteenth-century criminal justice: Uniquely Irish or simply “not English”? Irish Journal of Legal Studies, 3(1), 67–89. Kearns, D. (2020). Criminology found a home in UCD. Available online at https://www.ucd.ie/newsandopinion/news/2020/march/09/criminologyf oundahomeatucdafter30yearsinwildernessmountjoyprisonconferencehears/. Accessed June 13, 2020.

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Maruna, S., & McEvoy, S. (2015). Afterword; Why Irish criminology. In D. Healy, C. Hamilton, Y. Daly, & M. Butler (Eds.), Routledge Handbook Irish criminology. London: Routledge. McAra, L. (2008). Crime and criminal justice in Scotland. European Journal Criminology, 5(4), 481–504. McCullagh, C. (1996). Crime in Ireland: A sociological introduction. Cork University Press: Cork. Mulcahy, A. (2005). The other lessons from Ireland? Policing, political violence and policy transfer. European Journal of Criminology, 2(2), 185–209. O’Donnell, I., Baumer, E. P., & Hughes, N. (2008). Recidivism in the Republic of Ireland. Criminology and Criminal Justice, 8, 123–146. O’Donnell, I. (1997). Crime, punishment and poverty. Criminal Law Journal, 2, 1340151. O’Donnell, I. (2005). Crime and justice in the Republic of Ireland. European Journal of Criminology, 2(1), 99–131. O’Mahony, P. (1993). Crime and punishment in Ireland. Dublin: Round Hall. Smith, D. J. (2013). Wider and deeper: The future of criminology in Europe. European Journal of Criminology, 11(1), 3–22. Vaughan, B., & Kilcommins, S. (2007). The Europeanisation of human rights: An obstacle to authoritarian policing in Ireland? European Journal of Criminology, 4(4), 437–460.

CHAPTER 2

In Conversation with Prof. Ian O’Donnell

Abstract In this chapter Prof. Ian O’Donnell speaks about his research journey. His story starts with a role working on the issue of suicides in the London underground system, followed by a position that involved examining the issue of armed robbery and later his involvement in research focused on developing a drug testing regime in British Prisons. The unifying features of these projects are the focus on decision making processes and environmental design, and in this chapter Prof. O’Donnell explains how these theoretical approaches alongside the data collection processes have informed his work. Prof. O’Donnell speaks about his more recent work on isolation in prisons, and mirroring the sentiment of other contributors to this volume, acknowledges the need to ensure that the multiple audiences for criminological writing are served. In particular he speaks about the popularity of his book on isolation among the population of prison inmates and how this impacted on their own experience of and understanding of solitary confinement. Keywords Psychology · Institute · Cambridge · Imprisonment · Coercive

In tracing the origins and evolution of the discipline of criminology in Ireland, the indisputable elder (in experience not age!) must be Prof. Ian © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 O. Lynch et al., Reflections on Irish Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60593-3_2

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O’Donnell. Occupying the first named criminology post in the country, Prof. O’Donnell has long been a part of both criminal justice organisations and academic criminology in Ireland. Prof. O’Donnell’s work on prison, probation and the history of violence has filled a significant void in our knowledge of penology in Ireland, and his pioneering data collection and analysis has changed the way we think about imprisonment internationally. His focus on coercive confinement has impacted both the story of penology in Ireland but also how we understand our own history of coercive control, the treatment of women, and the role of the criminal justice and parallel systems on the island. Through his work on parallel systems on confinement, Prof. O’Donnell has revealed that unlike official incarceration rates, states have in fact become less punitive rather than more. Importantly, this empirical work serves to augment existing theories on the cultures of control (Garland 2001; O’Donnell 2004). The exposition of extra-judicial control practices and Prof. O’Donnell’s general philosophy of greater attention to the past served in this case to bring new information and analysis to the study of penology informed of course by Foucault’s (1977) work on the carceral archipelago. Criminological work often brings the researcher in and out of academia often via practice work in prisons, law offices, NGOs, police stations and schools. The experience of Prof. Ian O’Donnell is no different and his research journey is marked by his time working on the issue of suicides in the London underground system, examining instances of armed robbery in partnership with the flying squad in the Metropolitan Police and evaluating a drug testing regime in British Prisons. While these may seem like diverse research undertakings, the unifying features of these projects is an interest in the decision-making processes and environmental design that impact on the behaviours in question; in this chapter Prof. O’Donnell explains how these theoretical approaches have informed his work. He also speaks about his more recent work on isolation in prisons and mirroring the sentiment of other contributors to this volume, acknowledges the need to ensure that the multiple audiences for criminological writing are served. In particular, he speaks about the popularity of his own book on isolation (solitary confinement) among prison inmates and how access to this volume impacted on their experience of and understanding of solitary confinement.

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Bio Prof. O’Donnell was appointed as Professor of Criminology in the School of Law at University College Dublin (UCD) in 2006. Between 2004 and 2010 he was Director of the UCD Institute of Criminology. Prior to joining UCD in 2000 Prof. O’Donnell was Director of the Irish Penal Reform Trust (1997–2000), Research Officer at the Oxford University Centre for Criminological Research (1992–1997), and Research Assistant at the University of London (1989–1992). Previously he was involved with HMP Pentonville as a member of the Board of visitors and sat as a Magistrate on the Oxford bench. Prof. O’Donnell is a Chartered Psychologist and Fellow of the British Psychological Society; a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; a Member of the Academia Europaea; an Adjunct Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. His most recent books are entitled Justice, Mercy, and Caprice: Clemency and the Death Penalty in Ireland (2017) and Prisoners, Solitude, and Time (2014). Recommended Readings O’Donnell, I. (2017). Justice, mercy, and caprice: Clemency and the death penalty in Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Sullivan, E., & O’Donnell, I. (Eds.). (2012). Coercive confinement in Ireland: Patients, prisoners and penitents. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Pathway to Criminology I studied psychology at Trinity College Dublin for four years and when I was coming to the end of that I wanted to do a post-grad, I didn’t want to stay in Ireland, it was coming to the end of ’88 so there was a lot of outward movement of people then. I think everybody in my graduation class emigrated. I applied for a Masters in Social Psychology in the London School of Economics and a Masters in Criminology in Cambridge, and when the offers came through I opted for the Masters in Criminology in Cambridge, then I did my PhD in London on a part-time basis. Around that time I saw a job advertised in the Guardian for somebody to do a study on suicide prevention in the London Underground Railway System. I applied for that job and got it. About two-thirds of the

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way through my PhD I saw another ad in the paper for a research officer in the criminology department in Oxford looking at armed robbery in London. I was nearly finished the PhD at that point and my Head of Department strongly encouraged me and I went for it and I got it. I started working in Oxford on a study on the decision-making of armed robbers which involved working closely with the Flying Squad in London; it involved interviewing everybody who was involved with armed robbery events in a particular year. Then when that project came to an end I got some money to do a study of violence in prisons with a colleague called Dr Kimmett Edgar who I recruited and we worked together a lot over the years. I also got some money to do a study of a mandatory drug testing programme that was introduced into the prisons over there (UK) so I went from doing a Masters in Cambridge to working in London on an unrelated project, but with some criminological principles underpinning it, to working again in Oxford, to doing some [practice] criminology again. At that time, the post of Director of the Irish Penal Reform Trust came up and I applied for that and I got it. I worked there for about three years and then moved to UCD where the Institute of Criminology was set up and I have been working here (UCD) for the last nineteen years.

Key Influences The work that I found influential at the start [of my career] was in the tradition of crime prevention that Ron Clarke (1995) and others did; that loomed pretty large when I was trying to make sense of people attempting to take their lives on the London Underground. When I went to Oxford the rational choice perspective on crime was part of my work too in terms of analysing the decision-making practices of armed robbers. For the last number of years my work has been more focused on sentencing and penology and there is a huge amount of literature in the USA in particular, but also in the UK, that I draw on in that work. I also have an interest in Criminal Justice history, so I have been impressed by the kind of work that has been done in the middle and in the latter half of the nineteenth century by Crofton (Hinde, 1977) and others into prison regimes and early release and all the rest of it, so I found it helpful to look back to draw information on how we might address issues in the present.

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Recommended Readings Clarke, R. V. (1995). Building a safer society: Strategic approaches to crime prevention. Crime and Justice, 19, 91–150. Hinde, R. S. E. (1977). Sir Walter Crofton and the reform of the Irish convict system, 1854–61—II. Irish Jurist, 12(2), 295–338.

Situating Your Research At the moment my research is largely focused around penology and imprisonment with a strand of work in criminal justice history, such as the history of violence. I have written an account of violence since the [Irish] famine— from the 1840s up to the present—to try chart the trends and then to try and explain that. I have an interest in violence as it manifests historically, I have an interest in all the practical problems associated with prisons and how they are run and how people organise their lives within them. I do this with an eye on particular aspects of society that might be unique to an Irish context. So my research is about the contemporary problems around imprisonment, how they’re addressed, the history of crime and punishment with a focus on violent crime in particular and sentencing practice.

Key Publications Eoin O’Sullivan and myself wrote an article for the journal Punishment and Society in 2007 and it was an attempt to think more deeply about the emergence of a culture of control where the measure of control was usually the amount of prisoners per 100,000 of the national population. We decided to cast the net more widely and instead of looking at prison as a proxy for how punitive or controlling a society is, we looked at everyone who was involuntarily contained - so the people held in psychiatric hospitals against their will, in reformatories and industrial schools, in Magdalene asylums and all the rest of it. When we put all of this together we discovered that the rate of coercive confinement in Ireland in the 1950s was over 1000 per 100,000 of population; the rate of imprisonment in the USA today is about 750 per 100,000 population and that’s a cause of huge concern, but it’s much, much lower than the population coercively confined in the 1950s in Ireland. The other element of this

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story is that the 1950s was a time of huge outward movement of people so the country was haemorrhaging its people and we were still confining more than 1% of it. So when we sent this article into the journal, initially we got very good feedback about the value of this framework for looking at the area of social control as it made a lot of sense. However, some of the commentators who got back to us said maybe this is peculiar to the Irish context and one of the reasons we worked the article up to a book was to say well look, this isn’t peculiar to the Irish context because the institutions we are talking about were found everywhere, certainly throughout the common law world. So Ireland certainly wasn’t the only country to detain people in psychiatric hospitals, it wasn’t the only country that had Magdalene asylums, it wasn’t the only place where young people were held in Industrial or Reformatory schools. So our argument in the book is that these institutions existed in lots of places, and it would be worthwhile examining the patterns of use because what’s peculiar about Ireland is the rate that we used psychiatric hospitals, we use them more than any place in the world. So in the volume on Coercive Confinement in Ireland: Patients, Prisoners and Penitents we presented a challenge to people working in other jurisdictions, and that was to think of coercive confinement rather than just imprisonment, to try to assemble data from all of these different sources and see what the trends look like. If we look at Ireland and we look at the prison, the trend over the last 150 years has been upwards but if we think of coercive confinement the trend has been steeply downwards, so we wanted to issue that challenge to other scholars in other jurisdictions to do the same analysis and see what emerged. We also wanted to introduce some balance to the debate by presenting contemporary sources. So there is a lot written today about what these institutions were like but there isn’t a great awareness of what information was available at the time, what had been written at the time, so in the first fifty years post-independence, what would a citizen have known about these institutions? Was there anything out there in the public domain, maybe written by people who had been in the institutions, or visited them, or who had some responsibility for them? We wanted to identify that material which is difficult to find, and bring it together in one place. The other thing we wanted to do in this book was to challenge this notion that these institutions or the problem of coercive confinement can be put at the door of the state or religious orders and we wanted to say look there

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is a missing part of the story here which is the family. Some of these institutions in Ireland were run by religious orders and congregations, and sometimes people were sent into these institutions via the courts, but a referral route in lots of cases was the family. So the reasons for writing the book were to build on the article from 2007, to put a challenge out there to other scholars to say, what were the patterns like in other countries, and to re-balance the debate by introducing the family into the context so it becomes about the church and the state and the family. Linked to this, in some of my other work I was curious about what did a sentence of say three or four years feel like to a man in the 1830s or 1840s whose life expectancy might be 45 years, compared to what does a prison sentence of the same duration feel like to a man in 2020 whose life expectancy is nearly twice as long. I was thinking about how prisoners deal with the temporal dimension of their lives, how they manage time. When I started looking into the history of prison I became very interested in the different models—the separate system versus silent system—and how the passage of time felt to a prisoner who was alone in a cell all day with nothing but the Bible and the reformative influence of the Chaplaincy, compared to a prisoner who was working in congregation with other prisoners but under a rule of strictly enforced silence. As I was thinking about the history of the prison and the different penal regimes that were popular at the time, and the philosophies that underpin them, I started thinking about how would it feel to be a prisoner today in very strict solitary confinement where the authorities have given up any prospect that the experience is going to be a reformative one. A prisoner in the 1830s and 40s and 50s was held apart from other prisoners because there was a belief that this was a way of triggering a process of reform that would mean that when they left prison they were less likely to commit further crime and end up back in prison, but today that reformative rationale is gone. If somebody is in a supermax prison in the USA, the degree of isolation they experience is probably more total than the degree experienced by a prisoner in the 1840s I was curious to know how it feels to be isolated against your will for a long period of time and has that changed. And then I was concerned to see is there anything we can learn from people who experience isolation of their own volition that might be used to shed some light on the prisoner experience. There were some historical dimensions to the work and there were temporary resonances and I was trying to bring together different literatures about how people spend time, how they deal with

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boredom and what strategies they come up with to make that burden a little bit more manageable. I began corresponding with some prisoners who had been in isolation for a long time, and I visited the USA and other places where prisoners had been isolated for a long time and came up with a couple of very simple questions that I asked prisoners, or if I had colleagues that were working in prisons, they would survey the prisoners, but basically it was a simple question something like ‘based on your own experience if you had a single piece of advice to give to a prisoner about to embark on a life sentence what would that advice be?’ So I drew some information from that data collection exercise and then I spent a long time reviewing autobiographical works by prisoners, and there are many of them out there from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present and the idea was to see what can we learn from what prisoners tell us about enforced isolation over a long period of time; so that’s how the book came to be the book that it is. Recommended Readings O’Donnell, I. (2014). Prisoners, solitude, and time. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Sullivan, E., & O’Donnell, I. (2007). Coercive confinement in the Republic of Ireland: The waning of a culture of control. Punishment & Society, 9(1), 27–48. O’Donnell, I., & O’Sullivan, E. (2020). Coercive confinement: An idea whose time has come? Incarceration, 1(1).

Most Influential Work If I was to pick one publication from the last few years that had some influence on policy and practice it would be the ‘Prisoners, Solitude and Time’ book which was used in the High Court case of a man who was fighting extradition to the USA on the grounds that if he was extradited he would be held in Administrative Segregation (solitary confinement) and this would be a violation of his human rights. The judge in that case relied on the argument in the book and I was an expert witness in the case. The argument I make in the book was that in solitary confinement some people cope remarkably well, but it has adverse implications for most. Some remarkable people can cope, but most people are harmed

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by it and if they have a pre-existing mental health problem the damage can be really catastrophic, also if they are young and their brain isn’t fully formed, the neurological damage can be severe. So that book had an impact in terms of affecting the outcome of that case because the extradition request was denied. The book was launched in Mountjoy prison so we had an event there and The Irish Times did a video feature on it, and the Director General of the Irish Prison Service, Michael Donnellan, asked me would I come and speak to his Elimination of Solitary Confinement working group. I thought it was great that the group aimed for the ‘Elimination’ of Solitary Confinement, not the ‘reduction’, or ‘remediation’ or ‘progress towards the elimination of solitary confinement’. I spoke to that group and after that he asked me to address the governors and various heads of function at the Irish Prison Service. At that meeting I issued a challenge, namely for the Irish Prison Service to come into compliance with the Nelson Mandela Rules (2015), specifically the rule that deals with solitary confinement, which aims to prohibit solitary confinement of more than 15 days. We are a small rich country with a modest prison population and we should be able to meet these standards relatively easily. Ultimately the prison rules were changed subsequent to that to allow prisoners more out of cell time, and to ensure that out of cell time involved meaningful human engagement. When the book was published I wrote a short article for The Psychologist, which is an inhouse publication of the British Psychological Society. I also was asked by the editor of a magazine that goes to every prisoner on death row called ‘The Wing of Friendship’—Lifelines is the name of that organisation— if it would be ok to reprint the piece from the Psychologist. It was only three or four pages but every prisoner on death row was then able to read it. Recommended Readings O’Donnell, I. (2016). The survival secrets of solitaries. The Psychologist, 29, 184–187. Available online at https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/ volume-29/march-2016/survival-secrets-solitaries.

One problem with academic books is they cost a lot and they are often only available in hardback. I approached Oxford University Press who published Prisoners Solitude and time and they gave me a discounted rate on a book order and the School of Law here in UCD paid for them, so

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I was able to put a copy in every prison library in Ireland, in the Prison Service Training College in Prison Headquarters in Longford—just to make sure that if there was a prisoner who was finding the experience of isolation overwhelming at least there would be some resource that they could draw on if they were literate and felt that they wanted to do it. I know from a couple of the prison chaplains that they have been working through some elements of the book with some of the prisoners, so I think that it has had some kind of impact in that regard too. When I finished the book on solitary confinement, I turned my attention to a study of people who had been sentenced to death in Ireland in the post-independence period; that is everyone who had been sentenced to death from 1923 onwards and what I was really interested in was that 1 in 3 were executed meaning 2 in 3 were not. I knew this because the Department of Justice made the closed prisoner files available to me. Subsequently I examined all of the relevant records I could find in the National Archives, and files that were at the Taoiseach’s Department that I was able to access on site there. But what I was really keen to work out was of the two-thirds of people who were not executed, were there reasons for that? How can we understand why one particular person was hanged or shot while another was spared? And then what happened afterwards? I spent a number of years going through the files to try and figure out what was the decision-making process behind it? If there was a conviction for murder and the death penalty was mandatory did the jury attach a rider asking the government to be merciful and did that have any effect? At the time judges had an opportunity to send a letter to government, to give their view and I read all those letters and I wanted to see what was the impact of a jury making a recommendation for mercy and a judge endorsing that. And then if the person was spared how long did they spend in custody, where did they go afterwards? At that time men who were sentenced to death for murder and whose conviction was commuted to penal servitude for life only served about seven or so years in custody. Men who are sentenced to life imprisonment for murder today spend more than twenty years in custody so there is an interesting question there to be addressed. The women who were sentenced to death, in all but one case were commuted to penal servitude for life, and didn’t spend as long as the men in prison. They were transferred to another institution, often to a religious run institution, and they could spend extensive periods of time there. I looked at the decision making behind the clemency process—what factors did the government

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weigh up when it was deciding if the law should take its course? Should the president be advised to commute the sentence and how long did they spend in prison? And what happened to them post release? The project gave a fascinating insight into what were the priorities of judges and juries and how they overlapped with the government of the day when they were trying to decide a case. Recommended Readings O’Donnell, I. (2017). Justice, mercy, and caprice: Clemency and the death penalty in Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Current Work At the moment I am working on a study of how prisoner societies organise themselves in different jurisdictions and I was very lucky a couple of years ago that I was asked by a Spiritan Priest, Paddy Moran, to spend some time in Ethiopia where he had been working for many years and where the commander of the prison was a very open minded reformist individual. Paddy Moran wanted to know if there were any suggestions I might be able to make based on my experience in other parts of the world that the commander might be encouraged to think about. So I spent some time out there and I was really struck by how harmonious an institution it was despite the fact—or maybe because of the fact—that there were very few staff; there were about 2200 prisoners and about 35 staff on duty at any one time. The prisoners were in a compound on their own and they organised their own lives, they were almost all working. Importantly the prisoners had an imperative to work because if they had a family outside and they couldn’t provide for them starvation was a possibility because Ethiopia is a terribly poor country. So the prisoners are all working, and the bank came to the prison about twice a week and the prisoners lodged their cash. I was particularly interested in the code of conduct that the prisoners had drawn up for themselves. They had their own constitution, that they put together after consultation and in collaboration with the prison authorities, and it is really a rule book for their daily lives that covers everything from personal hygiene to escape attempts. There were aspects of how the prison was organised that really fascinated me, here you had a lot of prisoners in a country that is very

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materially deprived but who are organising their lives in a really sophisticated way, so I was fascinated by that and I am going to extend that study into looking at other kinds of prison societies in other jurisdictions, so that’s what I will be working on for the next little while. Recommended Readings O’Donnell, I. (2019). The society of captives in an Ethiopian prison. The Prison Journal, 99(3), 267–284.

Irish Criminology I think it’s great in Ireland to see the number of people who are working in criminology. I suppose 25 or 30 years ago when I started working in this area it was possible to keep on top of everything because there was so little happening, there were very few criminology programmes available. There was no Institute of Criminology, like we have here in UCD, there were very few people working full time, probably no one working full time in the area, but a small number of people who were doing very good work. There was a small interest in the area but recently we have had an explosion in interest, so I think that is a really positive development. I think what seems to be happening in Ireland at the moment is there is a lot of growth but it is at the level of university courses, there is research going on of course there is, but I think there is a lot of remedial work to be done. We know very little about how prison societies in Ireland are organised, there has been very little in-depth work. We know very little about sentencing so there is a need for big quantitative study of crime trends and of sentencing practice. We did a big study on recidivism in UCD in 2008, maybe it’s time to go back to that again. We need to do these big quantitative studies and I think that these studies are so important because people have so little confidence in the official data. The Garda figures have very little credibility and it is so important for researchers to do what they can to create a context where we are working with data that we trust because it is reliable and valid. I think there is a need still for a lot of remedial work and I think it is an area of criminology and criminal justice where there is scope for fascinating research, looking at Ireland as a sort of a case study, to see where developments that have taken place in other countries might have different outcomes if they were tried here and not to slavishly copy or import legislation policies from

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other countries, which is what we have tended to do, to think in a really critical way about what kind of approaches might work best here. Maybe exporting some good ideas from here to other contexts but I think the way the tradition is developing is toward undergraduate education which I hope isn’t at the cost of doing this kind of fundamental research because although the discipline has grown there still aren’t that many people that are working in it, maybe a small handful in each of the universities, and if their energy is to be put into teaching, particularly at the undergraduate level I think that might have the consequence of impeding the progress on the research front that is still needed. Recommended Readings O’Donnell, I. (2011). Criminology, bureaucracy and unfinished business. In M. Bosworth & C. Hoyle (Eds.), What is criminology? Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Donnell. I., Baumer, E. P., & Hughes, N. (2008). Recidivism in the Republic of Ireland. Criminology and Criminal Justice, 8(2), 123–146.

Barriers to Research In Ireland, it’s not that it is difficult to get hold of the data, I think it is just what confidence can we place in the data. So, for example, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) has a lot on recorded crime but because we don’t really know a lot about crimes that are reported but not recorded, and because there are so many flaws with the recorded data, it is really not access to the material that is problematic, it is the quality of the material that we are given access to. On the prison side of things and in terms of probation there has been a real improvement in terms of access and I think that has to do with a kind of opening up of those agencies and forward thinking on behalf of their directors and that’s been terrific. So I wouldn’t say it is so much a difficulty getting access to information, even on the historical research that I have done, the Department of Justice has been open to making certain files available, with certain caveats of course. It is not so much access to information, it’s creating an awareness within funding bodies that important work takes time, and it costs money. So if there is a question about whether a particular programme [intervention] works, to take a criminal justice example, well it’s not going to be enough to give a bursary to a Masters student to look at that or even a PhD

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student. The Department of Justice is going to have to think along the lines of multi-annual funding on a significant scale so that we can initiate the kind of research programmes that we can stand over then for quite a while. But overall, one of the strengths of Criminology in Ireland is the fact that there is so much work to be done and that there is no shortage of areas of criminology to look into. I think it is a strength that people don’t become over specialised like they do other jurisdictions where the field is more advanced. I think that’s a real strength. Another strength is that we can have an annual meeting and that nearly everyone can go to it and that’s a significant strength too. So there are lots of positive things going on. The weakness I think is the wider funding environment and the difficulty of obtaining enough to do the big research projects. And probably one of the other weaknesses that is going to become more apparent over the years is a lack of good quality meaningful employment opportunities for people who have maybe done an undergraduate degree in criminology and a post-grad in criminology, and where does that lead to in terms of their career development? There are lots of people doing PhDs in all the universities, but there are very few opportunities for them in terms of lectureships and other appointments. While it’s fantastic that the discipline is growing this means that a lot of people are graduating without any obvious career path in front of them. But importantly, I’d like to see criminology develop not just as a subject that people take at undergraduate and graduate level, but as a field of research so that we can create a space to be ambitious in terms of the kind of research projects we take on and making sure that we bring them to a successful conclusion.

References Clarke, R. V. (1995). Building a safer society: Strategic approaches to crime prevention. Crime and Justice, 19, 91–150. Clarke, R. V. G. (Ed.). (1997). Situational crime prevention (pp. 225–256). Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press. Farmer, R., O’Donnell, I., & Tranah, T. (1991). Suicide on the London underground system. International Journal of Epidemiology, 20(3), 707–711. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Garland, D. (2001). Cultures of control. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hinde, R. S. E. (1977). Sir Walter Crofton and the reform of the Irish convict system, 1854–61—II. Irish Jurist, 12(2), 295–338.

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O’Donnell, I. (2004). Imprisonment and penal policy in Ireland. Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 43(3), 253–266. O’Donnell, I. (2011). Criminology, bureaucracy and unfinished business. In M. Bosworth & C. Hoyle (Eds.), What is criminology? Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Donnell, I. (2014). Prisoners, solitude, and time. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Donnell, I. (2016). The survival secrets of solitaries. The Psychologist, 29, 184–187. Available online at https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume29/march-2016/survival-secrets-solitaries. O’Donnell, I. (2017a). Justice, mercy, and caprice: Clemency and the death penalty in Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Donnell, I. (2017b). Ireland’s shrinking prison population. Irish Criminal Law Review, 27 (93), 70–77. O’Donnell, I. (2019). The society of captives in an Ethiopian prison. The Prison Journal, 99(3), 267–284. O’Donnell, I., Baumer, E. P., & Highes, N. (2008). Recidivism in the Republic of Ireland. Criminology and Criminal Justice, 8(2), 123–146. O’Donnell, I., & O’Sullivan, E. (2020). Coercive confinement: An idea whose time has come? Incarceration, 1(1). O’Sullivan, E., & O’Donnell, I. (2007). Coercive confinement in the Republic of Ireland: The waning of a culture of control. Punishment & Society, 9(1), 27–48. O’Sullivan, E., & O’Donnell, I. (Eds.). (2012). Coercive confinement in Ireland: Patients, prisoners and penitents (p. 250). Manchester: Manchester University Press. UNODC. (2015). United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the treatment of prisoners (the Nelson Mandela Rules) 1. Available online at https://www. unodc.org/documents/justice-and-prison-reform/Nelson_Mandela_Rules-Eebook.pdf.

CHAPTER 3

A Conversation with Dr Deirdre Healy

Abstract Seeking the relief of significant social issues is a theme that runs across the chapters in this volume, and in this chapter Dr Deirdre Healy emphasises how her own interest in Criminology was led by a desire to see the application of academic knowledge to prison and probation issues. Seeking a solution led approach, influenced by both forensic psychology and criminology, Dr Healy prioritises the voices of individuals with direct experience of the criminal justice system. Theoretical concepts that inform Dr Healy’s work such as recidivism, dehumanisation, othering and social identity are also discussed in this chapter. She traces her academic journey from its psychological origins and documents the influence of key authors on her work. In this chapter she also speaks about new methods in researching criminology and how innovative qualitative methods serve the discipline. Keywords Probation · Practice · Desistance · Voice · Hibernian exceptionalism

In the discipline of criminology, given its theoretical origins in sociology and in particular the influence of social theory, we are often less preoccupied with the subject—the individual actor—than one might expect. Summed up in the facetious quote ‘if you want to know why he did © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 O. Lynch et al., Reflections on Irish Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60593-3_3

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it, don’t ask a criminologist’ (Jefferson 2002, p. 149) the limited and inadequate conceptualisations of the subject in criminology is apparent. This gap, even in light of the critical awakening in criminology and even with the inclusion of the offender in Young’s square of crime (Lea 2016), was left to be filled by psychology, a role that was reluctantly shouldered. The contribution of psychology to the discipline of criminology has always been somewhat controversial, however, increasingly we are seeing true interdisciplinarity overcome this tension. Rather than researchers and practitioners remaining in their disciplinary silos, we see cross disciplinary training becoming the norm, we see the integration of or at least reconciling of psychological theories with social theory and we see the cross fertilisation of methods, particularly data collection and data analysis. Following the advice of Horney (2006, p. 14) where she advocates that ‘criminologists [to] take into account human complexity as we construct our theories on crime and delinquency’ criminologists in Ireland are doing just that. Dr Deirdre Healy, coming from the psychological tradition and influenced particularly by forensic psychology very much epitomises such interdisciplinarity in her work. Her training in both psychology and criminology as well as her work with practitioners has ensured she brings together the subject, the ecology and the system in her work on Probation. Attending to real world problems and the relief of significant social issues is a theme that runs across a number of the chapters in this volume, for Dr Deirdre Healy it is no different. In this chapter, she emphasises that her own interest in criminology was led by a desire to see the application of academic knowledge to prison and probation issues. Seeking a solution led approach, Dr Healy recognised the importance of having those individuals who directly experienced the criminal justice system contribute to how we might imagine change in this field. Attending to the voices of those who are marginalised in society was a key issue for her research and she discusses how giving space so that all individuals are heard in society, but also that society listens to these voices is vital. Theoretical concepts that inform Dr Healy’s work such as recidivism, dehumanisation, othering and social identity are discussed in this chapter and she traces her academic journey from its psychological origins and documents the influence of key authors on her work. In this chapter Dr Healy also speaks about new methods in researching criminology and how innovative qualitative methods might serve the discipline.

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Biography Dr Deirdre Healy is Director of the Institute of Criminology and Associate Professor at the Sutherland School of Law, in University College Dublin. Her teaching at UCD covers desistance and criminological theory. She completed her Ph.D. in UCD, where she developed an interest in imprisonment and its alternatives and researched crime and punishment in Ireland. Dr Healy is currently involved in researching the oral history of probation services in Ireland, which aims at integrating views on the service from the point of view of both staff and users. She is also a member of COST—Action on Offender Supervision in Europe, a European Union Initiative which wants to connect researchers and institutions in Europe on topics of relevance and to build a network around this work. Among Dr Healy’s recent published works there are ‘The Dynamics of Desistance: Charting Pathways through Change’ and the ‘Routledge Handbook of Irish Criminology’. Suggested Readings from Prof. Healy Healy, D., Hamilton, C., Daly, Y., & Butler, M. (Eds.). (2015). The Routledge handbook of Irish criminology. Abingdon: Routledge. Healy, D. (2020). From Celtic Tiger to Celtic Phoenix: Exploring the relationship between anomie and crime in Ireland. Deviant Behavior, 41(1), 70–86. Healy, D. (2010). The dynamics of desistance: Charting pathways through change. London: Willan.

The Path to an Academic Life I studied psychology and philosophy in Trinity College Dublin and in second or third year, I started to think about my future, what I would like to do afterwards. The common route for psychology students is to go into practice as a clinical psychologist, but this career didn’t quite interest me, so I was a little bit at sea as to where I wanted to go. I had an idea in my mind of what kind of job I’d like, or at least the boxes I’d like to tick, and when we were given options about what final year subjects we would like to study, one of the options was forensic psychology and as soon as I saw that it clicked with me instantly. I knew that it was what I wanted to do afterwards. So, once I finished my degree I did a little bit

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of work experience, just to make sure that I was happy with my choice of field, and during that time I applied for a Ph.D. over in UCD where I am based now. Criminology was so new in Ireland at the time, there were no established career pathways, but luckily the Institute of Criminology had been set up in the previous year or two and one of my lecturers knew about it and she suggested I speak to the director who was Peter Young at the time and that’s what I did. For me the Ph.D. in Criminology made me realise that this is where I belong and since then research has always been my first love. But even when I was studying psychology I was always thinking about the practical usages of knowledge. It is all very well to be in an academic setting with other academics which is great and wonderful for us but I also wanted to do something that had practical usages and applications. Probation interested me at that time because there was a huge focus among policymakers and politicians on imprisonment as the solution, the only solution, to the crime problem. So, I thought it would be really interesting to look at probation as an alternative to custody and as a sanction in its own right. I was also interested to hear what people under supervision thought about their experience, so that was really my starting point for my Ph.D. research. I suppose what motivated me was wanting to learn directly from people who had the experience of supervision and realising there must be other, more effective ways to deal with crime than imprisonment. That is what attracted me to the subject in the first place and what drew me into doing the Ph.D. later on. For Information UCD Institute of Criminology: https://www.ucd.ie/criminol/.

Becoming a Criminologist Criminology ticked all the boxes; firstly, it was varied, no experience was the same, day by day was very, very different so it was never boring. But more importantly it had a social value. I was very struck even at a young age by the plight of people who were marginalised, maybe treated as outcasts in society, perhaps people who were drug addicts or people who had committed a crime. There was a sense that they were different from the rest of us, that they didn’t deserve the same support as the rest of us and that never sat well with me. I always wanted to hear more about

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people’s experiences, and to help give them a voice to a certain extent. Obviously, I was doing interviews throughout my Ph.D. research and that was a way to give people a voice, albeit filtered through my own world view. I suppose it wasn’t a direct voice, but I really wanted their voices to be recognised and to be heard by people in public debates. I really wanted to get their perspectives into those debates and to humanise them in the eyes of the public. I know even from speaking to people outside academia who have read my work and who are not familiar with the area at all, they would often say ‘wow these people are articulate, they are really intelligent, you know they seem like good people’ and they were almost always surprised by that. Ultimately, I felt my job was partly done even just by making people think differently about a group that was marginalised. And in the literature that I was reading most used recidivism as the outcome measure, but this seemed very flawed to me because it was very binary, you know, you reoffend or you don’t. There are many cases where people are offending less often or committing less serious offences, so it didn’t seem like the right measure. Also, from what I had learned at that time, I felt it was quite narrow—whether someone was still offending or not. If someone had stopped offending, but was still suffering from addiction problems or homelessness, could you call that a success? So I was grappling with these issues and my supervisor, Prof. Ian O’Donnell, then recommended that I look at Shadd Maruna’s book ‘Making Good’ and as soon as I read it—it was like a lightbulb went off in my head and suddenly I said ‘yes, desistance is what I am interested in studying’. Recommended Reading Maruna, S. (2001). Making good: How ex-convicts reform and rebuild their lives. Chicago: American Psychological Association.

Contributions to the Field I would describe my work as sitting in maybe three research areas, the first is desistance. Desistance is really the process of how people stop offending and it involves a lot of different factors sometimes independent of the person and sometimes internal to the person such as agency, hope, motivation and coping skills. It involves social aspects as well, the idea that desistance is not just up to the individual, society has to help

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them by providing opportunities to change. Secondly, I was interested in the probation supervision experience as viewed from the perspective of people on probation and also from the perspective of people who work as probation officers. The third area I am interested in is victimology. Victims are often regarded as the polar opposite of offenders. So how can you do research that focuses on victims and also look at offenders’ experiences? But I would argue and people in the field would agree, that these research interests are not incompatible but rather complementary. For instance, offenders can also be victims and research suggests that people who commit crime have a high rate of victimisation. So, it is not just victims vs offenders, they may be part of the same population. Most importantly, the main thing that victims want to come out of the criminal justice process is a reduction in future offending and a reduction in future victimisation. So, a criminal justice approach that helps to reduce offending has benefits for victims and offenders. For me, the two areas are quite compatible even though on the surface they may not look like they are. Suggested Readings Healy, D. (2015). Desistance, recidivism, and reintegration. In The Routledge handbook of Irish criminology. Abingdon: Routledge. Hart, W., & Healy, D. (2018). ‘An inside job’: An autobiographical account of desistance. European Journal of Probation, 10(2), 103–119. Carr, N., Healy, D., Kennefick, L., & Maguire, N. (2013). A review of the research on offender supervision in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Irish Probation Journal, 10, 50–74. Fitzgibbon, W., & Healy, D. (2017). Lives and spaces: Photovoice and offender supervision in Ireland and England. Criminology and Criminology Justice, 19(1), 3–25.

One piece of work on probation that I published—the Lives and Spaces article—grew out of a research network, a COST Action project called Offender Supervision in Europe which was chaired by Fergus McNeill and Kristel Beyens. The network was set up to explore the experiences of probationers and probation officers as well as the legal and policy situation across Europe. So researchers from each European country participated in working groups that focused on different aspects of offender supervision, and I joined the ‘experiencing supervision’ working group. One of

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my colleagues was Wendy Fitzgibbon, who is now at the University of Leicester, and she came up with this fantastic idea of using photovoice as a way to study the supervision experience. The photovoice process, for those who aren’t familiar with it, began with us asking a group of men who were on probation to go out and take photographs that represented their experience of supervision. We developed the photos, and then laid the photos out in front of the men on the table and they discussed why they took those particular photos. They also gave the photos captions so you have the photography but also the voice aspect of it as well. Ultimately the purpose of this method is to convey people’s experiences of supervision to policymakers so we held an exhibition of the photographs afterwards. In the Irish case, we exhibited the pictures to audiences of policymakers, practitioners and judges in two different sites in Dublin. Wendy created this project within the context of the COST Action and she completed a number of pilot studies in England, Scotland and Germany with other colleagues from the network. Because I was particularly interested in the results I asked her to come to Ireland to duplicate the study with me. So, we conducted the study in a Dublin based probation programme over a number of days and we produced a huge number of photographs highlighting the different experiences of supervision. Recommended Reading Offender Supervision in Europe (COST Project): https://www.offenders upervision.eu. Fitzgibbon, W., & Stengel, C. M. (2018). Women’s voices made visible: Photovoice in visual criminology. Punishment & Society, 20(4), 411– 431.

Giving Voice---Methods in Criminology Photo voice was challenging to a certain extent for me. I would not consider myself a very visually minded person and the thing that struck me most was that, while we were still in the working groups in the COST Action, we went out to take photographs that we thought would represent supervision. I went out thinking that I wouldn’t be able to capture anything meaningful. Yet, when I went out I suddenly saw the world in a very different way. I was able to pick out images that to me reflected

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how I saw supervision. So even though I was going outside my comfort zone, what really interested me about this methodology was its potential to enable people to explore issues from a different perspective and maybe even discover latent talents that they didn’t know they had. I certainly didn’t know I had that capacity before I did it so that was really the major attraction to me but at the same time of course it was challenging because it was very different. It is one thing to sit down with a questionnaire and ask your set list of questions but photovoice is more open ended. Participants have more control over the process so they decide what photos they want to take and they are in charge of what is important in the research. It is challenging in a way to adopt a more collaborative approach to research and to work as a co-researcher with people. It is a very different way of doing research and I have to say I really enjoyed the whole experience. I have interviewed people about their experiences under supervision and you get certain information from that. But when these men went out and took photos about their experiences, they took photos about specific aspects of probation that they found helpful—say for example, the kind of support provided by probation officers or other workers in education and training—that was consistent with research I had done in the past. But they also brought in some extra things about the context of supervision; for example, what it is like to live in their communities, what their families are like and so on. It was represented quite visually and it was really enlightening because you really see what it is like to stop offending and undergo probation in a particular social context. They took photos of homelessness, of locations where people had been murdered, alcohol, gambling. All of these kinds of things show the context and the challenges surrounding the supervision experience, much more than an interview would. I think the other thing that really showed up that we may not have seen otherwise was that it was not just probation on its own—you have to look at supervision as part of a process. This process might start before somebody is sentenced and what really struck me was that a lot of participants talked about the role of lawyers and how helpful they had been in terms standing up for them, getting them the help they needed before sentencing and that’s another area I think that hasn’t been researched extensively—the role of lawyers beyond just defending their client in court. Lawyers can actually play an important role in desistance and in facilitating effective supervision as well. So, it is all these extra things that you wouldn’t perhaps get if you had your structured questionnaire in front of you.

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Current Projects I have a number of projects on the go at the moment. One that I am currently working on is in relation to the Probation Service. I am working with Louise Kennefick from Maynooth University on an oral history of the Probation Service, which is funded by the Fitzpatrick Family Foundation. We are interviewing people who started work as probation officers from the 1960s and we are also interviewing people who started work every decade since then. Over the next few weeks, we are going to start interviewing people who were on probation during the same timeframe and what we are hoping to do is produce an oral history of the Probation Service in Ireland from the 1960s to the present day, supported with archival research. The project offers a different angle on the areas of interest I have had over the last ten years or so.

Key Influences and Contributions I find the issue of what is influential quite challenging to think about; first of all, what do we mean by influential because you know it can be measured in so many ways—is it the number of citations an article receives, is it that the findings have been used to aid policymaking? Or is it because someone who is working in the field or has been subject to supervision comes up and says ‘you know that research really represented my true experience’? So if I was trying to figure out one piece of my work that covers all those things, I would have to say my book ‘The Dynamics of Desistance: Charting Pathways Through Change’ which was published in 2010. It arose out of my Ph.D. research and included findings from a postdoctoral study that I completed a few years later. And in terms of influence, criminology in Ireland is such a vibrant field at the moment. But of course the main person I would have to mention as having a major influence on the field of Irish criminology is my colleague Ian O’Donnell who has done a lot of influential work over many years. He has contributed hugely to establishing the field in Ireland and has shown that Irish research can make a significant contribution to international literature. One of the things that really strikes me about his work is that it manages to create a bridge between the Irish experience and the international literature. That is a model I am trying to adopt in my own research as well because I do think that the Irish experience is very interesting for international audiences. Maybe we don’t always appreciate that

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enough and I think Ian has done a really good job of advancing the field in Ireland and also acting as an ambassador for Irish criminology abroad. And Ian wrote an article maybe fifteen years ago, and he described Criminology as being in its infancy and it was. There was certainly a lot of work to be done to bring Irish criminology to a level where it is actually vibrant and prospering. But I think, even in the last five years, a lot has happened to the point where you could describe Irish criminology as being in its adolescence and that is certainly where I think it is. In a book I co-edited with Clare Hamilton, Michelle Butler and Yvonne Daly, the Routledge Handbook of Irish Criminology, we tried to map Irish Criminology in the intervening years. I feel on the one hand the field has moved on a lot from where it was in 2000, but I suppose it still has a long way to go too. In terms of what’s next, that’s again a hard question to answer, because I think each generation of criminologists can bring something new to the table, so the questions that my generation is interested in may not be the focus of the next generation. All I can I say really is that I look forward to seeing the new angles they take on the subject. Recommended Readings O’Donnell, I. (2005). Crime and justice in the Republic of Ireland. European Journal of Criminology, 2(1), 99–131. Healy, D., Hamilton, C., Daly, Y., & Butler, M. (Eds.). (2015). The Routledge handbook of Irish criminology. Abingdon: Routledge.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Irish Criminology The first strength of the field is the Irish angle, that it is in fact Irish. That might sound like an odd thing to say but the idea of Irish exceptionalism or Hibernian exceptionalism as it is called quite often, gives us a really strong starting point for looking at the generalisability of theories. Whether it is theories on punitiveness or desistance or probation supervision, it is important to really investigate those theories to see if they have international relevance or are specific to a particular jurisdiction. Often when you read the literature from the countries that lead criminology internationally—America, the UK—researchers often talk about their findings as if they are universally relevant which isn’t always the case. So, looking at things through an Irish lens can provide a different angle. Just to give one example—in Ian O’Donnell’s work, he created a concept

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called ‘coercive confinement’ which applied to anyone who was involuntarily confined, whether it was in a prison, a psychiatric institution, a Magdalene Laundry and so on. He used that concept to analyse the architecture of confinement but to trouble the international consensus about the increase in punitiveness, the rising prison populations. He pointed out that if you include all these other institutions as well as the prison in your analysis, then you actually find that the population in confinement has shrunk rather than grown in the last fifty years, certainly in Ireland. So one of the major strengths of Irish criminology is the use of the Irish experience to interrogate international theories and frameworks. I think another strength is that it is quite multidisciplinary, so it’s not narrowly focused on law or sociology or psychology. It is a combination of several different disciplines. I enjoy the experience of discovering something very interesting in the literature and then hearing criminologists from another disciplinary background, such as law, speak about it and they have a completely different take on it. It’s fantastic. And in terms of weaknesses I will probably say the same things that everybody says. There isn’t a lot of funding around for people to do research and that is always going to be a problem in determining the kind of research people can do. Having said that, it is kind of a strength as well as it does mean that we have a certain level of independence, that people might be able to research topics they couldn’t study if we worked under a different framework or in a different environment. I think another problem for people is access. You know, there are some organisations that are very open to research, they are quite happy for people to come in and do a piece of research on their work but there are others that would find that less acceptable, which makes it harder to research certain topics. So, researchers have to think why is it that we are having trouble getting access to information? Maybe there is something that we need to do to make that relationship work better you know in the interests of everyone concerned. Sometimes there are very good reasons why organisations can’t or don’t want to facilitate research. It could be lack of resources, for instance: sometimes it can be quite resource intensive to facilitate a research study. Finally, on the island there is a lot of talk at the moment about how we are going to see the relationship between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland become more difficult. I would like to see us have more discussions, and collaborations between colleagues north and south

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of the border. I think that there are a lot of differences as well as similarities between the two jurisdictions. We have the North South Irish criminology conference which is a collaboration between north and south so I would like to see that continuing. I’d also like to see more comparative work being done maybe to really to establish a kind of a Hibernian criminology as a recognised international field. Recommended Readings O’Sullivan, E., & O’Donnell, I. (2007). Coercive confinement in the Republic of Ireland: The waning of a culture of control. Punishment & Society, 9(1), 27–48.

Bibliography Carr, N., Healy, D., Kennefick, L., & Maguire, N. (2013). A review of the research on offender supervision in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Irish Probation Journal, 10, 50–74. Fitzgibbon, W., & Healy, D. (2017). Lives and spaces: Photovoice and offender supervision in Ireland and England. Criminology and Criminology Justice, 19(1), 3–25. Fitzgibbon, W., & Stengel, C. M. (2018). Women’s voices made visible: Photovoice in visual criminology. Punishment & Society, 20(4), 411–431. Hart, W., & Healy, D. (2018). ‘An inside job’: An autobiographical account of desistance. European Journal of Probation, 10(2), 103–119. Healy, D. (2020). From Celtic Tiger to Celtic Phoenix: Exploring the relationship between anomie and crime in Ireland. Deviant Behavior, 41(1), 70–86. Healy, D. (2015). Desistance, recidivism, and reintegration. In The Routledge handbook of Irish criminology. Abingdon: Routledge. Healy, D. (2012). Advise, assist and befriend: can probation supervision support desistance? Social Policy & Administration, 46(4), 377–394. Healy, D., Hamilton, C., Daly, Y., & Butler, M. (Eds.). (2015). The Routledge handbook of Irish criminology. Abingdon: Routledge. Horney, J. (2006). An alternative psychology of criminal behavior: The American society of criminology 2005 presidential address. In Recent developments in criminological theory (pp. 111–128). Abingdon: Routledge. Jefferson, T. (2002). For a psychosocial criminology. In R. Hogg & K. Carrington (Eds.), Critical criminology (p. 149). London: Willan.

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Lea, J. (2016). Left realism: A radical criminology for the current crisis. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 5(3), 53–65. O’Donnell, I. (2005). Crime and justice in the Republic of Ireland. European Journal of Criminology, 2(1), 99–131. O’Sullivan, E., & O’Donnell, I. (2007). Coercive confinement in the Republic of Ireland: The waning of a culture of control. Punishment & Society, 9(1), 27–48.

CHAPTER 4

In Conversation with Prof. Claire Hamilton

Abstract Prof. Hamilton was involved in the first MA criminology in Ireland and her origins in the faculty of Law in Trinity College Dublin informed her work on this degree. Importantly, Claire’s practice experience was important in the development of Criminology programmes, because in the early days of the field in Ireland, practitioners, including Gardai, social workers were a significant part of the student body. Prof. Hamilton’s academic work is informed by her legal training, but she also draws significantly from the sociological literature on Culture(s) of Control and she applies this to a range of cases including human rights and counter terrorism as well as securitisation more broadly. In this volume, Prof. Hamilton also refers to a theme that is prominent among other contributors and that is the issue of metrics and quantifiable variables and how in a jurisdiction like Ireland measurement might be addressed. Keywords Moral panic · Law · Garland · Counter terrorism · Securitisation

The foundations of criminological thinking in Ireland can be traced to the work of key authors such as Paul O Mahony, Ivana Bacik, Kieran Mc Evoy, Ciaran Mc Cullagh, Ian O Donnell, Caroline Fennell, John Brewer and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 O. Lynch et al., Reflections on Irish Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60593-3_4

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others, but as a discipline in its own right, the field began to take shape with the emergence of academic programmes of study in criminology. Prof. Hamilton was involved in the development of the first MA Criminology in Ireland and her origins in the faculty of Law in Trinity College Dublin informed her work on this degree. Prof. Hamilton’s academic work is informed by her legal training, but she also draws significantly from the sociological literature on Culture(s) of Control and she applies this to research on topics such as human rights and counter terrorism as well as securitisation more broadly. In this volume, Prof. Hamilton also refers to a theme that is prominent among other contributors and that is the issue of metrics and quantifiable variables and how in a jurisdiction like Ireland measurement might be addressed. In addition in her work Prof. Hamilton examines counter terrorism legislation (CT) and how it and other CT measures impact on society in the aftermath of terrorist attacks. Research on terrorism now routinely appears in criminological publications but this is a recent phenomenon. Much has changed in the relationship between the study of terrorism and political violence, and criminological research over the past thirty years. LaFree and Freilich (2017) trace the change to the impact of the Oklahoma Murrah Building bombing in 1995 where national, and international attention was fixed on the attack, but perhaps more importantly US federal funding immediately became available for research on terrorism. Prior to this criminological research on terrorism was rare. Unlike the USA, terrorism research (although that term would not be used) in Ireland did not have a moment of awakening like it did elsewhere with the Oklahoma bombing or 9/11, but in fact has long been a part of the scholarly landscape. As the contributors to this volume have demonstrated, research on terrorism and political violence in Ireland is complex and multidisciplinary and cannot be separated from the political history of the island. Lessons can and should be drawn from the Irish experience in this regard because political violence in Ireland is understood in relation to history, to sociology, to restorative justice, to law, to politics, to psychology and to international relations. Terrorism and political violence is not a topic in its own right, it is studied as part of the fabric of society, not as an isolated event whose etiology must be discovered. However, despite this, Ireland is not immune to the impact of 9/11 particularly on how we think about, study and legislate for terrorism. Prof. Hamilton has explored this impact, particularly in relation to contagion and counter terrorism laws and measures and discusses that work here.

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Bio Claire Hamilton is a Professor of Law at Maynooth University; before that, she worked in DIT and Queen’s University Belfast as a Lecturer, but she also previously trained as a barrister. Her research interests involve the relationship between punishment, counter terrorism policy and human rights. Her work on punitiveness is comparative in nature, and looks at Ireland, Scotland and New Zealand. She is a Fulbright Scholar and has worked on a number of projects including research on confidence in the Criminal Justice Systems in Ireland funded by the Department of Justice and Equality. Prof. Hamilton has also received funding from national and international bodies, such as the Irish Research Council and the European Union Horizon 2020 National Support Network. She is the author of numerous publications, among the most influential is her work on ‘Reconceptualising Penality: Towards a Multidimensional Test for Punitiveness’ and of course the foundational text on Irish criminology— the Irish Handbook of Irish Criminology. Recommended Reading Hamilton, C., & Berlusconi, G. (2019). Contagion, counter-terrorism and criminology: Justice in the shadow of terror. London: Palgrave. Healy, D., Hamilton, C., Daly, Y., & Butler, M. (2016). Routledge handbook of Irish criminology. London: Routledge.

Pathway to Criminology I studied Law and French in Trinity College Dublin, and then I went on and I did the Bar, and practiced as a Barrister but I decided it wasn’t for me. I had done a Masters in Criminology with Prof. Ivana Bacik in Trinity, and it really interested me, so then a job came up in Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), a rare position back then in criminology in Ireland. So I applied for it and got it and ended up staying there for eight years. Mairead Seymour and I set up the first MA in Criminology in the Republic of Ireland at that time, so I am very proud of that. Then I went on to work in Queen’s and now I am in Maynooth University. My Masters with Ivana Bacik was on moral panic. At the time, during the summer of 1996, in Ireland there was a package of legislation introduced following the murder of Veronica Guerin— and I was really

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interested in the politics of crime control so that really sort of grabbed my attention. I was particularly interested in seeing how it played out in practice. So it wasn’t so much the doctrinal side of the criminal law and criminal procedure that interested me, it was more about asking “why? why are these people here? why are they all from similar backgrounds, you know, these kinds of questions and how we should respond to them. I wondered is a criminal response the best response to what are clearly social problems. So these sorts of questions were bubbling away with me as I was practicing and I really wanted to explore them further; criminology provided a vehicle to do that. Recommended Reading King, C. (2017). Civil forfeiture in Ireland: Two decades of the proceeds of Crime Act and the criminal assets Bureau. In K. Ligeti & M. Simonato (Eds.), Chasing criminal money (pp 77–100). London, UK: Bloomsbury.

Key Influences So for me, the main influence has to be David Garland’s (2002) work on culture of control. Obviously it’s not just me, it has influenced a whole generation of researchers. I think there is this idea that we have witnessed this emergence of a culture of control in western societies, you know, it has some purchase definitely, but a limited purchase I’d say in some jurisdictions. For example, it may not exactly hold true in this jurisdiction in every respect and that was part of my doctoral thesis. But I do think, in a broad sense, if you talk about ‘cultures of control’ rather than a monolithic culture of control, it does have a reality, it does have a purchase and my thesis provided some empirical support for that in Ireland, Scotland and New Zealand. In terms of other scholars I suppose the work of Dario Melossi (2008) and the work of Liora Lazarus (2012), she is looking at the connection between counter terrorism and human rights, looking at how we can best stop what I see as a process of securitisation and how criminology can if you like work with human rights or bolster human rights discourses to try and stop this process of securitisation.

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Recommended Readings Garland, D. (2002). The culture of control: Crime and social order in contemporary society. University of Chicago Press. Melossi, D. (2008). Controlling crime, controlling society: Thinking about crime in Europe and America. Cambridge: Polity. Lazarus, L. (2012). The right to security—Securing rights or securitising rights? In R. Dickinson, E. Katselli, C. Murray, & O. Pedersen (Eds.), Examining critical perspectives on human rights (pp. 87–106). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Situating Your Research In some ways my research looks disconnected, research on punishment and research on counter terrorism, but for me it is all connected, it all relates to what David Garland (2002) has described as the ‘sociology of punishment’. So, for example, I look at counter terrorism but what really interests me and what is driving my research is how securitisation is changing the nature of punishment. So to go back to Liora Lazarus (2012) she has got some really interesting ideas on how we are not talking about punishment any more, we are talking simply, in the counter terrorism context, about coercion. Basically, this is simply state-sponsored violence because it is outside the parameters of the criminal justice system. In effect we have shadow systems of justice through, for example in the UK we have control orders and Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Act (TPIMs) and so on. So I am very interested in that, in punishment and how it’s changing, how it’s evolving, how it’s shifting from punishment to security to coercion, how we have seen a kind of temporal shift as Lucia Zedner (2007) has talked about in the field of punishment to nearly pre-punishment, a kind of pre-emptive strike. So all these issues really interest me and that’s what is at the core of all my research. Recommended Readings/Background Information Zedner, L. (2007). Curtailing citizenship rights as counterterrorism. In B. Gould & L. Lazarus (Eds.), Security and human rights. Oxford: Hart.

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Home Office. (2016). Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Act. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/terrorism-preven tion-and-investigation-measures-act. Home Office. (2011). Control order powers. https://www.gov.uk/govern ment/speeches/control-order-powers.

Theoretical Contributions Punitiveness was the subject of my doctoral thesis. I looked at the new punitiveness in Ireland, Scotland and New Zealand over a thirty year period from 1976 to 2006. I was really interested in taking the idea of ‘culture of control’ and the conversation that David Garland had started with Culture of Control and applying it to smaller jurisdictions because it was focused around larger jurisdictions such as the UK and the USA. So essentially I collected data on a broad range of indices, around 44 variables, and I was trying to get away from the simplistic reliance on imprisonment rates as an indicator of punitiveness and I came up with some interesting findings. I think there was some support, some empirical support for the thesis that David Garland was putting forward in Culture of Control in that in all three jurisdictions there had been indicators of an increase in punitiveness, so sentence length in particular, penal intensity as they say rather than penal propensity or your likelihood of going to prison, had increased. For example, in Ireland these indicators had increased eightfold over that thirty year period, a really, significant increase. This was particularly the case for certain types of offenders— sex offenders and violent offenders— they had more stringent controls on bail, freedom of movement and post release restrictions and so on. So there was empirical support for the thesis but it was much more aligned with the idea of ‘cultures of control’ rather than ‘culture of control’. I found very different expressions of control in the three jurisdictions and conceptually what the contribution of the thesis was in terms of the need for a multidimensional measure of punitiveness, that the concept of punitiveness, if it had some validity and I argue that it did, had to be approached in a much more nuanced way. Also it had to be appreciated that, in line with the journey of the offender through the criminal justice system, we have to look at policing as much as we look at prisons and sentencing because the police can be punitive and policing can be experienced in a punitive way. So I was arguing very much for that multidimensional approach and not to forget what I would argue are the indices at the front end of the system, which because they are very often

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seen as the preserve of lawyers, are very often neglected by criminologists who tend to focus on the back of the system.

Contributions to the Field In terms of influence, the piece on reconceptualising penalty which is based on my doctoral research was published in the British Journal of Criminology. I don’t know if it’s been particularly influential, I mean it’s been cited certainly by some criminologists for whom I have tremendous respect, Suzanne Karstedt and so on, who are working in this area but certainly it’s one of the pieces I am most proud of, because it advances that argument that we need to do better really as criminologists in terms of the measurement of punishment in terms of the nuances in the criminal justice system and how it is experienced by the offender, that offenders travel through the system and they have had a long journey by the time they reach the end point of sentencing; as criminologists we need to respect that and reflect that in our work. Recommended Reading Adriaenssen, A., Paoli, L., Karstedy, S., Visschers, J., Greenfield, V. A., & Pleysier, S. (2018). Public perceptions of the seriousness of crime: Weighing the harm and the wrong. European Journal of Criminology, 17 (2), 127–150. Hamilton, C. (2015). Reconceptualizing penality: Towards a multidimensional measure of punitiveness. British Journal of Criminology, 54, 321–343.

Counter Terrorism Legislation in Ireland—The Past and the Present I did work on contagion and counter terrorism in the post 9/11 context and the countries I looked at were the UK, Poland and France but I see a lot of similarities with counter terrorism in Ireland. In terms of my writing I drew on the work of Shane Kilcommins and Barry Vaughan (2008) who had already written about contagion in the Irish context and there are a lot of parallels. The parallels which are continuing in the post 9/11 context are the fusion of terrorism with organised crime, so we had that of course in Ireland with the discourses on narco-terrorism and so on post 1996. And we also see that happening very clearly in France - the fusion of ideas of procedural standards that apply to terrorism being now being applied to organised crime and vice versa. So what we are seeing is this synergy developing between the two areas, as well as the rhetorical synergy

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in terms of the discussion on the two in public discourse and in political discourse. We’ve also seen, quite frankly, the abuse of counter terrorism legislation in terms of its application to ordinary offences and of course we had that in this jurisdiction, the abuse of the powers of detention being applied to ordinary offences, and we see that again quite clearly in France. So in France for example, the state of emergency powers were applied to drug offences, minor drugs offences and weapons offences, so they were applied very broadly. There were approximately four thousand measures and, I think I said it in the article, they only opened six counter terrorism cases and the rest were used for ordinary criminal justice offences. So the contagion is very real in that jurisdiction and has historically been very real here. In terms of the differences I think we’ve seen much more use of what I describe as ‘terrorism as a pick lock’, as a way of leveraging reforms. So in a period following a terrorist attack, we’ve seen governments opportunistically introducing legislation which ostensibly is to tackle terrorism, it’s a counter terrorism measure, but in reality has a much broader effect, and often in relation to mass surveillance. So, we’ve seen in France in 2015 they introduced their version of the Patriot Act as it was called, The Intelligence Act, which introduced very sweeping powers which were controversial, so they seized the moment there. Similarly, in the UK they introduced what was called ‘The Snoopers Charter’, again very controversial legislation in the period following a terrorist attack. So I think that’s a trend, that type of contagion is much more obvious to me in the post 9/11 period. Another key difference I think is, and this ties in with the culture of control, that because we‘ve seen a hardening of discourse in relation to serious offences in the last number of decades, the distance between what is ‘normal’ and what is ‘special’ is less. Clive Walker talks about this, that the plasticity of what is ‘normal’ and what is ‘special’, is so much more fluid. So we see very draconian provisions being applied to sex offenders, for example, to drug traffickers and maybe then the government borrowing those types of provisions and applying them to the terrorist arena. in the past you might have had borrowings only from the special arena, the counter terrorism to the ordinary, now we see again this kind of synergy or dialectic between the two, which is very interesting. Recommended Readings Vaught, B., & Kilcommins, S. (2008). Terrorism rights and the rule of law: Negotiating justice in Ireland. Devon: Willan Publishing.

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Howell, B. A. (2004). The making of the USA Patriot Act. The George Washington Law Review, 72, 1145–1207. (‘The Snoopers Charter’) Murphy, C. C. (2019). State surveillance and social democracy: Lessons after the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. Available at SSRN: https:// ssrn.com/abstract=3494880.

Terrorism as a Criminological Concern I think it is really interesting where criminology is at the moment, because I suppose it really has been traditionally intimately connected with the nation state, and been very much a project of the nation state: connected with government departments, relying on government data, but in relation to relatively mundane crime burglaries, property crime, etc. It hasn’t really looked beyond the borders of the nation state traditionally, and this has attracted huge criticism from the likes of Wayne Morrison (2006) and so on, really prominent criminologists. And I think, rightly so, he made the point that while the atrocities of the inter-war period were happening in Germany and other places, criminologists were holding conferences about every day crime like burglaries, so to some degree they were just ‘fiddling while Rome burned’ if you like. So I think criminology, given globalisation, is having to confront these issues now, and there’s been really a huge and impressive body of work emerge by the likes of Katja Aas and Mary Bosworth (2013) and so on, on Global Criminology and the impact of globalisation for criminology. We see a lot more now about international criminology, transnational criminology; all these terms are suddenly appearing and I think there has been an appreciation that we have to look outside our borders, that we can’t leave these issues to international relations scholars, to politics scholars, to public international lawyers, that we need to engage in these issues that are having an impact on crime domestically. Crime of course as an issue is becoming globalised, the problem of crime is a global problem and our response has to be global of course but I think beyond that as criminologists we need to think and connect with discourses around human rights, think about the ethics of a global criminology. What really interests me are questions around what is our ethical basis, is it a sort of cosmopolitan criminology that references human rights standards, or is there something more that human rights can contribute to that debate.

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Recommended Readings Morrison, W. (2006). Criminology, civilisation and the new world order. London: Routledge. Aas, K. F., & Bosworth, M. (2013). The borders of punishment: Migration, citizenship, and social exclusion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Irish Criminology In terms of influence and in my own area of research and someone I find myself citing all the time is Shane Kilcommins (2004). It may be just because our interests overlap so much but I think his work on counter terrorism in Ireland is really fantastic. I think his work on legal culture in Ireland is very important and I very much agree with that and indeed his work on victims is really important. I think he is a scholar that I really have a lot of regard for. Important work is being done all across the island, someone else who comes to mind in terms of the sociology of punishment is of course Ian O’Donnell and his work with Eoin O’Sullivan on coercive confinement, I think that piece and indeed the book was a really important contribution to criminological scholarship, because again it challenged the conventional assumptions of what punishment is and where it ends and it simply doesn’t end at the criminal justice system. Very much tying in with Foucault’s (1977) work on this idea of the carceral archipelago. Certainly for me that work was really really important in terms of throwing down the gauntlet or posing a challenge to conventional assumptions about what punishment is and I think it is an important contribution to the sociology of punishment. Recommended Readings Kilcommins, S. (2004). Crime, punishment and the search for order in Ireland. Institute of Public Administration. O’Sullivan, E., & O’Donnell, I. (Eds.). (2012). Coercive confinement in Ireland: Patients, prisoners and penitents. Manchester University Press. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.).

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New Directions in Irish Criminology Criminology in Ireland is expanding. It is really great to see so much expansion, you know particularly in University College Cork, also in the University of Limerick with the new programmes there, it’s really great to see. This is a personal observation but what has really given me a lot of energy is going to the North South Conferences that have been taking place recently, and going through the sessions, the papers that are being presented. They are not being presented, as they may have been in the past on ‘blackletter topics’, you know, doctrinal law or even if not doctrinal law, maybe criminal procedure or criminal justice related topics, you see now topics on pure criminological issues, based on theory, criminological theory, so it’s great to see criminology emerging from the shadow of law in Ireland. I really see that happening and as I say you see it evidenced in the type of papers that have been given at those annual conferences and that is really gratifying to see that, that’s really good. I think there’s a need for criminology to continue to work with law, I’m not suggesting in any way that there needs to be a parting of the ways, but it’s good to see it emerging in its own right as a discipline and with the undergraduate programmes, the new posts that are being advertised in criminology … these are all very positive signs. But we are obviously a small jurisdiction, so that in itself can be a problem because you don’t always have that critical mass that you need and I think that has led in the past to a sort of lack of infrastructure around criminology. So unlike Britain we don’t have a society, we don’t have a journal that’s affiliated with the society, so there’s a gap and it would be great to see a society for criminology. Of course we have the Association for Criminal Justice Research Development (ACJRD) which is wonderful but I think there is a space there for a society and a journal. Historically, I suppose as well there have been problems with a lack of data; we’ve had unreliable data being published by the criminal justice agencies, and that has been very challenging for anyone working in the area as very often you are working in this data vacuum that doesn’t exist in the UK because they are very good at keeping and publishing statistics. There has also been a lack of funding, justice funding, both of those issues are now being addressed by the Department of Justice and that’s great to see. So we have grant calls now for research being put out by the Department and they are taking steps to combine data and to share that with researchers which are really, really positive. So I think we are

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getting there but I think traditionally there’s been that lack of infrastructure, perhaps a lack of commitment to it, I think if we had that permanent infrastructure it would be to the benefit of everyone. Criminology in Ireland also has a number of strengths, I think because we are smaller, and this is the flip side of being small, it’s a very collegial environment, everyone knows everyone else, everyone does work together and I think that’s a real positive. Also, sometimes when you are dealing with a clean slate, that is really exciting you know, you can build. So unlike England where some areas have been very well-trodden and researched, you are dealing in Ireland with all these different issues, criminological issues that really are pretty much virgin territory, they haven’t been examined by researchers, you can take the international research and best practice and so on, and apply it to the Irish context. So that’s a very good position to be in I think, that’s very attractive for researchers, for new generations of researchers coming in that they have such scope and it is very exciting for someone like me as well and others who are working in this area, because they can build, because the demand is there. I think other disciplines don’t find themselves in that position, but we are in a position where there is demand for this from the student body and we have scope to innovate, so it’s exciting.

References Aas, K. F., & Bosworth, M. (2013). The borders of punishment: Migration, citizenship, and social exclusion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Adriaenssen, A., Paoli, L., Karstedy, S., Visschers, J., Greenfield, V. A., & Pleysier, S. (2018). Public perceptions of the seriousness of crime: Weighing the harm and the wrong. European Journal of Criminology, 17 (2), 127–150. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Garland, D. (2002). The culture of control: Crime and social order in contemporary society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hamilton, C. (2015). Reconceptualizing penality: Towards a multidimensional measure of punitiveness. British Journal of Criminology, 54, 321–343. Hamilton, C., & Berlusconi, G. (2019). Contagion, counter-terrorism and criminology: Justice in the shadow of terror. London: Palgrave. Healy, D., Hamilton, C., Daly, Y., & Butler, M. (2016). Routledge handbook of Irish criminology. London: Routledge. Home Office. (2011). Control order powers. https://www.gov.uk/government/ speeches/control-order-powers.

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Home Office. (2016). Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Act. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/terrorism-prevention-and-inv estigation-measures-act. Howell, B. A. (2004). The making of the USA Patriot Act. The George Washington Law Review, 72, 1145–1207. Kilcommins, S. (2004). Crime, punishment and the search for order in Ireland. Dublin: Institute of Public Administration. King, C. (2017). Civil forfeiture in Ireland: Two decades of the proceeds of Crime Act and the criminal assets Bureau. In K. Ligeti & M. Simonato (Eds.), Chasing Criminal Money (pp. 77–100). London, UK: Bloomsbury. LaFree, G., & Freilich, J. (Eds.). (2017). The handbook of the criminology of terrorism. London: Wiley Blackwell. Lazarus, L. (2012). The right to security—Securing rights or securitising rights? In R. Dickinson, E. Katselli, C. Murray, & O. Pedersen (Eds.), Examining critical perspectives on human rights (pp. 87–106). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Melossi, D. (2008). Controlling crime, controlling society: Thinking about crime in Europe and America. Cambridge: Polity. Morrison, W. (2006). Criminology, civilisation and the new world order. London: Routledge. Murphy, C. C. (2019). State surveillance and social democracy: Lessons after the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract= 3494880. O’Sullivan, E., & O’Donnell, I. (Eds.). (2012a). Coercive confinement in Ireland: Patients, prisoners and penitents (p. 250). Manchester: Manchester University Press. O’Sullivan, E., & O’Donnell, I. (Eds.). (2012b). Coercive confinement in Ireland: Patients, prisoners and penitents. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Vaught, B., & Kilcommins, S. (2008). Terrorism rights and the rule of law: Negotiating Justice in Ireland. Devon: Willan Publishing. Zedner, L. (2007). Curtailing citizenship rights as counterterrorism. In B. Gould & L. Lazarus (Eds.), Security and human rights. Oxford: Hart.

CHAPTER 5

In Conversation with Dr Jennifer O’Mahoney

Abstract In this chapter Dr O’Mahoney discusses the need to ensure the authenticity of the voices of victims and survivors and reflects that considerations around culture and power, do not necessarily reflect the experience of the individuals in those systems. Dr O’Mahoney reflects on the system which allowed the Magdalene Laundries to come into existence and survive for so long. Her framework of gendered violence aims at addressing the lack of historical analysis of the phenomenon of coercive control as well as the institutional silence around the Magdalene Laundries and similar institutions (such as mother and baby homes). In addressing such issues, Dr O’Mahoney stresses the importance of the application of a humanistic approach where narrative psychology allows for the survivor to disclose their experiences of abuse in the institutions, without disempowering them through forcing upon them a pre-existing system of expectations. Keywords Victims · Survivors · History · Magdalene · Voice · Institutions

Criminology has been variously described as a rendezvous discipline (Young 2003), a convergence, undisciplinary (Binder et al. 1987) and interdisciplinary. Young (2003) points out that criminology represents © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 O. Lynch et al., Reflections on Irish Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60593-3_5

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the livilness where different disciplines converge bringing social theory, psychology and law together but is not in fact a subject in its own right. These positions are variously represented by the contributors to this volume making an analysis of the question of criminology and particularly Irish criminology complex to say the least. However, adding to this issue is the existance of specialist areas, namely victimology and considering where and how these sub-fields or even sub-disciplines sit in relation to criminology. While there are an increasing number of sub-fields within Criminology, rather than being an esoteric concern, victimology has developed its own canon of work, experienced its own critical awakening and has developed its own associations and journals and continues to grow in breadth and depth. It is fair to say that the development of victimology has substantially influenced how we think about crime, offending and criminology more generally, whether the subject is understood as bounded by the traditional disciplinary structures of academia or as an activist pursuit concerned with the impact and harm of crime. The work of Dr Jennifer O’Mahoney, sits comfortably in a number of fields, and is influenced and defined by victimology, psychology, criminology, law, critical theory and anthropology. Her work has challenged the topdown processes that dominated early approaches to victimology where the victims were unseen, the approach was legalistic and definitions were normative. Her work examines the politicisation of victimhood, victims rights, activism, and restorative justice as she explores the experiences of victims of state and institutional abuse using a victims’ centred approach. Jennifer is part of a growing community of researchers in Ireland whose focus on victims, victims issues and victimology more generally is increasingly visible on the international stage and actively draws attention to key legacy as well as contemporary victims issues in Ireland. While criminological researchers face many challenges in their day to day work, victimologists face some unique data challenges from issues of data access, data collection to ensuring authenticity, visibility and voice for victims and survivors. In this chapter Dr O’Mahoney discusses the need to maintain the authenticity of the voices of victims and survivors and reflects on the fact that dominant narratives of culture and power, do not necessarily reflect the experience of the individuals who went through those power systems. Dr O’Mahoney reflects on the system that allowed the Magdalene Laundries to come into existence and to be maintained for so long. Her framework based on the notion of gendered violence, presents a structured elaboration of the Magdalene Laundries also drawing on an

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often absent historical analysis of the phenomenon. Dr O’Mahoney highlights the institutional silence that surrounds the story of the Magdalene Laundries and similar institutions. In addressing such issues, Dr O’Mahoney stresses the importance of the application of a humanistic approach where narrative psychology allows for the survivor to disclose their experiences of abuse in the institutions, without disempowering them through forcing upon them a pre-existing system of expectations.

Bio Dr Jennifer O’Mahony is currently a Lecturer in Waterford Institute of Technology. She is a psychologist by training. Prior to this, Dr O’Mahoney worked in University College Cork as a research assistant and tutor, and in Edinburgh University. She is involved in a number of projects around the research areas of victimology and trauma. Her work examines the contribution of oral history to our understanding of the Magdalene Laundries, and the abuse perpetrated against women and children. Dr O’Mahoney has been awarded funding from a number of different bodies, the most recent of these is linked to the SASCA project, a 24 month European research project financed by the Justice Department of the European Union; this work researches the impact of long term institutional abuses on children. Her publications revolve around the Magdalene Laundries and similar institutions, analysing issues of gender, history and culture and discussing how these allowed such institutions were allowed to exist and function in Ireland. Suggested Reading from Dr O’Mahoney O’Mahoney-Yeager, J., & Culleton, J. (2016). Gendered violence and cultural forgetting: The case of the Irish Magdalenes. Radical History Review, 2016(126), 134–146. O’Mahoney, J. (2018). Advocacy and the Magdalene Laundries: Towards a psychology of social change. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 15(4), 456–471.

Becoming a Criminologist? I would find it difficult to define myself as a criminologist, and I have been asked why I don’t define myself as a victimologist because my research would very much be around work on survivors and victims. I

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think the label victimologist is easier to refute because I think the word is heavily laden, I don’t particularly like the term ‘victim’ and ‘victimologist’ conveys something quite different to me than the work that I do. While my work certainly applies to criminology I think because I have always been defined in academia as a psychologist, that crossover has never been quite clear. I think that’s the case for a lot of people involved in criminological research, they don’t define themselves as criminologists unless they are in a department of criminology and it is specifically the type of work that they do, but actually their background is probably sociology, law, psychology and so forth. So I think my work naturally overlaps into criminology rather than me being or becoming a criminologist per say.

Key Influences The work that has most heavily influenced me is by people who wouldn’t necessarily define themselves as criminologists but I think their work can easily be seen as hugely relevant within the field. Going back to my PhD work, Robert Kozinets (2010) would have been very influential, he is actually a professor of journalism and he developed a procedure called ‘netnography’ which is the application of traditional ethnography into the online space and for use in an online forum. Initially this was used in business in terms of looking at marketing behaviour and consumer behaviour, but it has been utilised now much more broadly across a diverse range of the social sciences. I used it to look at our understanding around the habits of survivors seeking social support online, it was hugely important in that work. I think criminology at the moment and into the future is going to have to respond much more deeply to the development of technology both in terms of perpetrating criminal behaviour but also its impact on victims of harm and criminal behaviour. A huge amount of this activity is taking place online, so in that sense I think Kozinet’s (2010) work is hugely relevant to criminology. Also Rebecca Campbell (2008) as well, she is a Professor of Psychology and she writes a lot about rape culture, about legal responses in the USA to rape disclosure, and is again hugely relevant to criminology. More recently in my work I am looking at even more diverse fields, for example, David Chalmers (2017) is a philosopher and cognitive scientist and while he is quite philosophical in his writings and in the way he theorises about language, his work is very relevant. A large

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amount of the work that I do looks at language, so whether that language is online where words are the only communication that is being used because visible body language can’t be used and so forth, the language is the primary mode of communication. In addition, in day to day life, in storytelling, in disclosing victimhood, we are relying on language to frame experiences and to communicate, so the philosophy of language is extremely important. Chalmers (2017) as a cognitive scientist and a philosopher brings together both the what if, the why, and the how, the actual mechanics of what we are doing and how our brains respond to language and communication. So I found him extremely useful because he also bridges that artificial division between quantitative and qualitative research and I say it is artificial because I firmly believe it to be an imposed archaic division but Chalmers (2017) has a great way of bridging the gap between these two and arguing for critical realism as an approach which I have relied on quite heavily in my own work as well. Then the final person I would probably mention is Paul Bloom (2017) who is a psychologist at Yale, he wrote a book called ‘Against Empathy’, and his argument is that, empathy is in many ways quite damaging and that as professionals we should be moving more towards compassion and compassion combined with reason and if we use reason and intellect in our decision-making, this is how social change will occur. Empathy is damaging to ourselves, to our own psychology, but I don’t agree with him entirely, I think that there is room for empathy. But in terms of research rigour in methods is important and something that psychology does very well. It emphasises the importance of a very robust and a very clear methodology and it is something that qualitative work is only starting to respond to. I think criminology is in a very unique position to be able to create a much more open approach to the work a much more transparent approach and much more novel approach to methods so that when we are trying to convey what we are doing to the public, or when we are trying to convey information to encourage change in public policy, which criminology has been involved in for a very long time, we have the tools, the integrity and reliability to do that. Key Readings Kozinets, R. V. (2010). Netnography: Doing ethnographic research online. Los Angeles and London: Sage. Would have been very influential, he is actually a professor of journalism and he developed a procedure called ‘netnography’.

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Campbell, R. (2008). The psychological impact of rape victims. American Psychologist, 63(8), 702. Chalmers, D. J. (2017). The virtual and the real. Disputatio, 9(46), 309– 352. Bloom, P. (2017). Against empathy: The case for rational compassion. New York: Random House.

Research in the Field In my field data collection can be very problematic because I am dealing with people who have horrendous trauma memories or who have survived an exceptionally traumatic event or often events. Firstly, there are very serious ethical implications to the work that is being done, both regarding the integrity of the work and the obligation to do no harm to the participants, and in fact in victimological terms, to serve some useful advocacy or support role. The mechanics of ethics processes are at times cumbersome, and even out of date because they fail to capture the complexity of what we are doing in work like this, for example, the dual role of academic and advocate. So providing a platform for survivors voices, giving participants back ownership of their own voices, these are all part of the research process. I see my work as a platform for survivors to have their voices heard, not trying to hide them or narrowly categorise them. Now, you get pulled in two different directions because as academics there is an expectation to publish within narrow parameters and assimilate information and trying to do that while maintaining the authenticity of the participants voice is sometimes difficult. This is why I started the ‘Waterford Memories Project’ it is a way of putting the raw stories out there in an accessible way and letting the power of the stories be available in the individual’s own voices. Recommended Reading Waterford Memories project: https://www.waterfordmemories.com/home.

‘The Waterford Memories Project’ was something I started in response to the release of the 2013 report which examined state involvement in the Magdalenes Laundries. Now the report was heavily criticised by the Justice for Magdalenes research group and other survivor organisations

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for being too narrow in its remit, it only examined the complicity the Irish state had in the running of the laundries, but it did find that the Irish state was complicit. However, it found that the laundries were nonprofit making and this was highly contentious as survivors questioned how could they not be profit making when they had an unpaid workforce for 100 years and had contracts with Guinness, with local hospitals, with local psychiatric asylums and so forth. There was a strong backlash from survivors themselves because the remit of the report was not to make findings about the lived experience of the people in the laundries which the survivors found disrespectful because they took their time to tell their stories as part of the enquiry. Even worse, all of the archival evidence that was collated for that report is held by government and they refuse to release it. So in 2013 when the report was released a group of staff met at WIT because we work in the building which is the former Waterford laundry so there was a real desire to respond to the report in some way. This old laundary building that is not a part of the University, it doesnt have a plaque or a sign, there is nothing to document the history of what went on here. So I started initially just enquiring if anybody wanted to tell their story about their time here and it has grown since then. The other part of it was to really document the building itself. Losing the story of the building was always a risk because a number of Magdalen laundry buildings have been quietly demolished recently, for example in New Ross, without anybody really knowing it was taking place until it had occurred. There is a debate currently going on in Dublin about Sean McDermott Street, which is the only laundry that is currently owned by the Irish state, and how it should be utilised. It was earmarked to be turned into a hotel/apartments but there is a call for the creation of a museum or some sort of site of memory. This is a really interesting element in the history of penology and social control in Ireland and it is certainly a space where criminology researchers have a role—part criminology, part human geography, part archeology. Here at WIT it is quite unique because the building is so authentic, it looks like it did back in the 1940s, and 1950s. The site has the industrial school, the convent, the chapel and the Magdalene laundry itself, so in terms of our heritage I think it is extremely important that it is responded to and documented. We have run a couple of events where the public have been invited into the space, we have worked with our students here with performance and drama with my colleague Dr Kate McCarthy where we looked at how do you respond to historical events of trauma without

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recreating them. We don’t want to create an artificial replaying of the stories that the women have told so we want to think about how we meaningfully respond with a view to bring about social awareness and even social change. And great credit is due to the ‘Justice For Magdalenes Research Group’ for the political campaign they launched which resulted in achieving an apology from the Taoiseach Enda Kenny. This prompted me to reflect on how if we talk about social change as academics we have to by default look at what it means to be an activist, whether we define as an activist or not the reality is that the work we are doing is often being used in activist ways and being really reflective about what that means, and being honest about what we are trying to achieve. Recommended Reading Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee to establish the facts of State involvement with the Magdalene Laundries (also known as McAlesee Report) (2013): http://www.justice.ie/en/JELR/Pages/MagdalenR pt2013. Justice for Magdalenes Research: http://jfmresearch.com.

Contributing to the Field A recent paper I published in US journal ‘Radical History Review’ was an effort to explain the the social, economic and cultural systems that allowed the Magdalen Laundries and associated institutions to exist and thrive in Ireland. I think we have an expectation that the occurrence of these systems of control is self-evident with vague references to The Church and the State but within social sciences often there are historical gaps that explain how did this happen and what actually happened, and how was it facilitated. We have lived it in Ireland, we experienced these institutions, so when you have to explain it to an audience who is not Irish and does not have a framework of understanding based around the complex Irish cultural context it takes some work! One part of that publication was looking at Irish narratives of femininity, and the culturally bound notions that are explicit and implicit in that. In some ways it is unique to Ireland, unique in the way the state and religious institutions were so central to the formal and informal control of Irish society and women in particular. I think a gendered lens is still important because the experiences of gendered violence that occurred in state and religions

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institutions in Ireland; men and women in these institutions were not the same and they were treated differently. But overall in this work—it is about really looking at the strength of the survivor narratives told through an oral history approach, and the reason the oral history approach has such strength is that the survivors themselves tell the story as they want to tell the story. I suppose the way that I would see it is ensuring that we give representation and really kudos to the survivors who have broken the silence and that is extremely difficult, and for most of these people, it took them until their sixties or seventies or eighties to be able to tell their stories. So I think when we talk about social change in Ireland we have to be extremely honest about our past and who we are in terms of our identity before we can ever talk about moving forward in any real way, shape or form and I am often asked why don’t you leave this alone?, it’s history, it’s past and it’s been done but I think the survivors certainly don’t see this as being in the past, their children certainly don’t see it as being in the past. We know that trauma can be inter-generational, we know that people experience secondary trauma by being raised by somebody who has experienced trauma, so I think that I couldn’t disagree with the statement more than the past needs to stay in the past.

Current Research I am currently working on a project that sits at the intersection between advocacy, activism and academia and the possibilities for social change. I think every higher education institution in the country in its ethos has a statement around social change and community engagement because what we do here should be about engaging with the public and about social change. This engagement is happening as a movement in academia regardless of whether it is at the forefront of academic policy or not, it is happening. If we are taking funding from the public purse to do research it is publicly owned, and that means at every stage of the project, but it also means a new way of thinking about and dealing with data. So the silos and protectionism around data have to go.

Criminology in Ireland I think there are new voices contributing to this field and these new voices are key. I think we are all aware, especially in Ireland, of who everyone

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is and to a degree what everyone is doing—although sometimes we lose track. But the future of the field is in those new voices and the existing voices, those senior colleagues should be amplifying the work and voices of new contributors, opening doors for them—letting them be heard. But also, in Ireland, criminology is about what is outside academia, there are so many other stakeholders, the victims groups, the NGO’s, the social movements that have been so powerful in Ireland in recent years—and I am thinking about the people involved in the Repeal the 8th and the referendum for Gay marriage. It is definitely happening—the bringing together of all the stakeholder voices—but I think that we just all need to be aware of encouraging it as much as possible. This idea of nothing about us without us incorporates this idea and that is the way forward. In addition in Irish criminology there has always been a very strong focus on the need to speak to public policy, maybe not to the degree we see in the UK and the USA, but certainly it is relevant. And this idea of including all voices should not only be the way forward in academia but also in terms of who gets heard in terms of public policy influence. Another huge benefit of criminology in Ireland is that it is an all island affair, it is not the Republic of Ireland vs Northern Ireland, and there are very few fields I think that do this as openly and as comprehensively as criminology does. Even though we are dealing with two different legal systems and we are dealing with very different cultural frameworks, and rather than shying away from that as just being problematic and sticking with one approach, criminology on the island actively incorporates and deals with the tension and I think that that’s a huge benefit and should be something that other disciplines should pay more attention to. The weaknesses again I think are the same weaknesses that any branch of academia could be accused of and it is the lack of representative voices and again you can see clear movements to address this but I think that is one of the bigger issues in academia. Basically it comes own to a fundamental under representation of minority groups: people of colour, women, Minceiri groups. In addition, and it is part of where my own interest would be is moving from the very socio-legal focus of criminology to a more humanistic approach. Now that is my own bias being reflected but I see where the gaps are and it is the lack of the humanistic approach, the lack of the individual within the system.

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Recommended Reading Repeal the 8th Campaign: https://www.abortionrightscampaign.ie/cat egory/repeal-the-8th/. Campaign for gay marriage equality: https://www.iccl.ie/archive/yes-equ ality-the-campaign-for-civil-marriage-equality-formally-launches/.

Bibliography Binder, A., Klein, J. T., Bailis, S., & Miller, R. C. (1987). Criminology: Discipline or interdiscipline. Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies. Bloom, P. (2017). Against empathy: The case for rational compassion. New York: Random House. Campbell, R. (2008). The psychological impact of rape victims. American Psychologist, 63(8), 702. Chalmers, D. J. (2017). The virtual and the real. Disputatio, 9(46), 309–352. Kozinets, R. V. (2010). Netnography: Doing ethnographic research online. Los Angeles and London: Sage. Would have been very influential, he is actually a professor of journalism and he developed a procedure called ‘netnography’. O’Mahoney, J. (2018). Advocacy and the Magdalene Laundries: Towards a psychology of social change. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 15(4), 456–471. O’Mahoney-Yeager, J., & Culleton, J. (2016). Gendered violence and cultural forgetting: The case of the Irish Magdalenes. Radical History Review, 2016(126), 134–146. Young, J. (2003). In praise of dangerous thoughts. Punishment & Society, 5(1), 97–107.

CHAPTER 6

In Conversation with Dr Cheryl Lawther

Abstract While criminology can now be said to be based on a core literary canon, often Criminologists emerge from a range of disciplines, experiences and activist positions. Reflecting this, in this chapter Dr Cheryl Lawther speaks about her work at the intersection of politics and law, and the importance of grassroots activism and research and how it influences her teaching. Dr Lawther discusses her work, broadly defined as restorative justice, dealing with the past and transitional justice, and traces the influence of key theorists who inform her ongoing academic projects. She speaks about the inherent multidisciplinarity of her work, the international dimensions and the intersection of victims and perpetrators in truth and reconciliation initiatives. Finally, Cheryl describes the application of her work to a real world setting, how the findings from her projects can serve to alleviate some of the issues that exist in postconflict societies, and how academics can and must serve this advocacy purpose. Keywords Victims · Transitional justice · Truth and denial · Interdisciplinary

Criminology as a discipline can reasonably be said to be based on a core literary canon, however Criminologists emerge from a range of disciplines, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 O. Lynch et al., Reflections on Irish Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60593-3_6

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experiences and activist positions. Dr Cheryl Lawther speaks about her work at the intersection of politics, law and transitional justice, and the importance of grassroots activism and research and how it influences her teaching. Dr Lawther discusses her work broadly self-defined as restorative justice, dealing with the past and transitional justice, and traces the influence of key theorists who inform her ongoing academic projects looking at issues of denial, power and victimisation. She speaks about the inherent multidisciplinarity of her work, the international dimensions in terms of post-conflict societies and the intersection of victims and perpetrators issues in truth and reconciliation initiatives. Finally, Dr Lawther describes the application of her work to a real-world setting, how the findings from projects can serve to alleviate some of the issues that exist in post-conflict societies, and how academics can and must serve this advocacy purpose. While transitional justice has only emerged as an area of study in its own right in the recent past, it has quickly divorced from its heritage as a sub-specialism of political science to incorporate inputs from psychology, sociology, anthropology, law and criminology (McEvoy et al. 2017). Importantly, like other areas of criminology, transitional justice is both an academic endeavour and an activist/advocate undertaking with the field receiving very significant international attention and funding over the past number of years, so much so it has been referred to as the transitional justice industry (ibid.). McEvoy et al. (2017) have pointed to the possibility that criminology as a rendezvous discipline could contribute to drawing transitional justice debates deeper into discussion of philosophy and social theory but also as a means of balancing the influence of legalism in the field (ibid.). In this chapter Dr Lawther speaks of the importance of the work of Cohen (2008) for her own contributions on societies in transition but also how victims voices and experience can be incorporated into the literature on transitional justice on issues of memory, representation and reparation.

Bio Dr Cheryl Lawther is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at Queen’s University Belfast; prior to that, Dr Lawther worked at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland as a postdoctoral researcher. Her research is interdisciplinary and mainly looks at issues around transitional justice and how societies adjust post-conflict in the context of mass human rights violations as well as on the process of truth recovery. She is currently involved

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in a number of projects on top of her scholarly activities, among these, a project funded by the ESCR—Leading impact fund looking at reparations for victims of sexual violence in the context of armed conflict and a research project on the truth process in Northern Ireland (in collaboration with Kieran McEvoy). Dr Lawther’s article in the British Journal of Criminology ‘Securing’ the Past: Policing and the Contest over Truth in Northern Ireland’ received the Brian Williams Article Prize in 2011. Recommended Reading Lawther, C. (2017). Competing with the past: The struggle for truth in Northern Ireland. London: Edward Elgar. McEvoy, K., Dudai, R., & Lawther, C. (2017). Criminology and transitional justice. In A. Liebling, L. McAra, & S. Maruna (Eds.), Oxford handbook of criminology (6th ed., pp. 391–416). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lawther, C. (2010). ‘Securing’ the past: Policing and the contest over truth in Northern Ireland. British Journal of Criminology, 50(3), 455– 473.

I am a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at Queen’s University Belfast. I started off my career as a Lecturer in Criminology and I have been here 9 years now. In terms of getting into academia, I think it is something that evolved gradually over time, so thinking back even to my school days, I was always interested in the subjects that allowed me to do more self-directed research. So when I came to university I really enjoyed the opportunity to pick topics that were interesting to me but also the topic that could play to my strengths in terms of being quite independent and being willing to go off and do self-directed study. Even when starting my Ph.D. I still wasn’t so sure I wanted to be an academic. I knew I liked research but I wasn’t necessarily sure that being an academic was the route that I was going to take. Nevertheless, as time progressed and the Ph.D. went on I realised that yes I did want to be an academic and I needed that freedom to investigate the topics that were important to me but also through doing work that has an impact. So as a Ph.D. student, I orientated all my time towards making sure I had the foundations in place for an academic career, and with the encouragement of my supervisor, Prof. Kieran McEvoy, I began publishing quite early in my Ph.D. which put me in a very strong position in terms of employment prospects. When I finished my Ph.D. I wanted to do a

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postdoc, I wanted to have that period of time for research rather than just jumping straight into a lectureship. At the start of 2010 I got a postdoctoral position in the School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews. It was a project looking at the needs of victims and survivors in Northern Ireland so I had the academic background that lent itself to doing that work, but I also had a good enough CV that I could be competitive when that job came up. So I was in St. Andrews for 18 months and because my ultimate aim was to be a lecturer in Belfast and because I liked how Criminology was taught and researched in Belfast, I took a position at Queens. Belfast has that unique blend of criminology meets human rights meets transitional justice and this was where I wanted to position myself.

Key Influences There are a number of key criminology academics who have influenced me, probably the one who has had the most influence on my work is Stan Cohen, the former Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics. In particular I used Stan Cohen’s (2008) work on States of Denial during my masters but then I fully immersed myself in it when I was doing my Ph.D. and I think it is still the one piece, the one book that I would turn to time and time again. For me it is eye-opening how Cohen sets out the different techniques of denial and how those techniques of denial, be it literal denial, or interpretative or implicatory denial are used by states or other powerful organisations in the attempt to cover up responsibility for gross human rights violations. I think it was kind of devastatingly simple, but also increasingly clever, the way that Cohen set that out, that provided a lot of the framework for my own Ph.D. which looked at opposition to dealing with the past in Northern Ireland, and that work became my first monograph ‘Truth, Denial and Transition: Northern Ireland and its Contested Past’. A lot of what I did in my Ph.D. and in my other work was using Cohen’s “States of Denial” to look at how pro-state forces in Northern Ireland have denied responsibility for different aspects of the conflict. But also how they used those techniques of denial, such as the condemnation of the condemners or the denial of victimisation, and how that has mapped on to the attitudes of dealing with the past and in particular the failure to establish a truth process in Northern Ireland; so Cohen’s work has been absolutely influential for me.

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The other big influence would be my supervisor Kieran McEvoy who himself was heavily influenced by Cohen’s work. His work is not only inspiring in terms of his scholarly rigour and also the sheer brilliance of that work, but also the sheer commitment to giving something back to the communities that we work in. I think because of our position here in Belfast, in a society that is post-conflict maybe, certainly transitioning from conflict, particularly those of us with a Criminology background in the School of Law and in terms of conflict transformation, it is not a case of going out and doing research and then disappearing with the results. It is obviously about fulfilling that obligations of the job but it is also about producing research that is usable and accessible to the communities that we work with and maybe has the potential to do some good work on the ground. Recommended Reading Cohen, S., & Husain, E. (2008). States of denial and the secular state. RSA Journal, 154(5534), 48–49. Lawther, C. (2014). Truth, denial and transition: Northern Ireland and the contested past. London: Taylor & and Francis. McEvoy, K., & McGregor, L. (2008). Transitional justice from below: Grassroots activism and the struggle for change. London: Hart.

Situating Your Research I do interdisciplinary research, if I were to put myself in a box then it would be in a transitional justice box, but traditional transitional justice is a very interdisciplinary subject as it draws from law, it draws from politics, it draws from sociology, criminology, Human Rights maybe even anthropology, peace and conflict studies and over the course of my academic career I have sampled quite a lot of those disciplines. So in the broadest terms I am interested in the process of how societies transition from the past and in particular how they deal with the legacy of violent conflict and mass human rights violations and criminology is effectively the home for that kind of research. There are however particular areas that I have worked in, a lot of work has been orientated around dealing with the past and truth recovery so quite a few of my publications look at the failure to comprehensively deal with the past and truth issues in Northern Ireland. I am particularly interested in the fact that a lot of the emphasis

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or a lot of the headline coverage is given to those places that have done truth, so places like South Africa, if people want to talk about truth everybody wants to talk about South Africa as a shiny example of a place that has a ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ but obviously the TRC in South Africa was problematic in itself. What we haven’t really paid so much attention to are the places where we haven’t had truth and reconciliation and so I am interested in—rather than arguments about how dealing with the past can be politically disruptive or it can be re-traumatising, which obviously could be—I am interested in the ideological, the sociological, the political objections to not doing truth recovery. So in Northern Ireland that has played out in themes around loyalty, around betrayal about this idea of rewriting the past and around complex ideas of victimhood, of blame and blamelessness. So truth has been a big area of my work and that has played out in more recent work looking at the contested nature of victimhood in post-conflict societies. Following on from that work, I also have a piece of work on Dark Tourism: so Dark Tourism is the practice of people going to places like Robben Island or Auschwitz as part of a holiday as something to see or perhaps something to enjoy. But places like Auschwitz or the Tuol Sleng torture centre in Cambodia are places that are founded on traumatic loss and mass human rights violations, but we don’t really pay any attention to the victims and survivors of those atrocities, how they actually view these places, or are their voices represented in these places, do they have an opportunity for example of contributing to the narrative that is created around those represented there. So the pipeline from issues around truth recovery to complex victimhood, to issues around how victims are represented in sites of atrocity are all elements of my work. I am currently working on a large collaborative research project which looks at reparation in post-conflict societies, and some of the themes I am interested in are also in that project, particularly reparations for more complex victims. So people who, for example, may have been former combatants or perpetrators, asking should they receive reparations or should they make reparation. And I am also interested in the ways former combatants can make reparation, maybe by contributing to truth recovery or by engaging, as they do in Colombia, in demining exercises, where land-mines are decommissioned and the land is then returned to communities who can then use it for farming or re-establishing a livelihood. The other part that I am interested in is how former combatants

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have contributed to the recovery of the remains of people who were disappeared during periods of conflict. Additional Reading Gibson, J. (2006). The contributions of truth to reconciliation: Lessons from South Africa. The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 50(3) (Transitional Justice), 409–432. Dempster, L., Killean, R., & Lawther, C. (2019). Transitional justice at sites of ‘dark tourism’: The case of genocide memorials in Cambodia. https://justiceinconflict.org/2019/01/28/transitional-justice-at-sitesof-dark-tourism-the-case-of-genocide-memorials-in-cambodia/.

Current Research Currently I am the principal investigator working with my colleagues Kieran McEvoy and Valerie Lawrence on an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded early career project entitled ‘Victimhood and dealing with the past in northern Ireland’. So as part of the project, we are interested in issues around voice, agency and blame and we conducted over 60 semi-structured interviews with victims and survivors across Northern Ireland. We weren’t geographically representative, it was more about the theme of voice, we particularly wanted to capture the voices of people who maybe haven’t been heard so much or maybe you know hadn’t taken part in research projects, but maybe decided that now was the time to tell their story. So that project is around dealing with the past and complex and contested victimhood, there is also a very strong practical element to that project so picking up on that theme of voice, we are aware that sometimes victims and survivors in Northern Ireland as in many other transitional societies have not been treated all that well in the media and when we were doing the field work we asked our interviewees what has your experience been like, in terms of dealing with the media? And how do you feel that the media has represented legacy issues or engaged with legacy issues and sometimes that feedback wasn’t all that positive. But people were at the same time saying ‘you know what, I would really like to hear a greater diversity of voices on the news or maybe like to hear more women on the news, people maybe from more rural areas’. So we were working with the award winning journalist Susan McKay and we decided there is a space there both in terms of what hasn’t

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been done in Northern Ireland, and also hasn’t been done internationally, to provide guidelines for victims and survivors on how they can best engage with the print and broadcast media and vice versa. The guidelines are literally a step by step walk through the process of engaging with the media and then we do the same for journalists and for editors—a walk though of engaging with victims. So we have the two sets of comprehensive guidelines and two additional documents one page each just a quick summary guide. The second project that I am working on is a project on dark tourism, it led on from this idea of victims and dealing with the past in Ireland. So if you come to Northern Ireland, particularly Belfast, you can do a lot of conflict tourism, whether that’s a Black Taxi tour or whether you are going to visit an old prison or going to see a peace wall, there is a lot of stuff around conflict tourism. So as part of that project on victims and dealing with past, we did a lot of those walking tours and went to see a lot of those sights to see how victims are represented in the public domain and it really got me thinking about this idea that sights of atrocity are being envisaged for tourists, for the purpose of tourism. So these sites are a source of revenue, but I was curious that a lot of the research looked at the experience of the tourist: were the facilities clean, could you get a drink of water, was car parking good—but it didn’t actually look at how victims and survivors were actually connected, for example, to Auschwitz, to Robin Island or to the Killing Fields in Cambodia. The research didn’t actually look at what victims and survivors actually thought of these places, and question if they had an opportunity to contribute to the story that’s told or to the representation of the past in these places. So in response to this we came up with a pilot funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund called Whose voices are heard? victimhood and dark tourism in Cambodia. We went to Cambodia in 2018 to test out these research questions, we did a number of site visits to the Tuol Sleng—S-21, which is former school that was turned into a torture centre and to Choeung Ek, the Killing Fields which is where about 14,000 people were buried, plus a number of other sites of atrocities, the Khmer Rouge in the Cambodian provinces and we interviewed victims and survivors, former members of the Khmer Rouge themselves, site visitors and other NGO’s in Cambodia to test out these questions. We are in the process of writing that up now. We found that these places can play a very valuable role in terms of truth and justice, and for educating particularly younger people about the horrors of the past. Then the third project that I am working on is a project led by my colleague, Dr Luke Moffett and it looks at Reparations, Responsibility and

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Victimhood in Northern Ireland, Peru, Columbia, Guatemala, Uganda and Nepal. I’ve been involved in the field work in Northern Ireland and in Colombia. So we are interested in what do people understand by reparations, what’s more effective or more meaningful, individual reparation, collective reparation or symbolic reparations? We are also interested in what role should non-state actors play in respect to reparations. Colombia is in an important moment in terms of transitional justice process because they have established what is called a ‘Special Jurisdiction for Peace’ which is a criminal justice body that has responsibility for trying thematic and high profile cases in respect to the conflict in Colombia, so they have been engaging with the special jurisdiction for peace and engaging with evidence in terms of what’s been done here in Northern Ireland, especially in terms of what’s been done in terms of restorative justice, but also the involvement of former combatants in the peace process. Funding Bodies Arts and Humanities Research Council—Early Career Researchers. https://ahrc.ukri.org/skills/earlycareerresearchers/. Global Challenges Research Fund. https://www.ukri.org/research/glo bal-challenges-research-fund/. UK Research and innovation Funding. https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref= AH%2FP006965%2F1.

Key Publications The paper ‘The Truth about Loyalty: Emotions and Combatants and Transitioning from the Past ’ came about in 2017 looking at why people of Loyalist orientation seem to be more uncomfortable about engaging with conversations on dealing with the past. I began to look internationally to see what literature was there on ex-combatants in transitional justice, and that literature fell into a number of different categories, so there is a lot of literature for example on ex-combatants and engaging with DDR schemes (disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration schemes) there was increasing evidence in terms of the literature on the perpetrator-victim axis, but also literature on former armed actors involved in grassroots conflict transformation and peace building initiatives. There is also some literature on the benefits for ex-combatants of engaging with truth processes, but again less well explored why former combatants would

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be reluctant to engage with truth recovery. In that area there is a focus on denial or silence or claims about developing amnesia, or creating a very sort of fictitious past, but I wanted to go beyond that and I was wondering what exactly were the emotional tensions and what are the emotional dynamics that shape ex-combatants willingness to engage with truth recovery. I initially focused my research on Northern Ireland and I decided to use Loyalist ex-combatants as a prism through which to explore these issues. Loyalists are pro-state actors so by definition they are loyal to the state, so I wanted to think about what are the emotions, sociological or ideological objections to truth? And then I wanted to marry that on to ex-combatants so by definition Loyalist are loyal, so I used the emotion of loyalty to try to tease out the issues involved in emotions, ex-combatants and the past in Northern Ireland. I came up with a four pronged typology of loyalty, which, I argue in the paper, has shaped Loyalists objections to dealing with the past. The first is loyalty as betrayal, the idea that loyalists claim that they were loyal to the state, but that the British state has left them down in not really supporting Loyalists through the peace process. The second is loyalty, blame and shame this focuses on reiterative shaming, using what John Braithwaite (1989) calls re-integrative shaming. This is where people who were involved in crimes, if they explain what they did and participate in various peace-making efforts or efforts of truth and reconciliation, they can engage in that effort of re-integrative shaming in that they are taking responsibility for what happened in the past and they are owning up to it, they are acknowledging the wrong that they did. This is a way to be re-integrated back into your community as opposed to being stigmatised and ostracised from your community. Then the third theme is the idea of Loyalty as Silence, I think that this was the one that I was most interested in, it is a real paradox I suppose we all do it in our daily lives, whoever we are loyal to, we try not to criticise, or we try to be a bit gentler with them, sometimes that doesn’t necessarily do us any favours. Loyalists are loyal to the British state and by definition if there was a process of dealing with the past, that would involve questioning the state and looking at the actions and inactions of the state. So I argue then in the conclusion that if we really and truly want to know about Loyalist ex-combatants in Northern Ireland but also about pro-state ex-combatants elsewhere, who are by definition loyal, we really want to understand why they are reluctant to deal with the past. It is not enough to talk about denial or silence or creating a series of lies, you actually need to go deeper than that and understand the notion of

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loyalty and the role of emotions in mediating the relationship with the past, how they sit in the present and also where they see their future as well. Additional Reading Braithwaite, J. (1989). Crime shame and reintegration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawther, C. (2017). The truth about loyalty: Emotions, ex-combatants and transitioning from the past. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 11(3), 484–504.

Criminology in Ireland I think there is definitely an increasing recognition that there is a really vibrant tradition and a growing tradition of criminological research on the island of Ireland and I think that that has been recognised over the last number of years with, for example, the publication of The Routledge Handbook of Irish Criminology (2015) and the North South Criminology conference and the Post Graduate conference. I think it is important that those conversations continue and I think it is part and parcel of the nature of academic work that people are pulled in a lot of different directions and we tend to retreat to our offices and maybe don’t have the time to have those conversations that this podcast series is basically facilitating. However there are issues like institutional child abuse, there are issues about human trafficking or issues particularly perhaps in light of what is going to happen in respect of Brexit around the border, so there are like key criminological issues that criminologists in Ireland are well placed to make a distinctive contribution to and I would hope those conversations would continue and would continue to open up to see research on an all-Ireland basis. I suppose there are two challenges, one is unique to all academics and that is having the time to sit down and brainstorm and actually think about what are our points of common interest and what can we learn from each other. I think another weakness that is apparent as well—it is both a weakness and a strength—that we are geographically isolated; for example, if you are in London you could have the choice of five different seminars a day, we don’t really have that luxury here cause it

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always involves a flight somewhere else, so I suppose given peoples schedules and time demands there can be that tendency for people to become that little bit more isolated. But on the other hand then we are uniquely placed in respect to what has happened here in the north but also in the south of Ireland. I think that there is an increasing recognition that there is a really vibrant tradition and a growing tradition of criminological research on the island of Ireland. It a small place and it is a really tight community and people tend to know one another and perhaps have more crossover in terms of, for example, external examining around courses or Ph.D.s, or for example around the North South Criminology conference and that gathering of a tight group of people. So there’s an option to get to know people rather than being distant colleagues and there are some really fantastic criminologists on these islands and we are very fortunate to be in that position.

The Future of Criminology I think it is a really exciting time for Criminology and I think it is a really exciting time for dealing with the past, or trying to deal with the past. There are some very pressing issues which cut across the border and then there are issues of interest in Criminology that are sadly facilitated by the border. So I think issues of human trafficking and smuggling across the border, those are issues which I think criminologists in Ireland should be tackling, and of course the unique issues of security or policing the border. In terms of the development of Criminology I’d like to see more opportunities for meaningful engagement so I think facilitating conversations and facilitating dialogue not just among academics but among students is really important, but also harnessing the resources and the expertise we do have to develop a very distinctive and a very unique type of Criminology.

References Braithwaite, J. (1989). Crime shame and reintegration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, S., & Husain, E. (2008). States of denial and the secular state. RSA Journal, 154(5534), 48–49. Dempster, L., Killean, R., & Lawther, C. (2019). Transitional justice at sites of ‘dark tourism’: The case of genocide memorials in Cambodia. https://justic

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einconflict.org/2019/01/28/transitional-justice-at-sites-of-dark-tourism-thecase-of-genocide-memorials-in-cambodia/. Gibson, J. (2006). The contributions of truth to reconciliation: Lessons from South Africa. The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 50(3) (Transitional Justice), 409–432. Hamilton, C., Healy, D., Daly, Y., & Butler, M. (2015). The Routledge handbook of Irish criminology. London: Routledge. Lawther, C. (2010). ‘Securing’ the past: Policing and the contest over truth in Northern Ireland. British Journal of Criminology, 50(3), 455–473. Lawther, C. (2014). Truth, denial and transition: Northern Ireland and the contested past. London: Taylor & Francis. Lawther, C. (2017a). The truth about loyalty: Emotions, Ex-combatants and transitioning from the past. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 11(3), 484–504. Lawther, C. (2017b). Competing with the past: The struggle for truth in Northern Ireland. London: Edward Elgar. McEvoy, K. (2007). Beyond legalism: Towards a thicker understanding of transitional justice. Journal of Law and Society, 34(4), 411–440. McEvoy, K., Dudai, R., & Lawther, C. (2017). Criminology and transitional justice. In A. Liebling, L. McAra, & S. Maruna (Eds.), Oxford handbook of criminology (6th ed., pp. 391–416). Oxford: Oxford University Press. McEvoy, K., & McGregor, L. (2008). Transitional justice from below: Grassroots activism and the struggle for change. London: Hart.

CHAPTER 7

In Conversation with Prof. Shane Kilcommins

Abstract In this chapter Prof. Kilcommins reflects on his experience as a Ph.D. student in the UK, his role in setting up practice-based university courses, and the importance of clinical or placement options for criminology students and researchers. In addition, Shane speaks about how his theoretical approach to criminology and criminal justice were fostered through his interaction with colleagues in sociology departments and how his exposure to key social theorists changed his perspective from a purely legal standpoint, to a more multidisciplinary approach. Prof. Kilcommins also speaks about his work on victims’ issues, and how this work had a significant impact beyond academia. Importantly he speaks about the intersection of a range of vulnerabilities and victimhood within the criminal justice system in Ireland, and how his research has been directed to relieve the revictimisation of individuals engaged in that system. Keywords Foucault · Penology · Carceral archipelago · Social movement

It is not unreasonable to say, despite the significant influence Michel Foucault’s work had on the development of criminology, that little attention was given to his work by legal scholars (Baxter 1996). This is on © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 O. Lynch et al., Reflections on Irish Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60593-3_7

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the one hand related to the tripartite ‘classical, holistic, clinical’ framing of legal education but also due to the (crude) division of criminology into two broad approaches: the first is generally concerned with causes and social conditions, and places its focus on the individual criminal, the second is broadly referred to as critical criminology. In terms of attending to criminology when it did happen, legal scholars have historically been concerned with knowing the criminal for the purpose of understanding how this might impact a legal process (Ferraari and Holmes 1912) rather than questioning the basis of the legal process, issues of power, governmentality or social control. However this cannot be said to be still the case. Issues of, for example, penal punitiveness and social control more broadly are now mainstays of legal education in Ireland. The influence of sociology, social theory and criminology on legal education can be traced back to the early educational experiences of a number of Irish scholars, who contributed to this volume, with key criminologists in and of Oxford University; as a result, issues of mechanisms of power, the construction of knowledge and the boundaries of modernity are mainstays of legal education on the Island. In this chapter, Prof. Shane Kilcommins speaks of the influence that criminological and social theory texts had on his own experience of studying and researching the law and how the intersection of theory and practice are the hallmark of criminology as he sees it in Ireland. The research output across the island is testament to this, and this approach is reflected in the pedagogy evident in Universities offering criminology courses. Prof. Kilcommins speaks about his role in setting up a practice-based Masters degree in UCC, and the importance of clinical or placement options for students and researchers. In addition, Prof. Kilcommins speaks about how his theoretical approach to criminology and criminal justice were fostered through his interaction with colleagues in sociology departments and this exposure to key social theorists changed his perspective from a purely legal standpoint, to a more multidisciplinary approach. Prof. Kilcommins also speaks about his work on victims’ issues, and how this work has had a significant impact beyond academia. Importantly his work speaks about the intersection of a range of vulnerabilities and victimhood within the criminal justice system in Ireland, and how his research has been directed to relieve the revictimisation of individuals engaged in that system.

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Bio Shane Kilcommins is a full Professor and Head of the School of Law at the University of Limerick. He is a Fulbright scholar and sits as an expert on the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Prof. Kilcommins has been asked to chair the Consultative Council to advise on issues relating to penal policy, and has chaired the consultative forum on the Victims’ Charter. He has authored or edited 8 books with publishers such as Manchester University Press, Willan, Clarus Press and Routledge. He has also published reports and numerous articles in leading journals such as the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, International Journal of Evidence and Proof, International Review of Victimology, The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, European Journal of Criminology, and Criminology and Criminal Justice. In addition, he has contributed 25 chapters to edited books, and presented over 75 conference papers. Recommended Readings Kilcommins, S. (2004). Crime, punishment and the search for order in Ireland. Dublin: Institute of Public Administration. Kilcommins, S., Leahy, S., Walsh, K. M., & Spain, E. (2020). The victim in the Irish criminal process. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Starting off As an undergraduate student, I did a law degree and when I was finishing the degree I actually wanted to get into practice but I didn’t have family in the area of law. I did look for an apprenticeship but I couldn’t find one. I had applied for masters courses at the University of Wales and they said we are interested in what you are doing, why don’t you come and do a Ph.D. interview with us. So I went there and did an interview for the Ph.D. and they offered me a Ph.D. for three years in the area of criminal justice; it was going to be paid. So this was offered to me in the April or May of the final year of my degree and I was happy to take it. Then in August I got offered an apprenticeship so I had a real decision to make. Do I go to the UK and do a Ph.D. or do I go down the route of becoming a solicitor and I actually chose the route of the Ph.D. I don’t know why, intuitively I just thought it felt like the right thing to do, so I went to the UK and

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that really opened up a lot of doors for me because I was working in a big law department with a Ph.D. community, about six Ph.D. students, and a much larger postgraduate community. So in a way I kind of learned to find my feet there through Ph.D. work. It was actually a big transition because I went straight from an undergraduate degree to a Ph.D. and it definitely took me a year to find my way. But I really enjoyed it, I had three great years, and then took up a lecturing position. When I came home to Ireland, I ended up in UCC but I first worked in Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT). There were no jobs in Ireland at the time but I got a job in WIT teaching in areas that really interested me around criminal justice and then I moved to UCC in 2001 to work in the law school with Prof. Caroline Fennell. At that time we set up the first specialised masters in criminal justice and human rights, and I taught criminal justice, penology and criminology and Caroline taught advanced terrorism; it was a brilliant programme because it was clinical. This meant the students were going into the courts, they were in mock juries, they were going out in Garda cars so the clinical aspects were outstanding for them, as well as the theoretical frameworks. At that time Ciaran McCullagh was in UCC and he was a senior lecturer in the sociology department; he had set up an MA in criminology, so myself and Dr Catherine O’ Sullivan worked with him and we taught penology and criminology and he taught sociology. At that point, with Ciaran, I started looking at social deviance from a sociological perspective. In terms of criminology in particular, when I was in the UK, the department I was in was the Department of Law and Criminology, so I was involved in criminology teaching as a tutor, so when I came home to Ireland, when I was working with Caroline Fennell, there was no difficulty for me to set up those two new modules, penology and criminology. It was really exciting for law students because they were getting an introduction to the more sociological aspects of the law and the reality behind legal rules, they took to it like ducks to water, so it was great to be involved in that. Recommended Reading McCullagh, C. (1996). Crime in Ireland: A sociological introduction. Cork: Cork University Press.

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Key Influences You have to understand that as a law student all I was doing was really learning the rules and applying them, the only real critical insights we were getting as law students was in jurisprudence, which is about legal philosophy, but not really where we would begin to critique rules. But when I went to the UK the Professor there, he was an old Oxford academic, so one of the books he got me to read was Discipline and Punishment—The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault (1977). I still teach it now, but when I came and started teaching penology in UCC I thought it around Foucault because I thought it was so brilliant. I have been teaching Penology now since 2003, but every year I tell the students about my experience of this. So reading Foucault was what really opened my eyes up to that whole vista behind legal rules and the frameworks for legal rules. Here was a guy who was saying that law doesn’t really matter. So this was just incredible for me. When I read that book the first time, I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. I’d say I’ve read it about ten, twelve times now because I keep prepping for teaching and every time I read it I still get something new. But it is just an incredible book. Most of us in academia are saying new things but we are saying them in a conventional way whereas Foucault changed the entire landscape and changed the entire way we think about things. He gives the greatest insight into the carceral archipelago, how the disciplinary society emerged and it is still crucial to this day, so he was the biggest influence. If you needed to critique law here was someone who gave you the tools to be able to do that. What was really important for me is I also really loved history and the thing about Foucault was he was writing the history of the present. Key Readings Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Garland, D. (2012). Punishment and modern society: A study in social theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Durkheim, E. (2014). The division of labor in society. New York: Simon and Schuster.

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Situating Your Research At the broadest level my research area is criminal justice and penology, but I would frame that very broadly. I would see it as engagement with the legal rules, criminal law and procedure, it would include then engagement with empirical criminologists and the work that they are doing, it would involve the work of penologists and mapping out the work and the history of the present in terms of the Criminal Justice System. So, for example, Garland (2002) has ‘The Twelve Indices of Change’ one of those indices is that the public must be protected, so if I am working on something it could be a doctrinal piece of law, it could be on bail, but I am trying to fit it in all the time to the history of the present and even in relation to the accused, sketching out when did that state accused model of justice emerge? Also thinking about all the rights that emerged for the accused right throughout the nineteenth into the twentieth century and the constitutionalisation of those rights in our Constitution but also in the European Convention on Human rights. And then the interesting thing is you can use writers like Garland (2002) to examine the rights of the accused, and look at how those rights are changing for a whole variety of different reasons: crime rates are increasing, there is an increase in the idea that the public must be protected, law and order has become politicised etc. So what you begin to see then is you see changes to those rights, so to some extent you see this culture of control emerging, you see it in a whole variety of different ways. You see it in the minutiae of legal life so it could be the right to silence, the presumption of innocence, increased powers of detention, the provision for search warrants, etc. So you link all that material back then into its sociological context through writers like I mentioned. Recommended Readings Garland, D. (2002). The culture of control: Crime and social order in contemporary society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Most Influential Work When I first got to UCC I did a piece on extending the nine grounds of discrimination. I produced a report along with three others in UCC on extending those nine grounds; I was looking at offenders. The report is

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not cited that often but in terms of actual impact, it resulted in a change in the law. Also I did work with Mary Crilly in the Sexual Violence Centre in Cork. She was producing a guide for survivors and so along with my Ph.D. student Dr Susan leahy, who works here (UL) now and who does a huge amount of work on consent and sexual offences, we helped with that guide by answering questions like what is a book of evidence? What does a victim impact statement mean? How can I write a victim impact statement ? So we were answering those questions and we were also providing some information on legal offences and consent and what that means. That wasn’t published in a peer reviewed journal but it was printed in a guide and 10,000 people got to read it, so that type of work is really, really important. I really enjoyed it even though you can’t count it in terms of research outputs but I’ve always enjoyed the idea of being able to do that kind of work and to be of service. Then I had pieces in the Journal of Criminology, Criminal Justice, and the European Journal of Criminology and it’s lovely to see them getting cited. I did a piece in 2004 with Ian O’ Donnell and Eoin O ‘Sullivan, and Barry Vaughan who is now working in the department of the Taoiseach. What I liked about that book was that four of us were involved in it and it was really enjoyable to write. Also I did a lot of work around that notion of the carceral archipelago. I did a piece in a criminal justice book saying that there was this informal criminal justice system where people were being detained and these were sites of incarceration as well. So I think for a long time there was a lack of theory in Ireland but my book in 2004 was an attempt to engage with David Garland’s (2002) volume on ‘The culture of control’ to see the extent to which it operated in Ireland. It was really nice to see that book because you had Ian (O’Donnell) who was a strict Criminologist doing empirical work, you had Eoin (O’Sullivan) who was more of a sociologist, you had Barry Vaughan who was a theoretical criminologist and you had me then who was more lawyer and interested in penology. It was a really good book that engaged with theory and it created a platform where people can now engage further so I like that. And more recently I have done work on victims with disabilities and it’s being published in good journals. So you have the piece let’s say in the International Review of Victimology which is a top ranking journal and that’s great but actually a lot of the work as well was published in reports and it was trying to flag that there was a real problem around attrition rates amongst vulnerable witnesses, around people with disabilities who

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were being discriminated against in the Irish criminal justice process. So I think we got huge traction in that work and again I think it was important work. Related to that piece, Claire Edwards in Cork has done a lot of good work and has a brilliant knowledge of disability and I have worked with her. I had knowledge of Criminology and I had a knowledge of evidential rules and the Durkheimian law and by creating those synergies with different colleagues like Claire you can overcome all the silos and you can make recommendations that stand up, so I am proud of that work as well. Recommended Readings Kilcommins, S., McClean, E., McDonagh, Mullally, S., & Whelan, D. (2004). Extending the scope of employment equality legislation: Comparative perspectives on the prohibited grounds of discrimination. Report Commissioned by the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform. Available online at http://www.justice.ie/en/JELR/Discri mination.pdf/Files/Discrimination.pdf. Crilly, M., & Kilcommins, S. (2007). Sexual violence in Ireland: The criminal justice system: A guide for victims. Available online at http:// www.cosc.ie/en/COSC/Sexual%20Violence%20-%20A%20Guide% 20for%20Victims.pdf/Files/Sexual%20Violence%20-%20A%20Guide% 20for%20Victims.pdf. Leahy, S. (2014). ‘No means no’, but where’s the force? Addressing the challenges of formally recognising non-violent sexual coercion as a serious criminal offence. The Journal of Criminal Law, 78(4), 309–325. Kilcommins, S., O’Donnell, I., O’Sullivan, E., & Vaughan, B. (2004). Crime, punishment and the search for order in Ireland. Dublin: Institute of Public Administration.

Recent Work So the book ‘The Victim in the Irish Criminal Process’ was published by Manchester University Press and you can tell I’m getting old now because two of the people I published it with were former Ph.D. students, so Dr Susan Leahy and Dr Kathleen Moore Walsh. They both worked with me in UCC on their Ph.D. work, and later on research projects. There was another colleague involved as well Dr Eimear Spain, also another really good academic, interested in emotions and emotional context and the law and very often how the emotional side of a person’s behaviour was

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down played particularly with victims. So it was lovely to engage with all three co-contributors. There is always a danger when you do work of this kind that it becomes research by committee so that you are not all on the same page, but I think that if you work it properly and you use all of the different expertise, what you get is that you can create a really powerful form of scholarship. That book was about history of the present for victims. I think this probably captures most of what I am interested in - how victims were at the forefront of the criminal justice system, how they presented evidence in court, how they were the considered in the paradigm of prosecution and then you see from the nineteenth into the twentieth century you see them being replaced by the state. What you see is them being distrusted as victims of crime because they are emotionally too involved, they are seen as partial, they are partisan and so increasingly you move towards a more professional model and so increasingly the victim is entirely placed outside of the process and this becomes the system then for the next 150 years. So victims are absolutely alienated, isolated, removed from the criminal justice system - their only input is for the public interest, which you know is often very gendered, it is given over to certain voices, certain experts and so on. This often includes lawyers, politicians, penal reformers and so on but very few women and very few voices of victims themselves and what you begin to see then from the 1970s onwards in Ireland and it was really slow and it is still continuing bit by bit, we began to see change. It started off really with the Women’s Movement and the setting up of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, and then the Limerick Rape Crisis Centre and then women’s movement more generally around reform of law. You’ll have heard of ‘The Belfast Train’ and Magee vs the Attorney General in marital privacy and so on, but then also domestic violence centres being set up, that is how it started. For example, mass victimisation surveys began to reveal for the first time that there is a huge underreporting of crime and then criminologists and victimologists began to come on board and identify all of the various social issues related to this. So little by little we saw change and now increasingly I think we are getting to a stage where victims are being brought back into the CJS as they should be, and I think things are moving forward. It mightn’t happen in my lifetime but I think we are moving into a paradigm now where the system will become more tripartite—you will have the state, you will have the accused and you will have the victim, so I think that the victim will be a much more central player. We speak about the last 150 years being the state

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versus the accused—I think the next 150 years we will see the increasing accommodation of victims of crime. You can even see that now we talk about different issues, we talk about hashtags, a lot of this is a bottom-up phenomenon, it’s from the people themselves about their experience of crime and the criminal justice system. I started off on the journey saying that legal rules were legal rules and you never criticise them and then when I went to the UK and I started reading Foucault (1977) I realised that the rules don’t have to be like that, you can maintain fairness with the accused and still accommodate victims but there are certain things that don’t need to be done. So for instance that rape case in Cork in 2018 where a reference was made to the underwear that the complainant was wearing on the night in question. And again in the past you would have said ‘well if a lawyer said it must be right’ whereas now we are saying that this is not appropriate and from an evidence perspective the argument would be, well how is it relevant and if it is not relevant it shouldn’t be admissible. In the same way as the clothes I am wearing today shouldn’t be relevant in terms of the discussion we are actually having, there was no issue in that case and so people are going out protesting on the streets and so those reified voices of certain actors in the system, be it lawyers, be it judges, be it the state agencies themselves, we are seeing that move, and we are seeing that move from the bottom up and that is part of a social movement. Now I’ve also written on the other side saying that we all need to be careful with social movements, we need to harness their potential but we also need to be aware, and this is absolutely crucial, that this is about people being accused of crimes and the system needs to be as fair as possible. There is a presumption of innocence and we need to be able to maintain that while harnessing the potential of social movements. But we still have to resolve conflicts, mostly in court room settings so those court room settings and the rules need to be changed to accommodate as many as possible, but we also have to make sure that we accept the legitimacy of that process whilst changing it. We should accept the verdicts and whilst a trial is ongoing we should respect the presumption of innocence. I think that is important and sometimes that wasn’t always obvious through some of the social movements. So it is time to maintain all that is good around social movements and there is a huge amount that is very powerful, and would allow us to break down the edifices, but we have to remember that there is another person here and it is the accused party. The accused deserves, it could be you or I, that there is fairness and integrity to that

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process and to the decision that’s reached. I write about victims’ rights but I also write about accused rights because I am more interested in the history of the present and so I have never felt that I have only attached to one or the other. I think what is different is that I write about white-collar crime, I write about ordinary crime, I write about criminal law, I am more interested in the history of the present than a particular viewpoint. Further Information McGee VS The Attorney General: http://osaka.law.miami.edu/~sch nably/McGeev.AttorneyGeneral%5BIreland-1974%5D.pdf. Cork Rape Trial: https://www.image.ie/life/victim-blaming-commentscork-rape-trial-spark-outrage-133993. On contraception in Ireland (the Belfast Train): Ferriter, D. (2008). Women and political change in Ireland since 1960. Éire-Ireland, 43(1), 179–204.

Criminology in Ireland I think what’s really important for me is that work is being shared among postgraduate students and academics and the forum for doing that is obviously the North South Criminology conference and I think that forum is really important. I ran it in Cork in 2010, it was a brilliant event, two and a half days and fantastic groups of academics and students. So I think that what is important is that we continue to foster that environment and when I say that environment what I am talking about is from senior professors down to week one postgraduate students. Students when they are starting should hear about all the different ideas, hear about what’s going on from different perspectives and that should be from workshops and events around criminology and also bringing people in from the outside as well. I think a key strength for me is that criminology in Ireland can inform policy and I think that that was a thing that was really absent up until recently. Also in law schools we are not trained in qualitative and quantitative methods whereas criminologists who are coming from a sociological background were, so I think that that is a real strength and I think that continuing to do that would be vital from a policy perspective. I think one of the weaknesses of criminology is that it has been an absentee discipline for so long that it really hasn’t become embedded. Now in some

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ways embedded traditions aren’t really good things but the important thing now is that a lot of good people are now working on it, I think now what is important is informing government to inform policy. So it will be really important for academic institutions to engage with government departments and with key stakeholders like An Garda Siochana, the DPP’s office, The Attorney General’s office, victims of crime groups and so on And I think it’s lovely to see degrees being developed in Ireland degrees coming through as a specialist discipline, so you see that as a specialist discipline now in UCC, but you also see it in the criminal justice degrees here in UL and CIT and I think Maynooth as well has a criminology component to its programmes. So how I would like to see it develop then is to have it recognised by employers as a very good degree, from the industry right through to professional policing through to civil servants to administrators and so on. However, if you look at the history of academic disciplines criminology in Ireland is only in its infancy, but it has but huge potential.

Bibliography Baxter, H. (1996). Bringing Foucault into law and law into Foucault. Stanford Law Review, 48(2), 449–479. Crilly, M., & Kilcommins, S. (2007). Sexual violence in Ireland: the criminal justice system: A guide for victims. Available online at http://www.cosc.ie/ en/COSC/Sexual%20Violence%20-%20A%20Guide%20for%20Victims.pdf/ Files/Sexual%20Violence%20-%20A%20Guide%20for%20Victims.pdf. Durkheim, E. (2014). The division of labor in society. New York: Simon and Schuster. Ferraari, R., & Holmes, A. (1912). Should criminology be taught in the law school? Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, 2(6), 826–831. Ferriter, D. (2008). Women and political change in Ireland since 1960. ÉireIreland, 43(1), 179–204. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Garland, D. (2012). Punishment and modern society: A study in social theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kilcommins, S., Leahy, S., Walsh, K. M., & Spain, E. (2020). The victim in the Irish criminal process. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Kilcommins, S., O’Donnell, I., O’Sullivan, E., & Vaughan, B. (2004a). Crime, punishment and the search for order in Ireland. Dublin: Institute of Public Administration. Kilcommins, S., McClean, E., McDonagh, Mullally, S., & Whelan, D. (2004). Extending the scope of employment equality legislation: Comparative perspectives on the prohibited grounds of discrimination. Report Commissioned by the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform. Available online at http:// www.justice.ie/en/JELR/Discrimination.pdf/Files/Discrimination.pdf. Leahy, S. (2014). ‘No means no’, but where’s the force? Addressing the challenges of formally recognising non-violent sexual coercion as a serious criminal offence. The Journal of Criminal Law, 78(4), 309–325.

CHAPTER 8

In Conversation with Prof. Mary Rogan

Abstract In this chapter Prof. Mary Rogan speaks about her experience discovering criminology as a Law student and how it sowed the seeds for her later research interests. She speaks about combining elements of legal philosophy with criminological theory and how her research interests developed to focus on lived experience and penal policy. Prof. Rogan goes on to chart her journey from student to practitioner to Professor and explains how her sense of criminology as a rendezvous discipline was central to how her research career progressed. She talks about the need to share information, to give back, to inform policy and to understand how policy is experienced on the ground. Finally, Prof. Rogan speaks about her work informing, reviewing and creating policy based on her own and others’ research and the importance of this role as an academic and the potential for positive change that can come from such involvement. Keywords Law · Prison policy · Lived experience · Rendezvous discipline

The teaching of Law and legal training in Ireland has a long history reaching all the way back to the introduction of common law in 1170 (Delaney 1960). However in recent decades there has been significant change in how Law is taught in Universities with approaches ranging from © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 O. Lynch et al., Reflections on Irish Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60593-3_8

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traditional, to holistic, to clinical and everything in between (Paris and Donnelly 2010). Currently, almost every law school in Ireland ascribes to the holistic approach thus allowing students the opportunity to study law in combination with other subjects. The aim of such an approach is to expand past the assumption that a lawyer should be merely a legal technician towards the belief that it is vital for lawyers and legal scholars to be able to reflect on cultural and moral questions relevant to their profession (Paris and Donnelly 2010). The discipline of criminology is a key element in this approach and its role is seen as putting the law in context. The question of whether criminology has a place in Law Schools goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century where the purity of the American legal tradition was seen as inferior to European efforts to increase the ‘intellectual and emotional nature of the student’ by introducing criminology to legal training (Ferraari and Holmes 1912, p. 828). Much commentry in this volume has referred to how criminology as a discipline has borrowed from other fields, law being amongst them, however in the literature, there is little reflection on the role of criminology in contributing to academic research in its own right. A number of Irish legal scholars turned criminologists, among them, Prof. Mary Rogan, Prof. Kilcommins and Prof. Hamilton have highlighted how their experience of learning about criminology filled a both a theoretical and conceptual gap in their education. While Irish criminology has clearly benefited from drawing from the existing works of scholars from other academic traditions, so too have disciplines benefited from criminology. In this chapter Prof. Mary Rogan speaks about her experience discovering criminology as a Law student and how it sowed the seeds for her later research interests. She speaks about combining elements of legal philosophy with criminological theory and how her research interests developed to focus on the lived experience of the law and penal policy. Prof. Rogan goes on to chart her journey from student to practitioner to Professor and explains how her sense of criminology as a rendezvous discipline was central to how her research career progressed. The influence of social theory, studies on the history of ideas, and cultures of control, and particularly the work of Garland (1985) triggered an interest in social policy and policy transfer and this in turn influenced how Prof. Rogan does research. She talks about the need to share information, to give back, to inform policy and to understand how policy is experienced on the ground. Finally, Prof. Rogan speaks about her work informing, reviewing and creating policy based on her own and others’ research and the importance of this role as an academic and the potential for positive change that can come from such involvement.

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Biography Mary Rogan is Associate Professor at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). She received her degree at TCD, studied at Oxford University and then returned to TCD for her Ph.D. research; Prof. Rogan’s experience also extends beyond academia, as she trained as a barrister. Prof. Rogan was awarded a European Research Council Starting Grant worth 1.5 million euro in 2015 for a project entitled ‘Prisons: the rule of law, accountability and rights’ and has also received funding from the European Commission and Irish Research Council for cross-jurisdictional projects on imprisonment, and pre-trial detention, and for work on law and social change. She has led research on bail and pre-trial detention in Ireland as part of research examining seven European Union countries, and a further project examining leadership in penal change in the USA and Europe. She chairs the Implementation and Oversight Group on reforms to penal policy, reporting to the Irish Minister for Justice and Equality. She was appointed to the inaugural Research Advisory Group for the Department of Justice and Equality in July 2018 and sits on the Advisory Group to the Office of the Inspector of Prisons. She has also been a member of the Central Statistics Office’s Expert Group on Crime Statistics. Prof. Rogan is a representative for Ireland on the International Penal and Penitentiary Foundation, a body with advisory status to the United Nations. She is a member of the Board of the Irish Association for the Social Integration of Offenders, the Victims’ Rights Alliance, and is a former Chairperson of the Irish Penal Reform Trust. Among her most recent highly regarded publications are the monographs ‘Prison law’ and ‘Prison Policy in Ireland: Politics, Penal-welfarism and political imprisonment ’. Recommended reading Rogan, M. (2019). Prison inspection and monitoring: The need to reform European law and policy. European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, 1–21. Bacik, I., & Rogan, M. (Eds.). (2016). Legal cases that changed Ireland. Dublin: Clarus Press.

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The Path to Academia The beginnings of my work in academia came really as a result of my primary degree in Law which I studied here at Trinity College and through that I found myself very interested in the more non-legal of the legal subjects that we studied. I felt very drawn to criminology in particular, I was very enthusiastic to study it in my third year, and it was a wonderful experience. I studied criminology with Prof. Ivana Bacik and that really sowed the seeds for my later interests. As things went along I also became a little bit interested in Jurisprudence, the philosophy of law and I got interested in human rights and I knew coming to the end of my law degree that legal practice wasn’t going to be my primary interest, it became more of an interest later on in my life, but at that stage I knew probably further study was the thing I wanted to do. I did a Masters in Law at Oxford University so I still was in the legal sphere and that was a really wonderful experience. I got a huge amount out of that time and while I was there I took a module called ‘Crime, Justice and the Penal system’ with Prof. Andrew Ashworth and Prof. Ben Gould and I learned a great deal. As part of that degree I did a thesis and at that time I was still valiantly trying to combine legal philosophy with criminology which I do less of now, but I was looking at Hartian Obligation and non-criminal responses to crime—that is a pretty weird subject. But then I came back to Trinity, I came back home to Ireland and I decided to have a go at a Ph.D.— without having any clue what a Ph.D. was. My Ph.D. was with Prof. Bacik and the subject was ‘Prison Policy in Ireland 1922–1972’ and that actually eventually became my first book, ‘Prison Policy in Ireland’. The Ph.D. was fairly wide ranging and I roamed around a lot of stuff in that four years, looking at a lot of history, a lot of politics and public administration, there was a bit of human rights in there too and a bit of policy making analysis. That led to my later interests but from there I got my first post and that was at Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT)—a lecturer in Socio-Legal Studies at DIT. At the time I think it was the only position with that title in the county. It was great, I really had a wonderful time at DIT, I learned an enormous amount about teaching, and I learned a huge amount about research and I had some great colleagues. Then I ended up moving to Trinity College Dublin in 2016. During this time I did go back and train as a Barrister while working, I did that part-time and I have practiced and I found

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there are quite a few of us in Ireland who have moved from a legal background into criminology which I think gives us a particular perspective on it. I think we can learn a lot from other disciplines in terms of how we approach questions of crime and justice, but that was also quite a nice way for me to combine the two interests that I have, which is both Doctrinal Law and the lived experience. Recommended Readings Bacik, I. (2004). Kicking and screaming: Dragging Ireland into the 21st century. Dublin: O’Brien Press. Rogan, M. (2011). Prison policy in Ireland: Politics, Penal-welfarism and political imprisonment. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis. Rogan, M. (2014). Prison law. London: Bloomsbury.

In terms of my interest in criminology, I would have to lay the blame or the laurels with Prof. Bacik. During my undergraduate degree, when I found criminology, it was one of those moments when you think wow I think I have caught something here. I found myself wanting to read more, wanting to find out more, having lots of questions, a real moment where your brain probably feels on fire or alive and where you are really engaged with the subject. If I track back further, even to secondary school, I was always quite interested in social justice issues and even I would say certain novels probably influenced me, Les Miserable really influenced me as a Leaving Cert student, so those things pushed me into criminology. Just this desire to understand was really at the heart of it, to understand the legitimacy, the rationale for the most powerful tools of the state and how are they justified. What is the basis for their use? What are the effects of them? I have always been conscious of that connection between the use of these mechanisms of the state and the social dimension, so social disadvantage, the relationship between educational underachievement and equality. Also I really like the work of Mick Ryan, who I count as a mentor and somebody I was very lucky to meet—he is a retired Professor at Cambridge. He, like others, describes criminology as a ‘rendezvous discipline’, where History, Law and other social sciences met and I really like that—it makes me feel quite comfortable. Recommended reading Ryan, M. (1983). The politics of penal reform. London: Addison-Wesley Longman.

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Key Influences David Garland’s work was enormously influential for me, in general, but especially his work ‘The Culture of Control’. It was actually his earlier work that really grabbed me and which I really rate, I think it is brilliant; Punishment and Welfare had a major impact on me. I can still see the really 1980s cover of the book in the Berkley Library, where I’d go and hog it for weeks at a time. I guess what I really liked about that book was this effort to forensically trace the history of some policies around Penal-Welfarism, and the fact that it was a really in-depth study. He was really interested in social policy and the history of ideas in that book and I found that very compelling and I really tried to bring that approach into my own thesis. Then I would also say it was a revelation to me when I began to read policy analysis books, so at that time I was reading Tim Newburn and Trevor Jones’s (2007) work on ‘Policy Transfer’, Loader and Sparks (2013) on a similar field, and that work I found really quite helpful because I became very interested in the nitty-gritty of how policy is actually formed. So why do certain ideas come to fruition in criminal justice policy, why do certain evidence based ideas never get anywhere, how do we end up with certain policies and not others? That policy transfer and policy analysis work was really influential for me, it influenced my research, but it also influenced how I approach the policy making process and that has been equally as valuable and as important to me in my career to date. So two other areas that have been very important and influenced the current project I am working on was the work of Kitty Colavita and Valerie Jenness (2015) from the University of California. They did a big study of the prison system in California, particularly looking at how the people in prison and prison staff experienced and viewed the Prisoner Complaints Procedure. It was a massive study and it became a wonderful book called ‘Appealing to Justice’ and when I read that book I then wanted to pursue that kind of work, it just really crystallised things for me. And another major influence on my Ph.D. was Kieran McEvoy’s work on understanding the perspectives of people in prison during the 1980s in the North, the experience of people on Hunger Strike in the North and human rights. This really resonated with the work that I was doing on the perspective here in the twenties, where you see some really interesting and similar activities around resistance. So when we look at the post-civil

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war period in the south we see prisoners engaging in all kinds of active resistance to their confinement, so having a carnival in Mountjoy, having a dance in Mountjoy, coming up with their own magazine called the ‘Book of Cells’ as opposed ‘To the Book of Kells’. Obviously it was a kind of whimsy because there was a lot of pain and suffering to the whole process too, but you see a lot of parallels with what Kieran found in his work, so that was a very critical influence on my thinking. Key readings Garland, D. (2018). Punishment and welfare: A history of penal strategies (Vol. 29). New Orlean: Quid Pro Books. Newburn, T., & Jones, T. (2007). Policy transfer and criminal justice: Exploring US influence over British crime control policy. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press. Loader, I., & Sparks, R. (2013). Public criminology? New York: Routledge. Calavita, K., & Jenness, V. (2015). Appealing to justice: Prisoner grievances, rights, and carceral logic. Berkeley: University of California Press. McEvoy, K. (1998). Prisoners, the agreement, and the political character of the Northern Ireland conflict. Fordham International Law Journal, 22, 1539.

Situating Your Research My work has always been essentially around prisons—for example how have we got certain policies for our prison system and how do we use prison? How prison is experienced by people in prison and by staff? Also human rights in the prison context, particularly the analysis of human rights standards as they apply to prisons, and also how certain practices do not conform with human rights standards, and how those standards are experienced and lived out in practice. So it all flows around prison research but there are different dimensions, the policy side, the legal framework side and then the lived experience. But in terms of both research and policy, I get energised by the ability to bring some findings to the practical policy making audience in an effort to try and hopefully make things a bit better. So in the various projects that I have participated in we would always try and create at least a briefing paper for policy makers. It is important to take into account the many competing demands on their time, and also on their capacity

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for thought and the various priorities that they have, but you really have to make sure that your message is coming across in a usable format and that’s the key. Sometimes academic formats are maybe not the most usable formats for people who are just looking for an answer, for example what should I do in this scenario? What is the best thing? What’s the best approach? And to try to find that balance because as we know in academia there are so many caveats, and there are so many limitations on our work and it’s impossible to say that this one magical solution is going to change everything. So it is important to recognise that, but at the same time trying to put forward something practical that policy makers might be able to work with.

Research into Practice A briefing paper can be a really good way to get information to a policy maker, or holding workshops with policy makers, or more directly, getting a little bit stuck into the policy making process. At the moment I chair The Implementation and Oversight group for the Penal Policy Review Group Report. That report was published in July 2014 and it had a very ambitious objective of being an all-encompassing review of Penal Policy in Ireland. It was set up by a government minister Alan Shatter to look at what was then really a prison system sort of adrift and a penal policy making process which lacked coherence, lacked clear objectives and was pretty tired. The group comprised the Head of the Prison Service at the time, the Head of the Probation Service, so it was Michael Donlon and Vivian Guerin, a High Court Judge, and officials from the Department of Equality and Justice. I won’t name everybody, but there was a senior council, a consultant psychiatrist and then NGO representatives and the victims and the Irish Penal Reform Trust. The group’s report made forty three recommendations about how to improve penal policy in Ireland and they varied from making sure a prison is a measure of last resort to having a whole of government approach to crime, to improving our data to improving our research, and that report was accepted. The implementation process put forward by the group was agreed by the government and an implementation group was set up comprising the heads of the key areas from within the criminal justice agencies and an independent chair and that happened to be me. We report every six months to the Minister for justice and Equality on the progress on the implementation and the

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recommendations and I meet up with the members of the group individually every three months. So for me, what I like about that kind of work is you can bring your own research experience and your knowledge of the evidence which others have gathered, and take that into a practical realm and try to support people when we don’t have such a good culture of research as a feeder for policy making in Criminal Justice in Ireland. Ultimately the aim is to try and support people to do that and to help them do their jobs as well as they want to do them. So to me research and policy are very closely related and I think my Ph.D. work on the policy making process has helped me to navigate that world as well, to understand that world and to understand why certain ideas take flight and other ideas never get off the starting blocks. Recommended reading Penal Policy Review Group Report. http://www.justice.ie/en/JELR/ Pages/Strategic_Review_of_Penal_Policy_Implementation_Oversight_ Group_Reports.

Current Research I am currently involved in a project called ‘Prisons, The Rule of Law, Accountability and Rights’ (PRILA) which is a five year research project that started in 2016. It is funded by The European Research Council, and the wonderful thing about it is that it has allowed me to build a team of really amazing researchers to work with me on the topic. The objective is to understand the legal framework, the lived experience and the effects of prison oversight, so it’s specifically prison inspection, prison complaints procedures and access to the courts. So what we are trying to understand is what are the legal frameworks across Europe and what kinds of structures exist—for example for inspection bodies, for complaints bodies across Europe and compare those to what we find in the USA. We are also very interested in the lived experience, so the experiences of people in prison and the experience of staff of external scrutiny. So what is it like as a person in prison to know that there is an inspector who might come to visit the prison that you are in? Or what is it like to use the complaints procedure? Or why mightn’t you use the complaints procedure? From a staff perspective what is it like to know that the Inspector of Prisons or a member of the European Committee for the Prevention of

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Torture (CPT) is at your door and wanting to come in for an inspection right now What does that experience feel like? And what is the impact? So ultimately the question is what can we find out about the practical consequences of these kinds of oversight mechanisms? Their objective is really laudable; it is to prevent ill-treatment and it is to prevent the violation of human rights, but in practice how does that actually work? So we are interested in for example how does the CPT influence policies and practices at a local level, and so to complete the study we are working here in Ireland, we are working in Germany, we are working in Norway and Scotland, and then you have European wide surveys going around as well. So the people I work with are really fantastic to work with. Work in progress Prisons, The Rule of Law, Accountability and Rights (PRILA): https:// www.tcd.ie/law/research/PRILA/.

Current Key Work in Irish Criminology I just think it is really wonderful to see a new generation of criminology scholars emerging and the vibrancy of the field is really fantastic. For example two of my former Ph.D. students are doing amazing work. Dr. Kate O’ Hara who did her Ph.D. on the comparative outcomes and profiles of people on short term sentences of up to twelve months compared with those on community service orders. This was the first real effort to bring together administrative data from three systems, and try to understand and trace the consequences of these really important policies. It was such a massive piece of work and it was really admirable how she went about it, but I think she really did the country a massive service in showing what’s possible when you bring together the administrative data and all the necessary restrictions and being very careful and using data from the Central Statistics Office, it just shows what can be achieved, what you can learn about the outcome of policy. Dr Colette Barry who is now in Sheffield, looked at how prison staff dealt with deaths of prisoners in their custody. I think that is important for Ireland because it is one of the earliest pieces of prison staff work that we have seen and I think it is really important to have that perspective. I am very heartened to see the work by Lyndsey Black in Maynooth on gender, and historical perspectives on gender because I think we are really only coming to terms with our history when it comes to the confinement

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of women, and our approaches to women who offend, so I think her work is really going to have a major influence in the longer term. I have been very lucky to be able to rely on the work of wonderful people in the field, I am thinking of Shane Kilcommins, of Ursula Kilkelly, of Ian O’ Donnell, of Claire Hamilton, many others Kieran McEvoy, colleagues in Queens and even in areas where your work mightn’t be directly on their topic. I think they have been pioneers in the field, and have shown that this career path is possible, that this work is achievable and that has been really I think very encouraging. I think we are very lucky in Ireland in how the academic work is shaping up and to see such a generation of new scholarship coming through. I also think Louise Branagan at Edinburgh, who is bringing a new take on the history of Irish prison policy is doing great work and I just feel very encouraged, enthused and energised by all of that. Irish criminologists O’Hara, K., & Rogan, M. (2015). Examining the use of community service orders as alternatives to short prison sentences in Ireland. Irish Probation Journal, 12, 22–45. Black, L. (2009). Paper women: The representation of female offenders in Irish Newspapers. Barry, C. (2017). ‘You just get on with the job’: Prison officers’ experiences of deaths in custody in the Irish Prison Service. Prison Service Journal, 230, 53–60. Kilcommins, S. (2004). Crime, punishment and the search for order in Ireland. Dublin: Institute of Public Administration. Kilkelly, U. (2017). The child and the European convention on human rights. New York: Routledge. O’Donnell, I. (2005). Crime and justice in the Republic of Ireland. European Journal of Criminology, 2(1), 99–131. Hamilton, C. (2014). Reconceptualizing penality: Towards a multidimensional measure of punitiveness. British Journal of Criminology, 54(2), 321–343. Sparks, R., Bird, J., & Brangan, L. (2016). The politics of imprisonment. In J. Bennett, B. Crewe, & Y. Jewkes (Eds.), Handbook on prisons. Cullompton: Willan Publishing.

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What Is Next for Criminology in Ireland? I think we are in a good position with the numbers of people coming through and the great ideas they are bringing. So what is coming next I think is a natural stage and that is the maturing of the field. What I hope will come is a critique of the foundational stuff that people have written, about their take on the prison system in Ireland, about policing structure in Ireland, about the history of crime and punishment in Ireland. So we kind of had the first wave where people have sketched out what had been fairly unconsidered terrain or fairly unknown terrain. So people like me we’ve had a go in saying this is what we think prison policy was like, now let’s challenge that, lets critique that—that’s the next stage and I think that’s very healthy for the discipline as a whole. What I think really needs to happen and I hope it’s not too far away is to see a greater emphasis on research for policy, so I know people have different views on this, but I think we need to have some kind of administrative criminology set up in Ireland, because basically at the moment we don’t have anything and we need to create positions where people can bring their skills to bear on policy making and on the evaluation of policies and on the examination of government decisions. I think there is a crying need for that, and I am encouraged when I see there is a new strategy for the Department of Justice and Equality recently published and lots of efforts by Vivienne Guerin (former Head of Probation Ireland) in that respect and others Gertrude Singh (Dept. of Justice Research Unit), who is now within the department. I am encouraged by those but I think we need a big push and I hope in the next five years we will see some real efforts to embed a culture of research in policy making.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Criminology in Ireland So we are hamstrung to a great degree by the quality of the data that’s produced centrally, so just things like the format in which data is produced, for example if you look at sentencing data and you will do well to find sentencing data, but whatever you do find will usually not be in a format that’s conducive to research. The inability to answer, to even ask, not even answer, to even ask, some profoundly important questions about our system I think is a huge weakness and I think it’s going to become

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more of a problem later on unless we take some of the necessary steps to change it. But for the positive, first of all I think it is really wonderful that we have the North/South all-Ireland Criminology Conference, I think our shared history and the shared issues that we face mean that it’s an absolute nobrainer that we have more collaboration from north/south and it is very encouraging to see criminal justice agencies doing this on the ground. I know the Probation service for example and the Prison Service, both north and south have both been making a lot of effort to work together, to come up similar solutions to what are shared problems. Also what I hope is that we are able to find homes for all of the wonderful researchers who are graduating from Irish Universities, that our own academic community is able to sustain itself, and make sure that we can provide really good practical and good working environments for the people that are coming through. I suppose we can get specific about that and state that we would like that people can have good positions, that they have good conditions, that they are able to pursue their research, all of that, so that is something that I would very much like to see develop. I would also like us to continue to find our own voice on criminal justice issues and to not always perhaps to be in the shadow of our nearest neighbour in that respect. It is important to be able to talk about the unique and interesting features of the Irish criminal justice system and to talk about it on its own terms, its own experience is inherently interesting not only when we compare it to that of others. I’d like to see us perhaps have more of a role in the European context so our experience receives more analysis within a European context and I think we can achieve this in practical ways through involvement in European wide projects and by sharing knowledge and promoting a better European wide approach to policy.

References Bacik, I. (2004). Kicking and screaming: Dragging Ireland into the 21st century. Dublin: O’Brien Press. Bacik, I., & Rogan, M. (Eds.). (2016). Legal cases that changed Ireland. Dublin: Clarus Press. Barry, C. (2017). ‘You just get on with the job’: Prison officers’ experiences of deaths in custody in the Irish Prison Service. Prison Service Journal, 230, 53–60.

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Black, L. (2009). Paper women: The representation of female offenders in Irish Newspapers. Calavita, K., & Jenness, V. (2015). Appealing to justice: Prisoner grievances, rights, and carceral logic. Berkeley: University of California Press.. Delaney, V. T. H. (1960). The history of legal education in Ireland. Journal of Legal Education, 12(3), 396–406. Ferraari, R., & Holmes, A. (1912). Should criminology be taught in the law school? Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, 2(6), 826–831. Garland, D. (1985). Punishment and welfare: A history of Penal strategies. New York: Gower. Garland, D. (2018). Punishment and welfare: A history of penal strategies (Vol. 29). New Orlean: Quid Pro Books. Hamilton, C. (2014). Reconceptualizing penality: Towards a multidimensional measure of punitiveness. British Journal of Criminology, 54(2), 321–343. Kilcommins, S. (2004). Crime, punishment and the search for order in Ireland. Dublin: Institute of Public Administration. Kilkelly, U. (2017). The child and the European convention on human rights. New York: Routledge. Loader, I., & Sparks, R. (2013). Public criminology? New York: Routledge. McEvoy, K. (1998). Prisoners, the agreement, and the political character of the Northern Ireland conflict. Fordham International Law Journal, 22, 1539. Newburn, T., & Jones, T. (2007). Policy transfer and criminal justice: Exploring US influence over British crime control policy. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press. O’Donnell, I. (2005). Crime and justice in the Republic of Ireland. European Journal of Criminology, 2(1), 99–131. O’Hara, K., & Rogan, M. (2015). Examining the use of community service orders as alternatives to short prison sentences in Ireland. Irish Probation Journal, 12, 22–45. Paris, M., & Donnelly, L. (2010). Legal education in Ireland: A paradigm shift to the practical? German Law Journal, 11(9), 1067–1092. Rogan, M. (2011). Prison policy in Ireland: Politics Penal-welfarism and political imprisonment. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis. Rogan, M. (2014). Prison law. London: Bloomsbury. Rogan, M. (2019). Prison inspection and monitoring: The need to reform European law and policy. European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-019-09420-8. Ryan, M. (1983). The politics of penal reform. London: Addison-Wesley Longman. Sparks, R., Bird, J., & Brangan, L. (2016). The politics of imprisonment. In J. Bennett, B. Crewe, & Y. Jewkes (Eds.), Handbook on prisons. Cullompton: Willan Publishing.

CHAPTER 9

In Conversation with Dr Diarmuid Griffin

Abstract In this chapter Dr Griffin speaks about his experience working in the USA’s public defender system and how this led him from his legal training towards a career in criminal justice informed by criminological perspectives. He speaks about how he approaches risk assessment in his work and speaks about risk as a phenomenon that underpins decision making in criminal justice agencies but also more generally as a means of social control. Dr Griffin goes on to speak about the application of knowledge in the field of criminology, and he references his own work on the analysis of decision making in cases of life imprisonment. Importantly, this research has not only informed policy makers in Ireland, it has also been widely welcomed by the prisoners themselves. Keywords Life sentence · Parole · Politics · Death penalty

In 1959 Gilbert Geis (p. 40) stated that there is a considerable gap between the ‘values and practices of the social sciences and law’ he even went so far as to say that lawyers are apt to ‘be scornful of the findings of social science’. The roots of disunity he points out have been overcome by the increasing interest displayed in criminology by eager students and by the positioning of criminology units within sociology departments. This positioning has served to close the gap and opened the door for © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 O. Lynch et al., Reflections on Irish Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60593-3_9

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cross fertilisation. While the accuracy of this prophecy from 1959 is open to question, the outcome of the prophecy is certainly evident in Irish criminology. The positive relationships between legal scholars and sociologists, criminologists and psychologists, practitioners and researchers are testament to the cross fertilisation that is commonplace in the field. Furthermore anecdotal accounts of the experiences of legal scholars in this volume are certainly testament to the importance of sociology, criminology and social theory for legal scholars and vice versa. As will come as no surprise, Foucault’s (1977) work features prominently in the sociological awakening of legal scholars and Dr Griffin’s account below, and others in this volume, document this influence on both their legal training but also their academic research. The issue of practice dominates the perspectives of contributors to this volume, and for Dr Diarmuid Griffin it is no different. His experience working in the USA’s public defender system led him from his legal training towards a career in criminal justice research informed by criminological perspectives. Like other contributors to this volume, Dr Griffin references the influence of theories of social control and power on his work, and mentions the work of Cohen (1972), Foucault (1977), and Garland (2012) on his academic writing. Linked to this is the notion of risk assessment, and Dr Griffin speaks about this approach as a tool that underpins decision making in Criminal Justice agencies, but also more generally as a means of social control. He also prioritises the application of knowledge in the field of criminology, and he references his own work on the analysis of decision making in cases of life imprisonment. Importantly, this research has not only informed policy makers in Ireland, it has also been widely welcomed by the prisoners themselves. This again brings us back to the importance of hearing marginalised voices and the need for inclusivity in criminological research—a theme that is omnipresent in the chapters of this book.

Biography Dr Griffin is a Lecturer in the School of Law at the National University of Ireland, Galway, where he teaches criminal law, criminology and criminal justice. Dr Griffin completed his PhD in 2014 at the UCD Institute of Criminology. He also holds a LL.M. degree in Criminal Justice and a BCL degree from University College Cork as well as a teaching qualification from NUI Galway. His research has been published in journals such

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as the British Journal of Criminology and Irish Jurist and he has attracted research funding through the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights and the Millennium Fund from NUI Galway. He is currently working on a monograph for Palgrave Macmillan on life imprisonment and parole. Dr Griffin’s research has impacted on academic and public discourse as well as contributing to public policy. His research has been cited in numerous international peer-reviewed publications (Law and Social Inquiry; Youth Justice; Public Health) and has been subject to national debate through newspaper articles and radio programmes. He has contributed to public policy through his role as a consultant and legal expert for FRALEX (advising the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights), the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission and Transparency International. Diarmuid has held visiting scholarships at the University of California, Berkeley and New York University. In 2011, he lectured at San Quentin State Prison, as part of the Prison University Project which provides higher education to inmates. Recommended Reading Griffin, D. (2018). Killing time: Life imprisonment and parole in Ireland. Springer.

Pathways to Criminology I started off doing a law degree in University College Cork (UCC) and when I finished that I did a Masters in Criminal Justice (Law) also in UCC, and after that I applied for a job in NUI Galway as a lecturer on a one year contract. I was really very young and didn’t know what I was doing but that is how I got into academia. But in terms of criminology in particular I was enjoying law and criminal justice somewhat but I wasn’t really sure if it was something I wanted to do career wise. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a Solicitor or a Barrister and I think a lot of students have that issue, they are not really sure what they want to do after they finish college. So I applied for an internship in San Francisco in the Public Defender’s office and I worked there for a summer. I was with an attorney who was defending clients, offenders or accused people and I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed interacting with the clients and at that stage I decided I wanted to work in the area of criminal justice. I didn’t know what area, so when I came back home I did a Masters in Criminal

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Justice and it led me into criminology. I would say it was the internship that changed my perspective and having good mentors in college led me into the area of criminal justice.

Key Influences When I was in college doing my masters, Michel Foucault’s (1977) ‘Discipline and Punishment’ influenced me a lot in terms of my perspective and opened up my mind to different ways of looking at problems, and maybe not accepting the traditional narrative of what is put out there. That really influenced me in terms of thinking from a critical point of view and I think that was really encouraged in UCC. Then I think maybe later on David Garland’s (2012) work ‘The Culture of Control’ and Johnathon Feeley’s (1992) work on The New Penology which focuses on risk and risk assessment were important for me; I used that framework as a tool to analyse decision making in criminal justice. Key Readings Feeley, M. M., & Simon, J. (1992). The new penology: Notes on the emerging strategy of corrections and its implications. Criminology, 30(4), 449–474. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Garland, D. (2012). The culture of control: Crime and social order in contemporary society. University of Chicago Press.

Current Research My research area is looking at decision makers specifically in relation to life imprisonment and parole. So originally I wanted to achieve certain objectives. I wanted to look at a problem that was current that I thought was significant—so I chose life Imprisonment in Ireland as a problem because it is the ultimate penalty that a person can be subject to. But I also wanted to look at the legal decisions, the subsequent release and legal questions of international significance. I think because life imprisonment is the alternative to capital punishment and we are still figuring it out in Ireland but also in many other countries, the issue of how to manage life imprisonment issues, for example at what point will somebody be released, at

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what time has somebody served enough time in prison, should we have life without parole or, is that something that should not exist in any jurisdiction? These are all the kinds of questions that are being raised now in relation to life imprisonment and I use Ireland as a case study to look at some of these issues.

Influences I think the most influential piece I have published is my most recent book which is called ‘Killing time, Life Imprisonment and Parole in Ireland’, it is the culmination of a lot of work over a long period of time, it started off as my PhD but it culminated in the book and it gives a good representation of my work since my doctorate. When I set out to look at this issue of life Imprisonment and parole I suppose one thing that was obvious was that there wasn’t any previous empirical studies on this particular topic. One of the challenges in Ireland and I think one of the benefits is that as a researcher there is not much research done and that is positive, a bit challenging at times you know it is hard to get the ball rolling at times when nobody has done any work on it previously. But one of the challenges I definitely faced when I was doing my PhD was how to get access and even what to get access to because there was very little information out there on parole and life imprisonment, so that was a major challenge. Obviously I wanted to carry out an empirical project, I wanted to look at parole decision making and in order to do that you have to focus on the parole decision makers and the information that they are using so I was trying over a long period of time to get access to parole decision makers. Access was quite a difficult process, it certainly was the most difficult part of the PhD process for me and there were lots of challenges, some of it was just by nature of the fact that it was a new area that nobody had really done work on before, but another part of the process was the political nature of the decision making. In Ireland the Minister for Justice decides at what point a life sentence prisoner gets released and so it is politically sensitive and any research on politically sensitive topics is going to be more challenging. So in terms of gaining access it was a very long process. It was the parole board and one minister who eventually did agree to be interviewed, and the output was quite fruitful. The participants were really very honest in the interviews which was a benefit in terms of my research and really beneficial in terms of public knowledge.

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Researching Sensitive Areas Getting access can be difficult, there were a lot of meetings, a lot of discussions, a lot of letter writing, a lot of assurances being made about the research that was being conducted. I think for decision makers one of the issues that kept coming up and rightly so, is that the population is small and they don’t want adverse publicity. These individuals, these people are being released into the community and one of the problems that decision makers would have talked about in terms of their own decision making process is that there is such public interest in these releases, most of these people would have committed murder some of them are more notorious than others, or would have attracted more attention, but all of them would have attracted some attention in terms of the media. It was an issue for them, having outsiders coming into do research— particularly in relation to trust and having an agenda. That is quite a legitimate concern, from my point of view I had to make a number of assurances and build up relationships over a period of time that allowed people to give me access to themselves as decision makers and regarding how I would treat their work and about the results and publications. I think it has changed in many ways since I did my PhD because the Department of Justice is more open to research and more open to outsiders coming into evaluate the various different aspects of the criminal justice system. They have set up funding streams within the Department of Justice where people can apply for funding for different projects that they are interested in, so I think that is a really positive step and I think it really shows a change in terms of criminal justice research. It really is a positive development. Interesting as well is how research develops; one of the things that I focused on initially or I thought would be the focus was the decision making process; I thought this would be the issue of risk and risk assessment. I thought that decision makers when they were talking about the release of life offenders that their primary concern would be around risk and the likelihood of reoffending. But it emerged through the data analysis that there were actually other factors influencing parole outcomes. The process is political, the parole board makes references to the minister and the minister makes the decision so in this kind of environment politics ultimately plays a role where the decision falls to the politician. So what I found out is that the parole board were in some ways influenced by what their perception of what the minister’s response might be. This perception

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might not have been accurate from the minister’s point of view and sometimes things are lost in translation, but ultimately parole decisions are not just made by the parole board—the minister is part of the decision. So the parole board puts in a report on risk and the prison psychologist is involved and there is an interview with life sentence prisoners but there is a whole process before it gets to the parole board to make a decision on release. However, they are interested in risk and ultimately if someone is above a low level of risk they wouldn’t be inclined to release them, at least when I was doing the research. There would also have been factors such as the seriousness of the offence and the depravity of the offence. One of the problems with a life sentence is that it is mandatory for murder [in Ireland] so the judge has no discretion about the different levels of seriousness or the different levels of depravity of the offence. Any of the factors that are normally considered at sentencing where there is discretion, there is no discretion on the sentencing side of things for murder. So the parole board are in a position of making assessments, where, in the case of murder, everyone has a life sentence. One might ask are there people that have committed more serious and some way more violent crimes? So what this means is the parole board are involved in what would traditionally be sentencing activities, but by virtue of the sentence being mandatory for murder, this means that the decision is kicked down the line to the parole board and some would say that this is not an appropriate decision for the parole board. However, the reality is the system that we have in terms of the life sentences doesn’t allow any discretion and it creates a problem down the line. In some cases because within the offence of murder there are different types of behaviour and offending and because the court cannot account for it, the parole board feel that they must account for it at some level. So that was one of the findings of the research. The second thing was that politics did play a role in the decision making process and that different ministers did take different positions in relation to release. The parole board were in some ways reacting to that and there was some sort of a feedback loop going on there, I think things have probably changed in the last couple of years in relation to that since this study was done. But I think the main issue is that in a very unstructured and informal environment, individuals can have great influence. These are just some of the pros and cons of the Irish criminal justice system: It can be very discretionary, certainly different parts of the system

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can operate to the benefit of someone subject to the parole process and it can also operate in the opposite direction depending on the individual. I think the framework that is in place to structure decision making is very important and how we might manage that in the Irish criminal justice System is very important.

Policy and Practice The implications of this research are interesting. Fianna Fail recently introduced a parole bill and it is currently coming up for debate. It removes the minister and creates a statutory basis for the parole board and changes the decision making. At the moment the parole board meets once a month and there are about twelve people on the board. The board discusses people that are up for review and they make decisions or recommendations. So under this new process the parole board make the decision, but it would be a parole panel of about three people or five people making the actual decision on release. That process can either be a paper review so not too dissimilar to what’s happening at the moment or an oral hearing. At present we don’t have an oral hearing for parole so the prisoners have an interview but they don’t have a hearing and they have very few rights in terms of legal representation and their input into the process is quite minimal, so that would be a change. This proposal also allows victim involvement, victim input is part of the bill, and risk assessment is also used in this bill. Now this bill is far from perfect—I have worked actually with the Irish Penal Reform Trust on a paper putting a case forward for amendments to the bill. There are certain aspects of it that we think are problematic. This bill has been going since 2016 it is now 2020 and it is unclear really as to what is going to happen with this bill, whether it will continue its course through the houses of the Oireachtas or whether there be a number of very significant amendments to it or whether it will be withdrawn and redrafted. So it is by no means certain that this bill will become law. It is quite unusual though because at the time it was an opposition bill, normally opposition bills will not make it past any stage you know so the fact that it got to this stage is good. Now how much further it will go is unclear because the last time it was discussed was maybe June 2017 and nothing has been heard. But reform is certainly necessary, I think all parties are in agreement that reform is necessary it’s just a question of what form that reform should take.

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Parole Act 2019, link to Houses of Oireachtas’ page: https://www.oireac htas.ie/en/bills/bill/2016/29/.

Statutory Sentencing Ireland When someone is convicted in Ireland there is usually a sentencing hearing for all individuals and at that sentencing hearing under normal circumstances there will be arguments from the prosecution and defence putting evidence forward in terms of what level of sentence should be imposed. Then the judge makes a decision based on the principle of proportionality and the gravity of the offence and the circumstances of the offender—that’s the Judges job. For a conviction of murder because the life sentence is mandatory, there is no need really to go into all that and because the sentence is mandatory there is no discretion in the sentence to be handed down and the person is committed to prison if they are not already in prison on remand during their trial process. What happens is they get seven years before they are sentenced to review in front of the parole board. One of the issues that has changed in recent times is that if you are serving a life sentence they didn’t really engage with the parole board and they are trying to change that within the prison service. They are trying to ensure that life sentence prisoners are engaged from the start of their sentence which I think is really, really important. So I know the average time served for life imprisonment in the last eighteen years was twenty two years—it has ranged really between twenty to twenty two years. We know that the life sentence prisoner will be in the parole process for quite a long time. They are reviewed every three years, they can be reviewed earlier but it is usually every three years at the start. There will be reports written they will engage with various different agencies, probation, psychology, the Gardaí, the prison governor, etc. so they are in that process every three years. The recommendations made at the beginning of the process would be more to do with sentence management that the person needs to engage or there might be issues in relation to prison discipline that they need to address. There might be issues linked to substance abuse they might want them to work on or in terms of support around re-entry and family support employment prospects, skills in terms of employment, offers of employment etc. All of these things are part of the early stages of preparing for release and as someone is nearing

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release they may move them to a step down facility to help them engage in preparing for re-entry to society. They would have day releases and they may be able to work on a range of skills. At this stage they are on full temporary release. But up until that point they are in this process every three years, and from their point of view they are thinking what is the point in engaging with this process knowing that you are not going to be released. But that is the system and there are lots of challenges. For example, you know a person might be challenging their conviction, they might be charged with murder and they might be appealing it and hoping that the appeal will be successful. So different challenges arise for every review so there is no template, but I suppose one of the things about politics is that the different ministers will come and go and there will be different ministers looking with fresh eyes on a case and have different opinions on law and order. With the parole board there will be a change also in terms of human resources. So for example at the moment we would say that lifers are expected to serve a lot longer than they would have in the past, but there are certainly no rules about a person being released at a certain point, there are certainly persons within the prison system who have served more than thirty years in prison and still haven’t been released. So there is no one size fits all and obviously the different individuals involved might influence the decision to release or not in different ways.

Legal Interpretation One aspect of my work is how the courts view the processes in place. For example there was a decision on Ireland by the European Court addressing the mandatory life sentencing for murder. The mandatory element was challenged and the court found it was in fact compliant with the European Convention and to many in Ireland that was a surprise because there was a belief that mandatory life sentencing was not compliant with the ECHR. So the European Court effectively said it is compliant. Why was that? Well one of the reasons was that we don’t divide up our sentences, the judge won’t say for example that the person will serve ten years, and then after that ten years then an assessment must be made on his level of dangerousness, or his risk of reoffending because we don’t have that process. This is the system in England, which has been subject to a lot of adverse decisions by the court. We have a process of

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judicial review of the cases and there are a lot of different mechanisms to ensure that there can be oversight of the process. My conflict with what some of the decision makers have said is around how they got to this legal interpretation and how does this look in practice. The interpretation at ground level in my view and the legal interpretation is different. So the European Court said it’s important to look at the reality of the situation, but you know I would say that are two different realities based upon your perspective. If you are a parole decision maker your perspective on your role versus the European Court or the Supreme Courts interpretation of what the role of the parole board is, is quite different. This difference in interpretation was a big part of my training when I was doing my masters research; I was always interested in it and I always carry it with me. The difference between what the legal interpretation is and how that looks in reality is difficult to reconcile. For example I am currently doing seminars and workshops with life sentence prisoners, and when doing these seminars there is a frustration because there’s a big mix of information and they are not sure what to rely on. They are looking for information on the processes, and it is difficult for people subject to the process who do not really know the rules or the boundaries of the process. So I am working with my colleague on this, trying to provide information about decision making and the process in a reliable format, so they feel like they can rely on that information and they can situate themselves accurately within that process. So this involves telling people about their rights and dealing with expectations because the process is a very informal one, so it is about managing rights and expectations. But it is also about managing what they need to do to engage with the process. So it has a dual purpose for them, what are the parameters of the process and how do I best deal with engaging with it. We focus on things like risk assessment and risk factors and what dynamic risk factors are so that they can have a more beneficial or a more fruitful engagement.

Current Research At the moment I am working on the discretionary element of life sentences, so working with people who haven’t been convicted of murder but who have been sentenced to life, outside of murder. So for example sex offenders or those who have committed offences like manslaughter, or attempted murder and looking at the long term trends in life sentencing. It is the maximum sentence in Ireland for a lot of different offences, but

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it is rarely used. I think it is an area that is beginning to attract some interest, not just in Ireland but elsewhere because there is an interest in whether judges are more inclined to impose maximum sentences and what rationales are there for imposing a life sentence. So what I am really looking at is the judicial discretion to impose a life sentence and in what circumstances will they impose the maximum sentence. It is bringing up many questions, including questions about judicial discretion and the benchmark of severity. In Ireland traditionally we would have been, compared to other countries at least, lenient in sentencing and I believe we are becoming more severe in sentencing. So asking are we becoming more punitive—because the judiciary traditionally would have been more counterpoint to those kinds of trends—but there are always exceptions. Another question is under what circumstances should we permit a discretionary life sentence and what are the implications of it all, so that is something I am currently working on and hoping to bring to fruition at some point.

Irish Criminology In terms of academia—at the moment there seems to be a big movement towards undergraduate criminology degrees either entirely or in part but I think you know that’s a positive thing. Also I think in terms of research there seems to be a shift where there is more funding available for criminal justice research. From my own research when you are starting from scratch you know you talk about building up information, that’s the first thing you are doing and with so many Irish research projects coming through there should be lots of interesting research out there that should be very interesting academically but also relevant in the public arena so hopefully to be able to influence policy as well. A really important aspect of our work is that we are working in a field that there is a lot of public interest. Ultimately we can use our work to create a platform in order to influence policy, and decision making. From my point of view, when I start a project I consider how it might influence decision makers and will it be of influence at a policy level. Will there be an interest for those who work in this area in this research, so I think that that’s for me at least, it is not for everyone but for me that is an important part of my work. But despite the progress of criminology in Ireland, it is a struggle for us to try and establish structures that exist in other jurisdictions. If you take England and Wales, they have journals, they have institutes, and even

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though we have progressed a lot we are still at the stage where we are trying to build up these institutes and structures that can continue for decades without the need for one individual or one group of people to keep it going. It can kind of have its own existence and continue on as people come and go, so I think that is one of the big challenges for criminology in Ireland at the moment to build up these structures. We can all feed into them and it is to the benefit of the community, the criminal justice and criminology community as a whole.

Bibliography Cohen, S. (1972). Folk devils and moral panics: The creation of the mods and rockers. London: MacGibbon & Kee. Feeley, M. M., & Simon, J. (1992). The new penology: Notes on the emerging strategy of corrections and its implications. Criminology, 30(4), 449–474. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Garland, D. (2012). The culture of control: Crime and social order in contemporary society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Geis, G. (1959). Sociology, criminology and criminal law. Social Problems, 7 (1), 40–47. Griffin, D. (2018). Killing time. Cham: Springer.

CHAPTER 10

In Conversation with Prof. Maggie O’Neill

Abstract In this chapter Prof. Maggie O’Neill frames her approach to criminology as knowledge with purpose. She defines her work as one of theoretical advocacy in which narratives around art and participation are pivotal. Prof. O’Neill talks to us about her research, going in three directions: towards sex workers, around migration and belonging and finally, around methodology, towards the development of walking methods. Underlying these projects and approaches is the idea of using research methods with intervention potential, and not only aimed at understanding, but at social change. Prof. O Neill goes on to speak about the need to develop a subject to subject relationship in research in which not only the content of what is shared is important, but also the analysis of the conjuncture in which such sharing happens. Keywords Ethnographic · Voice · Ethnomimesis · Practice · Sex work

Criminological discourses have served both positive and negative ends. One problematic outcome of a dominant criminological discourse is the power in the dichotomy that has been created between the subject and the rest, be that the offender or the victim. This approach to crime and offending has influenced the ideological direction of the field (Cohen 1988; Deckert 2016). A part of this issue is the strong preference for © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 O. Lynch et al., Reflections on Irish Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60593-3_10

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quantitative methods chosen by early researchers in the field—and this inclination is still evident in the major disciplinary journals. For example a review of seven of the leading criminology/criminal justice journals demonstrates that survey research was the most prominent method used for data collection and multivariate statistical methods were the norm (Kleck et al. 2006; Treadwell 2019). Linked to the contracted methodological profile of the discipline is the issue of silencing; the silencing of certain voices and the amplification of other voices and the visibility of particular issues over others. Firstly researchers believe that developments in criminology are hampered by the use of non-quantitative methods and as a result sub-fields that focus on qualitative methods are left on the margins (Lynch et al. 2017). But also authors have pointed out that silencing happens due to the choice of methodology itself. For example Deckert (2016) points to traditional methods (interview, survey) that can silence minority populations, and lead to an absence of engagement with the researched community. However, things are certainly changing within the field; silencing and lack of engagement is the focus of the work of Prof. Maggie O’Neill over the past four decades. Her work on imaginative methods has challenged and reformed the way we think about criminological research and her approach to research embodied as knowledge with purpose has furthered conceptualisation of how and why research must engage with marginalised populations. Prof. O’Neill’s early research engagement with sex workers has come to define her work and she describes her academic engagement as theoretical advocacy in which narratives around art and participation are pivotal. From this perspective, storytelling is seen as a key underpinning concept for qualitative social research, as opposed to other methods of biographical research which, according to Prof. O’Neill bring in an inherently European point of view, and hence, risks excluding the point of view of the participant. In this chapter Prof. O’Neill talks to us about her research with sex workers, concerning migration and belonging and finally, around methodology. Criminology as a discipline at the crossroad between academia and practice is a key focus of this conversation with Prof. Maggie O Neill.

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Biography Prof. Maggie O’Neill is Professor of Sociology and Head of the Department of Sociology and Criminology at University College Cork. Prior to moving to Cork she worked in a number of institutions in the UK including Durham University, where she also co-founded the Sex Work Research Hub, and the University of York, where she was founder and co-chair of the Migration Network. While at University of York she was awarded an ESRC Impact Grant/IAA Fellowship, amongst other funding. Her research area is broad, ranging from sex work to migration, but across the board it maintains an emphasis on participatory research and the development of praxis , where the production of knowledge is intertwined with change, and has an impact on policy. She is author of ‘Prostitution and Feminism’ in which she links critical feminist theory with ethnographic research to expand the understanding of the phenomenon of prostitution and co-author of the recent volume on ‘Imaginative criminology: of spaces past, present and future’, with Dr. Lizzie Seal. Suggested Reading from Prof. O’Neill O’Neill, M. (2013). Prostitution and feminism: Towards a politics of feeling. Wiley. O’Neill, M., & Roberts, B. (2019). Walking methods: Research on the move. London: Routledge. Seal, L., & O’Neill, M. (2019). Imaginative criminology: Of spaces past, present and future. Bristol University Press.

Pathway to Criminology My B.Ed. specialist subjects were education, sociology and creative arts, so I guess that was my way in. In the final year of my degree I really got grabbed by critical theory. I had a fabulous lecturer called Conrad Lodziak, who introduced us to social theory, the work of Adorno and Benjamin, the Frankfurt school of Giddens and Ulrich Beck and that was it really, I was hooked. So a potential career in primary education turned into an MPhil, a Ph.D. and then a post as lecturer in sociology and later in criminology.

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In terms of criminology in particular, my first empirical research project began in 1989 looking at ‘Prostitution in Nottingham’, it was commissioned by Nottingham Safer Cities. At that time there were a number of cities deemed at risk of crime and disorder and Nottingham was one of them. But actually it was more to do with social class really, because the women were working outside the more middle-class residences while also working in multi-ethnic working class areas. So basically a ‘not in my back yard’ advocacy led to the need for the research and I was commissioned to do it. At that time I was a lecturer in sociology at Nottingham Trent. In ’94 I moved to a Senior Lectureship at Staffordshire University and I developed what was probably the first ever module on sex work called ‘Crime, Justice and the Sex Industry’. But as a consequence of the sex work project I became connected to criminologists. A friend at Nottingham Trent, Terry Gillespie, invited me to go to my first every criminology conference around 1990. In addition, the more cultural sociology and cultural work I was doing at Staffordshire, where I taught sociology, social studies and women’s studies, and the feminist work I was doing all connected to cultural criminology. So I describe being adopted by criminologists particularly the cultural criminologists, people like Mike Presdee and Martin O’Brien were very supportive of my research. Cultural criminology in particular was very male oriented at this time, but the conferences were always great fun. I was writing and being read and being invited to events that were criminological as well as sociological so I guess my scholarship took both paths and obviously as an interdisciplinary scholar it worked. But going back to how I got into academia—I didn’t in a million years think that I would end up where I am now. I did an MPhil at Bradford looking at Adorno’s Aesthetics of Modernism and that became a PhD. incorporating feminist aesthetics. However my involvement in sex work research really disrupted that path and I realised that I couldn’t go back to just doing theory, that I needed to do research that actually made a difference, that was participatory or involved in causing change. So my path was diverted and I used the theoretical work I had developed on the Adorno project to analyse prostitution. So studying for an MPhil and then Ph.D. really set me on a more academic route, and I thought ‘I can’t teach in schools now, I have to stay with this’ and I ended up doing part-time hourly paid teaching for four years and then I got a one year contract at Sheffield—sick leave cover, and then a point five contract back at Trent. They made me full time at Trent after a year, and in that time,

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I had had two children. Really in ’94 I had what I consider to be my first main post at Staffordshire University. I have been very lucky to work with many fabulous people. I think that is the other side of one’s path into academia—the people who you work alongside, and the influence they can bring to bear on one’s own thinking and the dialogue you can have. It was fantastic at Trent, there were so many amazing people: Terry Gillespie, Chris Wilkinson, Larry Wilde, Roger Burke, Conrad Lodziak, Nick Tilley and Don Hartley. At Staffordshire, again some amazing colleagues: Chris Rojek, David Jary, Christine Gledhill, and a number of fabulous women sociologists, Sandie Hope Forest, Tracy Potts and Ruth Holiday as well as Barbara Kennedy, Tim Edensor and David Bell. My path crossed with Gayle Letherby briefly. So I guess I was formed there, because there was a group of us that really supported each other as developing academics. Key Readings Adorno, T. W. (1998). Aesthetic theory (R. Hullot-Kentor, Trans.). Minnesota University Press. Presdee, M. (2003). Cultural criminology and the carnival of crime. London: Routledge. O’Brien, M. (2005). What is cultural about cultural criminology? The British Journal of Criminology, 45(5), 599–612. Lodziak, C. (1995). Manipulating needs: Capitalism and culture. London: Pluto Press.

Criminological Influences Primarily my influences are feminist works. Gail Rubin wrote a wonderful book called ‘Sexual Deviations’ and Gail Peterson wrote ‘Whore’s Stigma’ and those were really important early works for me, especially when I did my first ethnographic research on the streets. Also, in relation to sex work Eileen McLeod’s work was pivotal, she was a Marxist feminist, and her book ‘Prostitution Now’ was really influential; it really helped me to make sense of my own theoretical underpinnings. My conceptual framework was absolutely influenced by Western Marxism, principles of equality and justice, but also the feminist work addressing sexual and social inequalities, and thirdly that our work should make a difference, so the importance of praxis. Developing knowledge which is purposeful,

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which can unsettle, trouble or enable us to think differently about something, about a topic, is so important. Then for me there was also the activists, Ruth Morgan Thomas, who was a former sex worker who set up SCOTPEP in Edinburgh, a fabulous project supporting sex workers on the street, women and men and trans workers, they were the first outreach workers. Hilary Kinnell set up the SAFE project, in Birmingham at this time. Also. Karen Hughes—I worked with Karen who was a sexual health outreach worker, from her car, with a flask of coffee and a bag of condoms, and I learned a lot from her and from the women I met on the street. So that sex workers project, led to a five year ethnography as well as working to support activists and projects like Karen’s sexual health drop in. The research was happening at the same time as the development of a Prostitute Outreach Organisation in Nottingham called POW run by experiential workers who had worked in the industry and they set up this amazing organisation. One of the main issues for me back then was safety, safety and violence and that was just so apparent, and feminists who were fighting sexual violence, intimate partner violence, male violence against women, women like Betsy Stanko, Jalna Hanma, Gill Radford, they were really crucial for me in terms of developing a criminological imagination. Pat Carlen’s fabulous work called Criminal Women from 1983 where she published the life stories of four women who were former prisoners was a really nuanced critical work that helps us think differently and transgress stereotypes around women and crime and obviously prostitution in particular. So that’s the feminists and then, the second sphere of work is cultural, what became cultural criminology, so Jock Young, Roger Mathews, Mike Presdee. Mike was a friend, a dear friend, and Jeff Ferrell in the states, so again it was very male orientated but I really liked this combination, particularly in Jeff’s work, drawing upon the symbolic interactionist and ethnographic approaches. The influence of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies in the work of Stuart Hall was also particularly important for me, around the way power operates, the relationship between class, race, and state power, ideology and the work of hegemony too. Feminist work and the Birmingham School of Cultural studies and cultural criminology combined in the development of my research, but also most importantly ethnographic symbolic interactionalism and the work of the Chicago School of Sociology.

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Key Readings Rubin, G. (2011). Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pheterson, G. (1986). The whore stigma: Female dishonor and male unworthiness. Den Haag: Ministerie van Sociale Zaken en Werkgelegenheid. McLeod, E. (1982). Working women: Prostitution now. London: Croom Helm. Carlen, P. (1985). Criminal women. Blackwell: Polity Press. Young, J. (1999). The exclusive society: Social exclusion, crime and difference in late modernity. London: Sage. Ferrell, J., Hayward, K., Morrison, W., & Presdee, M. (Eds.). (2016). Cultural criminology unleashed. London: Routledge. Hall, S. (2003). Cultural studies and the centre: Some problematics and problems. In Culture, media, language (pp. 12–45). London: Routledge. Matthews, R. (2016). What is to be done about crime and punishment? Towards a ‘public criminology’. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Also important were Jalna Hanma and Sheila Saunders who did the first ever community based study of violence against women and it was called ‘Well-founded Fear, A Community of Violence to Women’. They knocked on doors and interviewed women, it was an amazing study, it was pioneering at that time to open a space for women’s voices and to go around actually doing door to door interviews in women’s homes about their experience of violence. It was carried out in Leeds and they interviewed something like one hundred and twenty nine women and they asked about the violence and sexual abuse they had encountered in the previous year. Finally Betsy Stanko’s work was really important. Betsy had arrived in the UK from the USA, had had experience of harassment, and had called it out. When she came to the UK she really applied her academic and her activist persona to addressing violence against women and was a real leading light for that study group. She went on to be a senior person on methodology research and had an impact on the Metropolitan Police and also had a leading role in The Mayor’s Office in policing crime in London. Very last, a feminist that I would like to mention is Jill Radford, her edited book ‘Femicide’ was a pioneering work.

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Key Readings Stanko, B., & Williams, E. (2009). Reviewing rape and rape allegations in London: What are the vulnerabilities of the victims who report to the police. In Rape: Challenging contemporary thinking (pp. 207–225). Hanmer, J., & Saunders, S. (1984). Well-founded fear: A community study of violence to women. Hutchinson.

I can give you one example in which the treatment of Sex workers played out in practice. Myself and Karen were out one night on outreach, we were talking to a woman and a guy came very suddenly past us, grabbed the woman and pinned her against a wall, and of course she was screaming. He had a weapon, we weren’t quite sure what it was, it was glinting. But probably because we were there he left, but I think he tore her gold cross and chain off her, and she was completely in bits and I have to say we were not much better having just witnessed that, it was really shocking. So what happened after that, we called it in, we didn’t hear anything and then we were called to give evidence in a court case. A police car was sent to collect us, but the victim had to make her own way. Two relatively middle-class women, professionals, I was working for Trent at the time and Karen was working for Sexual Health and a car was sent to collect us to take us to court. She didn’t show, surprise, surprise, you know, what would have happened to her if she had, this guy was seriously dangerous, and was known and we believed that the only reason it came to court was that they wanted him for other issues because really sex workers are a disposable population. John Lowman (2000) has written very eloquently about that, the disposable nature of sex workers associated with stigma. There was another court date and this time it was in Leicester and again we were taken to Leicester, we were actually quite nervous about appearing and giving evidence but we obviously would do it, but we didn’t have to in the end. I can’t remember what happened, he accepted the charges, or a deal was made or whatever, but that really stood out in my mind, you know that she could not appear and give evidence against him because of what would happen to her as a consequence. Yet you know for the two women who witnessed it, a car was sent to ensure that we got there in a timely manner and we were really supported. We were not the ones who needed support we could get there on our own, so that is why I feel really passionate I suppose about the rights of women.

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Related Projects The SAFE project. https://umbrellahealth.co.uk/our-services/safe#. Prostitute Outreach Organisation POW Nottingham. https://pow-advice. org.uk.

Situating the Research My research borders on a number of substantive research areas. First of all, obviously sex work; since 1989 I’ve continued to do work in this area but also the theoretical work, advocacy work and very much participatory biographical work along with arts-based activity. Although I have never really spoken about or developed a narrative around the arts-based stuff it is absolutely central to my work, pretty much 99% of my work is arts based and participatory. So this combination of arts and sociology/criminology has influenced the trajectory of subsequent work. Second, migration, predominantly forced migration, working on the issues around asylum, belonging and then, creative methodological research is the third substantive area. So I think I have made methodological contributions in relation to arts-based work and in coining and developing this concept that I call ‘Ethnomimesis’, a combination of ethnographic work and arts-based work. I have found that in working with artists you can often reach a much better understanding of social issues and social problems and the friction of working at the borders of disciplines is great, so working with cultural theorists or people who are psychologists and anthropologists and artists I think that kind of combination of interdisciplinary work can really produce something new and hopefully change hearts and change minds in relation to some of the important social issues we are all addressing. Key Readings Cantwell, R. S. (2000). Ethnomimesis: folklife and the representation of culture. University of North Carolina Press.

I think probably my most influential work was ‘Prostitution and Feminism’. ‘Prostitution and Feminism’ was a kind of a blueprint for my subsequent work, it was also defined as the origin of the development of contemporary feminist work on prostitution. It was a significant text, it combined theoretical analysis with interpretive ethnography as Norman

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Dempson would say, and also praxis. The Ph.D. was absolutely underpinned by participatory research and thinking about the outputs from that, this neo-liberal terms we use ‘outputs’, but actually the impact or the praxis was that it was the first project that looked for options for sex workers. As a result it also generated European funding. My first European funding bid was in collaboration with POW, Prostitute outreach Workers, so they were a former sex worker led organisation supporting women in sex work and we developed a project I think we just called it ‘The Options Project’. The project organised careers events, organised childcare, the women who signed up took courses so it was really nonjudgemental, but saying you have options, you can do training, other kinds of training if you want to. We also were able to employ to an ‘options’ lead worker—she was fantastic! The example that stands out most in my mind is that one the woman who did her HGV licence and went on to do truck driving. But lots of the usual things you might think about in terms of transferable skills such as beauty and massage and related areas. I met some great people as a consequence of this project, great women and really committed trainers who came and delivered workshops in a completely non-judgemental way, and also created jobs.

Creative Methods Storytelling has been a part of much of my work. First of all it connects with the ethnographic approach for me, where you try and situate yourself in the position of your research participants or your collaborators, and how we do that is through listening and understanding. When we do empirical research, when we do ethnographic research, people tell us stories, they may be stories in relation to the particular issue we are focusing upon, so for example working with women on the street, they would tell me about their working lives, but also in the process of telling me about their working lives they would tell me about their more personal lives, their children, their accommodation, issues around health. So for me, storytelling is really, really important, it underpins qualitative social research, it underpins ethnographic and anthropological research. You know we observe and we take notes of our surroundings, our environment, the sensory dimensions of the situation we are in, but how we connect to people’s lives is through interviews or life story methods. I mentioned that the Chicago School is really important for me and I was

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chair of The Biographical Research Network of the European Sociological Research Network Association for some years, I was the Chair, Vice Chair and board member, but that research network focuses on European biographies or the kind of perspectives we might take to explore European perspectives on biographical sociology. Biographical sociology has its basis in Chicago sociology and predominantly the work of Znaniecki, the fantastic Polish author of ‘The Polish Peasant’ published in five volumes between 1918 and 1920. The volumes include the story of Polish migration taught through one biography—Wladek—and then letters and diaries of migrants, families letters and also other kind of archival materials, documentary materials. So I think story telling has an incredible power in society. Walter Benjamin writes that in ‘The Storyteller’ which is a short story, he says storytelling holds a primary role in the household of humanity and a fragment of a story can tell us more than one hundred pages of information about life, that captures it, don’t you think? You know, you do a life story interview with someone or a partial life story interview and you can understand so much. Stuart Hall has uses this concept ‘Conjuctural Analysis’ and I think that stories operate in that way, you know if you are doing interviews with people, sex workers for example, or migrant women, or undocumented women, you know that you are hearing their story, but you are hearing their story within particular social, economic, political and cultural circumstances and a particular landscape and so their story can really speak of the social, cultural, political, and in this way you can get a sense of what Stuart Hall calls ‘Conjunctional Analysis’. This is really what my first project on migration was about, I worked with a Bosnian community in 1998 ’99 in the East Midland’s doing life story research on exile, displacement and belonging, but also we worked with artists to enable participants who gave their life stories to reproduce their stories in visual artistic form and get that art based work out to a much broader audience to change hearts and minds, and address prejudice, and anti-migration, or anti-refugee or anti Bosnian feeling which was as you can imagine profound. It was not as bad as the current state of affairs in relation to anti-migration sentiment and you know what has come to develop, certainly in the UK, as a hostile environment. But coming back to stories, for me, the importance of stories and storytelling connects methodologically, personally but also to that notion of praxis, that through listening we can achieve understanding and that might change our mind about prejudice against migrants and asylum seekers, or prejudice against sex workers. We get

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a much stronger sociological, criminological sense of peoples being in the world that can help us develop a much better critique of society in order for change to happen through oral history or biographical sociology. But also, visualising or representing stories more visually can help us to share this work beyond academia and have real impact in wider society to challenge people’s thinking and again address prejudice. Recommended Readings Hall, S. (2017). Selected political writings: The great moving right show and other essays. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Zaretsky, A. (1996). The Polish peasant in Europe and America: A classic work on immigration (W. Thoman & F. Zanieiki, Eds.). Illinois: University of Illinois Press.

Current Research I am currently working on three projects, a ‘Borders, Risk and Belonging’ theatre based and walking based research project. The second led by Pippa Grenfall and Lucy Platt and Rachel Stuart based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine looks at modelling decriminalisation of sex work in two London boroughs by using ethnographic work and mathematical modelling. That project is really pioneering because through rigorous social research we can see what decriminalisation will look like and will have a massive impact on policy and thinking about policy in relation to sex work. The third is a small project working with the fabulous Rosie Campbell to evaluate the ‘Red Umbrella’ Project in Merseyside. ‘Red Umbrella’ is a wonderful organisation in Liverpool that supports sex workers in relation to health abut also migrant workers. Merseyside was the first police authority to address violence against sex workers by treating it as a hate crime, and so there is a whole history in Merseyside, there is also a whole history of radical politics which is fantastic. It is no wonder that they are the first policing authority to take this approach and to really address violence as hate crime when it comes to sex workers, which has led to an increase in women feeling able to report, but also an increase in prosecutions as well. Oh and finally I am currently working with Umut Erel, Tracey Reynolds and Erene Kaptani on a project funded by ESRC and the National Center for Research Methods called PASAR, Participation Arts

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and Social Action Research. We are working with migrant mothers, migrant girls and mothers with no recourse to public funding, so three groups, using theatre based methods and walking methods. The biggest impact for me I suppose of doing that work, first of all is doing some training in theatre methods, I did a week long training in theatre methods so we could feel how the participants might feel when they are doing this research, and to set up a methodological framework for the project which meant that we were walking side by side, creating a space in the research workshops where we were not the powerful researchers, rather we were women working with other women side by side. We tried as much as possible to develop a subject-subject relationship in the research theatre workshop. Having worked for decades on migration and asylum with artists, what I loved about this project is working with theatre makers and practitioners. I have worked with Open Clasp the feminist group in the North East around migration, and also violence against women, but being involved in the workshops, taking part and learning through theatre based practice has been fabulous. It was a pleasure to work with the women, but also specially with Erene Kaptani, Tracey Reynolds and Umut Erel. Works in Progress Methods on the move: Experiencing and imagining borders, risk & belonging. https://walkingborders.com. The East London Project. http://eastlondonproject.lshtm.ac.uk/news/. Participation Arts and Social Action in Research–PASAR. http://fass. open.ac.uk/research/projects/pasar

Irish Criminology Here in UCC, we developed the first BA Criminology in Ireland, and also the first Inside/Out prison education programme, but I am new to Irish criminology and hope that I can make a contribution as well. It would be great if we could develop a Criminological Association of Ireland, for more networking, collaborating, mutual support. I know there is a network the—Irish Criminology Research Network, it would be great if this might be extended into a formal association perhaps into the Irish Criminological Association.

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There are exciting developments ahead, but I would say to Irish Criminology, don’t get caught up in audit culture, keep critical and foster collaboration not competition and so I think we need to work together to create change! Collaboration is really important. I guess the other thing is not getting territorial. Criminology has grown to be a discipline in its own right, but it has been argued that it is a field of study not a discipline, or a meeting of disciplines. I think criminology is mature enough to outline its disciplinary underpinnings, its theoretical and methodological underpinnings, but at the same time, it shouldn’t lose sight of the collaborative work from different disciplines, its parent discipline, sociology, as well as law, politics, anthropology, psychology. So I think collaborative interdisciplinary work is great, but also there needs to be a framing of what Irish criminology is and what is its history, its approaches, its key themes, principles and theoretical and methodological underpinnings. But mainly keep critical and be collaborative! Irish Criminology Inside Out Prison Exchange Project. https://www.insideoutcenter.org.

Bibliography Carlen, P. (1985). Criminal women. Polity Press: Blackwell. Cohen, S. (1988). Against criminology. New York, NY: Broadway Play Publishing. Cuffe, J. (2019). Just what is the Momo challenge? RTE [online]. Deckert, A. (2016). Criminologists, duct tape and indigenour peoples: Quantifying the use of silencing research methods. International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, 40(1), 43–62. Degenhardt, T. (2015). Crime, justice and the legitimacy of military power in the international sphere. Punishment & Society, 17 (2), 139–162. Ellison, G., Ní Dhónaill, C., & Early, E. (2019, September 19). A review of the criminalisation of the payment for sexual services in Northern Ireland. Belfast: Queen’s University Belfast. Ferrell, J., Hayward, K., Morrison, W., & Presdee, M. (Eds.). (2016). Cultural criminology unleashed. London: Routledge. FitzGerald, S. A. (2012). Vulnerable bodies, vulnerable borders: Extraterritoriality and human trafficking. Feminist Legal Studies, 20(3), 227–244.

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Hall, S. (2003). Cultural studies and the centre: Some problematics and problems. In Culture, media, language (pp. 12–45). London: Routledge. Hall, S. (2017). Selected political writings: The great moving right show and other essays. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Kleck, G., Tark, J., & Bellows, J. (2006). What methods are most frequently used in research in criminology and criminal justice. Journal of Criminal Justice, 34(2), 147–152. Lowman, J. (2000). Violence and the outlaw status of (street) prostitution in Canada. Violence Against Women, 6(9), 987–1011. Lynch, M., Barrett, K. L., Stretsky, P. B., & Long, M. A. (2017). The neglect of quantitative research in green criminology and its consequences. Critical Criminology, 25, 183–198. Lynch, O., Argomaniz, J., Serranò, A., Joyce, C., & Alonso, R. (2014). Best practice recommendations for supporting victims of terrorism. In Victims of Terrorism (pp. 149–153). London and New York: Routledge. Maruna, S. (2001). Making good (Vol. 86). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Matthews, R. (2016). What is to be done about crime and punishment? Towards a ‘public criminology’. London: Palgrave Macmillan. McGarry, K., & FitzGerald, S. A. (2019). The politics of injustice: Sex-working women, feminism and criminalizing sex purchase in Ireland. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 19(1), 62–79. McLeod, E. (1982). Working women: Prostitution now. London: Croom Helm. O’Keefe, T. (2013). Feminist identity development and activism in revolutionary movements. London: Springer. O’Neill, M., & Roberts, B. (2019). Walking methods: Research on the move. London: Routledge. O’Brien, M. (2005). What is cultural about cultural criminology? The British Journal of Criminology, 45(5), 599–612. Pheterson, G. (1986). The whore stigma: Female dishonor and male unworthiness. Den Haag: Ministerie van Sociale Zaken en Werkgelegenheid. Presdee, M. (2003). Cultural criminology and the carnival of crime. London: Routledge. Rubin, G. (2011). Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ryan, P. (2019). Male sex work in the digital age: Curated lives. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Sanders, T., O’Neill, M., & Pitcher, J. (2017). Prostitution: Sex work, policy & politics. London: Sage. Sweeney, L. A., Sixsmith, J., & Molcho, M. (2019). Giving voice to women in the sex industry: A voice-centred relational model based qualitative study. Journal of Social Care, 2(1), 4.

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Swirak, K. (2020). The ‘soft power’ of marketisation: The administrative assembling of Irish youth justice work. In Marketisation and privatisation in criminal justice (p. 91). Bristol: Polity Press. Treadwell, J. (2019). Qualitative research in criminology. In P. Atkinson, S. Delamont, A. Cernat, J. W. Sakshaug, & R. A. Williams (Eds.), SAGE research methods foundations. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526421036847209. Ward, E. (2010). Prostitution and the Irish state: From prohibitionism to a globalised sex trade. Irish Political Studies, 25(1), 47–65. Windle, J., Morrison, J. F., Winter, A., & Silke, A. (Eds.). (2018). Historical perspectives on organized crime and terrorism. Abingdon: Routledge. Wylie, G. (2018). Moving beyond the exclusionary politics of migration: A response from the social sciences. Biblical Interpretation, 26(4–5), 544–553. Young, J. (1999). The exclusive society: Social exclusion, crime and difference in late modernity. London: Sage. Zaretsky, A. (1996). The Polish peasant in Europe and America: A classic work on immigration (W. Thoman & F. Zanieiki, Eds.). Illinois: University of Illinois Press.

CHAPTER 11

In Conversation with Prof. Shadd Maruna

Abstract In this chapter Prof. Maruna points out that he sees his academic home as very much amongst those individuals who regardless of their backgrounds, see themselves as criminologists; Prof. Maruna points out that the collegial nature of criminology in Ireland is one of its key strengths. Prof. Maruna goes on to talk about how the necessary lack of boundaries in the discipline is important as is the recognition that there are multiple audiences for criminological research. Like other authors who speak of the need for criminology to inform not serve the state, Shadd points out that we must ensure our research reaches those who need it, in a manner that is both accessible and translatable. Finally Prof. Maruna references the importance of all voices in criminological work, and how as criminologists, we need to not only amplify those voices about whom we speak, but also include them in the production of criminological knowledge. Keywords Desistance · Psychology · Convict criminology · Community · Belonging

In this conversation Prof. Shadd Maruna refers to the maxim, nothing about us without us, a reference to the production of knowledge in criminology by, with and for people who are personally impacted by © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 O. Lynch et al., Reflections on Irish Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60593-3_11

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engagement with the criminal justice system. Across a range of domains the production of social science, medical, psychiatric and other knowledge is increasingly examining whose voices are heard, how we prioritise knowledge and what meaningful participation in research actually looks like. Researchers have pointed out that across a diverse range of disciplines, who speaks may be as or more important than what they have to say (Stewart 2017). Exclusion from the creation of knowledge that is relevant to oneself often mirrors more general social, economic and political exclusion (Yeo and Moore 2003) and in the case of criminological research, individuals who have spent time in prison experience widespread exclusion across all areas of their lives. The notion of nothing about us without us is perhaps best reflected in the emergence of what is referred to as convict criminology, a movement that started in the USA and gained prominence in the UK over the past twenty years (Tietjen 2019). The impetus for the formalisation of this branch of criminology was the personal experience of individuals of the destructive and oppressive impacts of incarceration, but also the experience of having this harm ignored by conventional voices. While the term convict criminology is controversial both from post-colonial and abolitionist perspectives, it has gained currency as an academic endeavour. In Ireland scholars from across the island have contributed to this growing field. Maruna, in an earlier publication (2016) refers to convict criminology as the ‘criminology of the self’ and suggests that this may in fact save criminology from the omnipresent danger of the objectification of crime. While convict criminology as a distinct academic endeavour has not emerged in Ireland like it has elsewhere (although there were tentative plans to have a panel on convict criminology in the 2019 North South Criminology Conference) the underpinning philosophy of convict criminology, that of ensuring space for all voices and valuing lived experience is alive and well on the island. The Irish experience has a unique history that can allow it to contribute to this field; the prisoner release process negotiated as part of the Good Friday Agreement inspired an entire body of work on desistance much of it by the individuals who were at one time incarcerated in prisons in the Republic of Ireland, the UK and Northern Ireland. In the Republic of Ireland we also have a burgeoning convict criminology-inspired cohort of researchers who are actively involved in research due to their life experiences with the criminal justice system. This

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involves individuals who make their identity relevant to their research, and others who do not. It also includes individuals with direct experience of the criminal justice system who are now working on research projects directly supported by criminal justice agencies and NGOs. While a small but visible cohort does not of course signal a change in direction in terms of the overall treatment of individuals with convictions, it represents a tangible shift towards prioritising the voices of all stakeholders in criminological research. In this chapter Prof. Maruna speaks to this notion of nothing about us without us and how it is relevant for his work. He reflects on his journey into criminology, his exploration of a range of disciplines and ultimately his experience of finding a disciplinary home. He reflects on the impact his work, particularly around desistance, had on his career and how his ideas are continuing to evolve. In particular he talks about criminology as a rendezvous discipline where different subjects, different people and different perspectives can come together for a greater good. Finally he reflects on the need for inclusivity in this developing discipline and amongst the people who make Irish criminology the success it is today.

Biography Shadd Maruna is currently a Professor in the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work at Queen’s University Belfast. Previously, Prof. Maruna has held posts at the University of Cambridge, the University of Manchester, the State University of New York and Rutgers-Newark (USA) where he was the Dean of the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice. He has received a number of awards for his scholarship on crime, criminal justice and criminology and his book Making Good: How Ex-convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives was awarded as the ‘Outstanding Contribution to Criminology’ by the American Society of Criminology in 2001. Prof. Maruna has been a Fulbright Scholar, a Soros Justice Fellow and an H. F. Guggenheim Fellow, and has received research funding from the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, the ESRC and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, among other sources. Since 1997 he has authored or edited six books and over 85 articles and book chapters.

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Recommended Readings Maruna, S. (2001). Making good: How Ex-convicts reform and rebuild their lives. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Maruna, S. (2016). Forward. In R. Earle (Ed.), Convict criminology: Inside and out. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

The Path to an Academic Life Mine was an interesting enough route into academia. First, I don’t happen to have academic parents, and the longer I’ve worked in this field it’s amazing how many other academics are second generation in, and you can see why. It’s a strange lifestyle, it’s a strange sort of thing to do with one’s life. But, in many occupations of course you see that kind of second generation phenomenon. I have a nineteen year old now and looking at her friends, almost all of the people going into, say, medicine have parents (sometimes both parents) who are doctors. And I do hope my daughter will follow me into academia but I didn’t have that as a background. I grew up in a very small town in the middle of fly-over country in the USA, in rural Illinois. This small town had a small university, and I discovered when I was very young that universities had all sorts of magical things—a theatre, an art gallery, racquetball courts, but most of all, the university had this amazing library. The library was old school, they had stacks in the basement and they just went on and on in a sort of dark labyrinth of hidden wisdom. At some point in my early youth, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old, I discovered these stacks as a place to go and to hide out. But this was also a place that contained what was magical to me. I found books on anarchism, and Freud writing about sexuality, and things that totally blew my young mind, and it was amazing. I felt like I had this secret dungeon of ideas that were out there and nobody else knew about it. There was also really interesting graffiti written on the walls and all of these interesting university students running around and I decided it was a world that I wanted to be in. Then, when I eventually went to university myself, I realised quickly that I didn’t want to leave and I have been successful in that regard. I am still in a University now and I still find it magical in lots of ways.

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Recommended Readings Freud, S. (2017). Three essays on the theory of sexuality: The 1905 edition. New York: Verso Books. Goldman, E. (1969). Anarchism: and other essays. Courier Corporation.

Becoming a Criminologist I was always sort of a magpie in terms of what interests me and I sort of still am. I flip from subject to subject and in lots of ways criminology suits that very well. It is a narrow specialism, but at some level it is a multimethod, multidisciplinary sub-field and that allows us to be magpies; we can draw on lots of different fields and I’ve enjoyed doing that in my career. But how did I get into criminology? I read all sorts of subjects in university. I started as an English and philosophy major and enjoyed both of those subjects enormously but, but I wanted more. I wanted to change the world as young people do. At that point, and no insult intended to my philosophy colleagues or literature Professors, I wanted a little bit more action, I wanted to feel a little bit more engaged with the world, but I didn’t know how I was going to do that. When I undertook a postgraduate programme I moved into something called ‘Human Development and Social Policy’ which was as broad as it sounds. I signed up for the course simply for that reason. My joke at the time was that it sounded like the type of degree where I never would have to get a real job and that turned out to be true. It also sounded like the type of degree where you could save the world—so whatever human development and social policy meant, I really wanted to do it and ended up enjoying it immensely. Although I didn’t know it at the time I enrolled, it turned out to be a mix of applied psychology and public policy, a little bit of economics, social work and education theory. There was a lot of focus on early childhood development and social policy around that, for example policies that impacted families, and young people. At the time I was a young guy in my late twenties, didn’t have kids, so this wasn’t really an interest of mine. Although, in retrospect, as the father of two kids, I do now wish that I had focused more on early childhood development as it might have come in handy. Anyway, I couldn’t see myself doing that kind of work but what appealed to me as a young male entering adulthood was the subject of young males entering adulthood and so I became interested in adult development. Really it was that transitional period, that difficult period

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of moving from being an adolescent—especially among those who don’t go to university. That rite of passage is made very wonderfully easy for people who have access to the university system and university education is I think, maybe I’m biased, the greatest rite of passage we have for making adults. As I mentioned above, for those who don’t have that option they can struggle with that movement from youth into adulthood and so we get things like gangs, we see huge numbers of young people going to prison during these university years as they struggle with this transition. This got me interested in adult development processes on the margins, in terms of how the criminal justice systems impact that transition, and what going to prison as a young person does to that adult development process. I found that I was good at this, and that this was something that I could say something about. I guess being as close to the subject as I was in lots of ways was a useful thing. I was this 20 year old studying 20 year olds and speaking to struggles that I could very much relate to. This is essentially what got me into criminology. I never actually had a single class in criminology in my life—until I sat in on one of Rob Sampson’s seminar courses at the University of Chicago. But once I got my first job in a School of Criminal Justice, a great school—at the State University of New York, one of the oldest departments in the USA, then I was suddenly accepted as a criminologist, which is pretty amazing. But, that’s how we are in criminology. It’s like, welcome to the club. Recommended Readings Dunham, R. M., Kidwell, J. S., & Wilson, S. M. (1986). Rites of passage at adolescence: A ritual process paradigm. Journal of Adolescent Research, 1(2), 139–153. Maruna, S., LeBel, T., Mitchel, N., & Naples, M. (2004). Pygmalion in the reintegration process: Desistance from crime through the looking glass. Psychology, Crime and Law, 10(3), 271–281.

Key Influences Another library story for you I’m afraid. I remember being in Northwestern’s downtown library, a beautiful library right on the coast in downtown Chicago with amazing views of Lake Michigan—no dark stacks there. And I found myself wandering among the shelves as one does and I came across an entire shelf of books all written by the same person—Hans Toch.

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I picked up one of these books, they were all from the 1970s and 80s and I found myself just reading one book after the other, I immersed myself. I had discovered an academic, a clearly prolific academic, who wrote and thought like I did. There was no obfuscation, none of sort of the jargon and the technical details that we use at times to obscure our work and to hide behind as academics. This was an academic talking about violent men, talking about human breakdowns in prison and writing things in a way that was accessible to me as a working class kid from Illinois; it was profoundly insightful in ways that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Hans had a huge impact on me in terms of my thinking, on what I wanted to do, how I wanted to do criminology and I was incredibly lucky to get to work with him in my first job at the State University of New York. He became a mentor of mine and we still talk several times a day thanks to the internet. Hans was a huge influence, but there are so many more. I had incredible mentors as an undergraduate, people like Mark Siderits, Carole Maso, but especially Cecil Giscombe. A few years ago, I got together with Cecil again at Berkeley, where he now teaches, and he could quote not just lines from essays that I’d written 30 years ago, but things I said in seminars, and I remembered them too, three decades later. Now that is a real teacher. An amazing guy, amazing teacher. Likewise, my Northwestern mentors, Dan McAdams and Dan Lewis; I owe so much of what I’ve written to their vision of the world. In criminology, John Braithwaite has been hugely influential in how I think about crime and justice. His great book Crime Shame and Reintegration came out in 1989 right around when I was starting my academic studies, it had a profound influence on me, as did works by folks like Stan Cohen and David Matza, whom I never got to meet. Nicole Hahn Rafter was another role model for me. We unfortunately lost Nicky a few years ago, but Nicky knew so much and had so much insight, her book Creating Born Criminals influenced me in huge ways. The way she thinks about the whole field of criminology had a huge influence on me and my contemporaries. I’ve also had incredible colleagues from my time at Cambridge, Queen’s, Rutgers, Manchester. Too many to name and I don’t want to be divisive, but they know who they are. We grew up together as a cohort in criminology and I owe them an enormous debt for all they have taught me.

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Recommended Readings Matza, D. (1964). Delinquency and drift. New Brunswick: Transaction. Rafter, N. H. (1997). Creating born criminals. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Toch, H. (1997). Corrections: A humanistic approach. Guilderland, NY: Harrow and Heston.

Areas of Expertise I think people would likely describe me as ‘that desistance guy’. Desistance is that terrible word that I didn’t invent—some people accuse me of inventing it—but I inherited the word from the 1980s discussions around criminal careers. We don’t talk much about criminal ‘careers’ anymore, but we still talk about desistance. The word desistance means to ‘stay stopped’, as in the phrase ‘cease and desist’, which means ‘stop what you are doing and stay stopped’. My first book was one of the first books that tried to grapple with the notion of why people might stop offending, and as such, no matter what I do in my career I will always be ‘that desistance guy’. But I’d like to think I have done or will do more than that. One of the things about academia is that we have a ritual where when you get a Chair or a Professorship, you get to give yourself a new title. So way back in 2007 I got a personal chair, and I struggled with what I should call myself. Professor of..what? I went around and around. I wanted it to be broad enough so you don’t find yourself too pigeon holed, but also narrow enough so that it is meaningful. I considered calling myself Professor of Deviance just so I could go by Dr. Deviance as a nickname, but decided against that. Ultimately, I ended up with Professor of Justice Studies and Human Development which meant something to me coming from the background that I did, and tried to capture the complexity of what we study. However, the title didn’t mean much to others, so now, twelve years later I am just the Professor of Criminology at Queens and that suits me just fine. I’m glad to be a criminologist, I am glad to be accepted as a criminologist. In fact, I just co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Criminology which is probably the canon or the bible of British criminology and I was proud to be chosen to do that as someone that never took a criminology course in my life. So, yeah, I’m more than just that desistance guy or would like to be.

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Recommended Readings Liebling, A., Maruna, S., & McAra, L. (Eds.). (2017). The Oxford handbook of criminology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maruna, S. (1997). Going straight: Desistance from crime and selfnarratives of reform. Narrative Study of Lives, 5, 59–97.

Biggest Contributions to the Field My very first book which was based on my PhD is called Making Good, and if you care about citation metrics, which I don’t, you’d say that that book is about 30 times more influential than anything else I’ve written before or since. That’s great and wonderful except that when the best thing you have ever done is the first thing you’ve ever done it is kinda downhill from there. I must say the older it gets and the older I get, the more one wonders, you know, if I ever will do anything else that will have this kind of influence. You come to grips with being a one-hit wonder, though, and it isn’t the worst thing in the world—at least you had that opportunity in terms of the influence it had. But it is very much a thing of timing you know and if this conversation is about speaking to the field of criminology, then one piece of advice I have is to be in the right place at the right time. I know that is easier said than done but that is essentially what happened to me with this book. In the 1990s there were all these important criminologists—John Laub, Terrie Moffitt, Michael Gottfredson, Travis Hirschi—and they all agreed that more research was needed on the end of criminal careers, on why people desist. We knew from the longitudinal research of the time that desistance was a common process among people who we call offenders or people who get involved in crime, but we knew we didn’t know much about why. So there was a call for people to do the work and a dozen or so of us set out to answer. But, even more importantly, at the same time, you had this strange thing going on politically at the national level in the USA, where we had the negative legacy in terms of criminal justice and mass incarceration and there was this realisation that if you lock up a million people, you are eventually going to get a million ex-prisoners. This was during Clinton’s watch but only towards the end of his administration was there was a recognition of the tragedy and travesty of what was happening. Mass

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incarceration didn’t start with Clinton, it has much deeper roots than that, going back to slavery, Jim Crow and so forth, but it got considerably worse under his watch. Anyhow, as a kind of redemptive act he got very interested towards the end of his term in the notion of re-entry. There was a recognition in the National Institute of Justice and by Attorney General Janet Reno that with prison numbers this high, we were going to have hundreds of thousands every year coming out of prison and the question was, are we ready for this? Jeremy Travis was director of the National Institute of Justice at the time and was hugely influential in steering this conversation. Yet, amazingly, despite the mass incarceration of the time, when Travis and others looked around for research evidence regarding the reintegration of former prisoners, the cupboards were practically bare. After a lot of interest in the 1960s and 1970s, criminology had largely stopped doing research on ex-prisoners, stopped caring about ex-prisoner issues. This was the decline of the rehabilitative ideal. Rehabilitation was dead as a concept, so why would anyone commission any research on ex-prisoners? So, when in 2000, Jeremy Travis and Bill Clinton’s people start asking ‘what do we know about ex-prisoners?’ Well I just happened to have a new book out called Making Good: How Ex-convicts Reform and Rebuild their Lives. So it was awfully well-timed, catching a major wave, and it got much more attention than it probably should have or indeed that things that I have written since have ever received. And I have been kind of coasting on that wave or what is left of it ever since. But I would like to think there are some good insights in the book and I go back to it now and again and when I do, I realise that, on some level I am still kind of grappling with the same issues I grapple with in the book. I have tried to move on, I have tried to desist from desistance many times, but I still come back to these questions even when I am doing other sorts of research. So I don’t mind too much if that is going to be the only work that most people will ever know of mine. I’m happy enough with it. Recommended Readings Moffitt, T. E. (1993). Life-course-persistent and adolescence-limited antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy. Psychological Review, 100(4), 674–701.

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Travis, J. (2005). But they all come back: Facing the challenges of prisoner reentry. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute.

Thinking About Ritual Some of my newer work is around this idea of re-entry as a rite of passage that I began about ten years after Making Good although it had its origins in that book too. This for me is a sort of move into social anthropology. I see myself as a sort of pseudo psychologist, no real psychologist would call me a psychologist, but criminologists like to say ‘this guy is coming from a psychological point of view, he is using words like cognitive, he uses words like narrative, so he’s all about what’s going on inside the heads of these people’. That was never exactly true, I wasn’t ignoring societal factors. If you go back to Making Good there is plenty about society in there and structure and so forth, but people want a label and so that was my label. But now, my newer work is much more explicitly about the structural and cultural, but continuing in the vein of the book in a symbolic interactionist approach. So I have been looking at everything from prohibiting ex-prisoners from getting into universities, to prohibiting them from getting licences to work—the enormous barriers they face and how these barriers are addressed, how are they enacted and how they work, as a kind of social psychology. And the best body of research in this regard is labelling theory. Labelling theory has gone in and out of style over the years, but the empirical support for it is remarkably robust and it is the most important criminological insight for the last 50 or 100 years, in my view. What I’m interested in is kind of the opposite of labelling theory. In effect it is to say how do we un-label people, how do we label people as nonoffenders, how do we use those same mechanisms of ritual and language to make citizens that we use to make criminals? So far, this work has been theoretically driven rather than empirical, but it draws on some of the research that I’ve done including for Making Good, to imagine structuring rites of passage that move people from the status of being prisoners into the status of being full citizens. And then thinking about what are the obstacles to getting this done? You know many of the things we talk about in the article are not expensive, they are not elaborate. It’s not saying what we need are new

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institutions with new professionals to help us. This is kind of saying we need a much more organic approach. To change in this case, the biggest obstacle is not so much have we got the means to do reintegration better than we currently do, but more do we have the public support. Reintegration is an organic thing, it happens because there is good reason for communities to want to reintegrate people after punishment. If we don’t reintegrate people we keep them as outcasts, we keep them on the margins of society and a person on the outskirts is a dangerous person. The person who has been reintegrated into society is not a person to worry about, so we have incentives but we also have disincentives. One of them is if we were to reintegrate everyone who does wrong, it would suggest that maybe doing wrong is less stigmatised, and therefore by decreasing the stigma that we put on ex-prisoners we would fail to deter crime in the first place. Societies have to stigmatise the acts that we don’t want. We have to stigmatise violence, in particular sexual violence, or whatever the focus of the moment is—drunk driving say—we have to deter others for doing that crime. There is some evidence behind this approach, but we forget the person that we are using to make this symbolic gesture, he, or sometimes she, becomes a means to an end and we are using them as scapegoats. John Braithwaite has written more about this than me, about how we can do the Durkhiemian job of recognising those violations of our shared community values without writing off human beings and their futures by punishing in a integrative way and that’s essentially what this article of mine is trying to work. Whatever the prisoner did right or wrong let’s set that aside and decide how we get that prisoner reintegrated back into the rest of society. That’s a big task. Recommended Readings Braithwaite, J. (1989). Crime, shame and reintegration. Cambridge University Press. Durkheim, E. (1983). The evolution of punishment. In S. Lukes & A. Scull (Eds.), Durkheim and the Law. Oxford: Martin Robertson. Maruna, S. (2011). Reentry as a rite of passage. Punishment & Society, 13(1), 3–28.

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Current Directions An article just published in the Irish Probation Journal, which I think is a tremendous outlet for new work, is my new newest article. It is based on my Martin Tansey address. The Martin Tansey Annual Memorial Lecture is a real institution in Irish criminology hosted by the Association for Criminal Justice Research and Development (ACJRD). They asked me if I wouldn’t say a few words about desistance and where I see the study of desistance going. At one level, I have moved on in some ways, I’m doing all sorts of other things now and Making Good was a couple of decades ago and so I wasn’t sure what I would say in a talk like that. And then I got thinking and what came out of it was an interesting enough argument. Basically what I was saying is that desistance was an important idea when it came in about 20 years ago around when Making Good was published, it did a lot of good. First, it did some good in terms of academic work. We in criminology can be very pessimistic, we can be very focused on the negatives. We’re in a very negative field of study, we’re looking at burglary, robbery, murder, rape, these are awful things. And so we can be an awfully morbid bunch in lots of ways and pessimistic because crime is terrible, but the criminal justice system may be even worse. You know, we have a lot of struggles. So I think pointing out these unabashedly positive stories of people who have been able to turn around their lives despite terrible prison experiences, despite terrible upbringings, despite terrible lack of resources, despite terrible stigma that they faced in their community, was a shock at some level to the criminological way of being in the world, which is to recognise that the dice are loaded and the good guys have lost. So I think it did good things in terms of academic research, and then it kind of moved on and it took on a life of its own in criminal justice and in the applied world. The biggest impact was in the UK, Scotland in particular took on the desistance concept largely thanks to Fergus McNeill, who became a kind of co-pilot on a lot of this desistance work. But in England and Wales, even Northern Ireland as well, you know, it’s hard to find a probation officer or even a prison officer, prison governor who hasn’t heard the word desistance, whether they enjoyed hearing about it or not. So desistance has had a big impact on the professional world, for example in the Irish prisons and probation services. But still the biggest influence has been in the UK and it was an interesting period to see that

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influence, because desistance as a concept isn’t a natural one for the criminal justice system. Rehabilitation may be a very common and familiar concept, but desistance at some level is the opposite of rehabilitation. It’s to say that people are making good despite what happened to them in the justice system. You know, my work wasn’t about a lot of stories of people who were bad, who went to institutions, then they came out good at the end. It’s quite a different story. But, it was great to see the interest in professionals in how the process of desistance worked. But now, what’s next in the desistance journey? I argued that desistance has gotten to a point where the next step is not about probation officers talking about desistance and it’s not about academics talking about desistance, but it’s rather those who are going through the process themselves. You know, we now have some very strong organisations led by, founded by and staffed by ex-prisoners across multiple countries. We also have academics who are themselves ex-prisoners who are doing academic research, they go under the name of convict criminology, to recognise their prior lives and their current work. And we have a great deal of criminology being taught inside prisons to groups of university students and prison based students through groups like Learning Together via the amazing work of Ruth Armstrong and Amy Ludlow coming out of the University of Cambridge and elsewhere, and Inside Out, the USA-based organisation. So we have some really interesting processes happening all at once. And what I argue is that there seems to be an emerging social movement around ex-prisoners organising, and finding their own voice. So in the article I talk about how we wrote about people with disabilities 50 years ago. We had experts in white lab-coats talking about people who had mental health struggles and talking about them as subjects, as patients in ways that were often demeaning, sometimes empowering, but often dehumanising. And now we wouldn’t have that: you can’t go to a conference on, say, autism, and not have representation from people who are on the autistic spectrum themselves. These changes have come about through social movements where groups of stigmatised individuals, so-called deviants, collectively get together and decide they’re going to counter the stigma against them. So whether this is the LGBT community or communities of people in recovery from drug addiction, being able to speak for oneself and have that voice to say, you know, ‘actually, we’re not going to let you speak on our behalf anymore, we’re going to speak for ourselves’. There’s a great phrase that comes out of these movements called nothing about us without us. It says that, yes, you can have a conference on mental health, please do, please have lots of them, but if you do,

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make sure you invite those of us who have been there, who have struggled with these issues, who are or are former patients, former people who are in recovery, or indeed people who are not in recovery, who are still struggling with these things. Likewise, I see that coming slowly to criminology. I mean and I’m using air quotes, the so-called offender is surely the most stigmatised of all kinds of stigmatised groups. So it makes sense that prisoner movements, ex-prisoner movements, may be the slowest to emerge. But I feel one is emerging and I think desistance work was kind of an early step in this process. We can’t take all the credit, but we were helpful in facilitating this, partially given that the nature of our work is giving voice to individuals with these stories. Eventually, it became like, ‘Well, why do we keep inviting Maruna to tell these stories? Why not get some of the individuals themselves up here on stage?’ And I think that’s fantastic. I think—on a less literal, more metaphorical level—the stage is now theirs to carry on the desistance there. And if they never use the word ‘desistance’, all the better. You know, there’s some fantastic work going on in this area that doesn’t use the word ‘desistance’ at all. We have a group in the USA called ‘Just Leadership’ and that’s a great name, it’s a play on the word justice and recognising that there are leaders who have these credible messages with this voice of experience. In the UK one of the most prominent groups is called ‘Positive Prisons: Positive Futures’, in Scotland. There is a name that can confuse people. But, you know, it’s difficult, we don’t have good language out there for ex-prisoner movements. Many have pointed out that talking about ex-prisoners is to define people by their former status, their stigmatised status. So even that word ex-prisoner’ isn’t a very empowering word. So we need new words, probably not ‘desistance’. But I think that the work that these groups are doing is perfectly consistent with what the desistance message was, and so in that article, it’s a short article, I’ve made it sound much longer than it is, I argue that this is where the exciting next steps are coming from in desistance theory. Recommended Readings Ludlow, A., Armstrong, R., & Bartels, L. (2019). Learning together: Localism, collaboration and reflexivity in the development of prison

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and university learning communities. Journal of Prison Education and Reentry, 6(1), 25–45. Maruna, S. (2017). Desistance as a social movement. Irish Probation Journal, 14, 5–20. McNeill, F. (2006). A desistance paradigm for offender management. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 6(1), 39–62. Tietjen, G. (2019). Convict criminology: Learning from the past, confronting the present, expanding for the future. Critical Criminology, 27, 1010–1114.

Criminology in Ireland I think we’re going from strength to strength, really, we continue to be very small and at times I have been frustrated by the lack of growth in some departments and institutional growth. I should say, in terms of readership and students who are interested in studying criminology and becoming criminologists, the growth has been huge, but our institutions have been slow to accept and to adjust and to start to capitalise on that interest. But to a degree, that small size is one of our real strengths. I think the fact that we can fit all the criminologists in Ireland into a reasonable room makes it a more human scale. If the kind of meetings that I talked about—the American Society of Criminology in particular—can become so huge that it’s difficult to really imagine a social movement coming from such a large group, as ironic as that sounds. I think our smallness makes Irish criminology unique and interesting in lots of ways. But we also bat well above our weight. We have a number of really interesting developments. A couple of years ago, I was lucky enough to be asked to teach at something called the Autumn Criminology School, arranged by Niamh McGuire and colleagues at Waterford. And this was a process like no other. You couldn’t imagine the same thing when I was working in US criminology or even British criminology. This was held at a remote castle and we made our own breakfast and our own dinners and sat on comfy couches, sat around talking criminology. You know, it was a school, but I wasn’t sure if I was one of the students or the teachers. And it wasn’t important, really. Just 15 or 20 of us kind of talking through where we’ve been and

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where we’re going as criminologists over a pint of Guinness. And it was a really important and special process, I think. I’ve also been really impressed with groups like the ACJRD, the Irish Penal Reform Trust, and the Cork Alliance Centre. They have been really impressive in what they have been able to do in terms of organising and generating important interest around criminology and desistance in particular. I mentioned the Irish Probation Journal earlier, I think it is a fantastic publication that’s done jointly through the Probation Board of Northern Ireland and the Irish Probation Service. I think it’s a great resource and one of a kind in the sector, you know. We have a number of organisations here in the North—Niacro, Extern, Start360, a new group called the Turnaround Project. But we have, in particular, a really strong tradition in the North around restorative justice. I think Ireland is leading the way internationally in terms of restorative justice, along with some other countries like New Zealand. So perhaps something to being a small island nation, but Ireland and Northern Ireland have been among the key pioneers with groups like Community Restorative Justice Ireland and Alternatives NI in thinking about reinventing justice in a different way. And I think also some of that may come from our small size—that everybody knows each other in Ireland to some degree. It is only with the size of the US population that you could get the kind of dehumanisation with mass incarceration that they’ve gotten, with whole social and ethnic groups written off as criminally suspect. As a society, you know, we’re not at that stage in Ireland by any means in our criminal justice system. And I think some of that is our size, some of it, though, also is Ireland’s unique history and culture. Kieran McEvoy and I have wrestled with this idea of what is unique about justice in Ireland. Kieran, who’s one of my real heroes in this world, is Professor of Criminology here at Queen’s. Kieran and I were asked to write a chapter for The Routledge Handbook of Irish Criminology that was produced by Deirdre Healy, Claire Hamilton, Yvonne Daley, Michelle Butler a few years ago. Just having that a handbook of Irish criminology is a huge accomplishment and a real achievement, something that has been a kind of coming of age for Irish criminology to say, you know, ‘here we are’. And so I was very pleased that they asked Kieran and me to say a few words as a kind of afterword for the book and in that afterword, we tried to wrestle with this notion of what is Irish criminology, why Irish? I think that was our title. ‘Why Irish criminology?’.

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What makes the criminology that we do here in Ireland so special and where does that specialism come from? And we decided that some of it comes from the unique history that Ireland has as a kind of post-colonial nation, but also the role of the criminal justice system in our history here. In particular in the North, criminal justice has played such a key role in the ‘Troubles’ and in the post-Troubles period that we’re living in. And so some of that history flavours the way we do criminology here and flavours it in a positive way. If you read the great history by Shane Kilcommins and colleagues Crime, Punishment and the Search for Order in Ireland, you will get this story. So my work, on reintegration and desistance for instance—there’s a lot of appetite for it on the island, partially because whereas, you know, in a way, we’re a ‘desisting’ nation. We are ourselves in a kind of process of recovery, reintegration, post the Troubles, and the restorative justice movement that we’ve seen here on the island, I think comes in many ways from that history as well. So what’s the next steps for us? You know, I think it’s important to hold on to what is special about Irish criminology—to stay unique, I suppose. I talked about institutional growth a little bit, and I think it’s important that we get that. I think we need more places to study criminology, more places to do research. But as you get growth like that, it can also lead to an institutionalisation of the research infrastructure at some level and move away from, say, the Autumn Criminology School in the castle, sitting on couches, talking about the future to something a little bit more corporate and bureaucratised through the criminal justice services and statutory agencies and so forth. I think that would be a shame. I hope that we can retain our independence. I hope we can retain some of the quirkiness of Irish criminology and the outsider status that makes us an interesting group, but also a part of the conversation, a key part, I think, to have that independent academic voice. You know when I wrote about desistance as a social movement, my argument wasn’t that we as criminologists are less important, that we need to take a back seat to credible messengers, that is the new phrase for those with real first-hand experience. The point wasn’t to denigrate academic work or to say that people who haven’t had those experiences shouldn’t study criminology. Far from it. It’s to say that the criminology we do should be in dialogue. It should be with, rather than about, these communities. And I think Ireland has that opportunity because we’re not this caricature of ivory towers sitting on hills, miles away from our communities, you know, because we’re a small island. We’re in the communities. We’re on the ground, as well as being academics. And I think that is a

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real virtue. And to keep that distance as small as it is, to keep our connections to community organisations, to advocacy work, and, as well, to the prisons and the police. To maintain that grounding in the world. Recommended Readings Kilcommins, S., O’Donnell, I., O’Sullivan, E., & Vaughan, B. (2004). Crime, punishment and the search for order in Ireland. Dublin: Institute of Public Administration. Maruna, S., & McEvoy, K. (2015). Why Irish criminology? In D. Healy, C. Hamilton, Y. Daly, & M. Butler (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of Irish criminology. Abingdon: Routledge.

References Braithwaite, J. (1989). Crime, shame and reintegration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dunham, R. M., Kidwell, J. S., & Wilson, S. M. (1986). Rites of passage at adolescence: A ritual process paradigm. Journal of Adolescent Research, 1(2), 139–153. Freud, S. (2017). Three essays on the theory of sexuality: The 1905 edition. New York: Verso Books. Goldman, E. (1969). Anarchism: And other essays. Courier Corporation. Gottfredson, M. R., & Hirschi, T. (1990). A general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hayward, K., Maruna, S., & Mooney, J. (2009). Fifty key thinkers in criminology. London: Routledge. Kilcommins, S., O’Donnell, I., O’Sullivan, E., & Vaughan, B. (2004). Crime, punishment and the search for order in Ireland. Dublin: Institute of Public Administration. Liebling, A., Maruna, S., & McAra, L. (Eds.). (2017). The Oxford handbook of criminology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ludlow, A., Armstrong, R., & Bartels, L. (2019). Learning together: Localism, collaboration and reflexivity in the development of prison and university learning communities. Journal of Prison Education and Reentry, 6(1), 25–45. Maruna, S. (1997). Going straight: Desistance from crime and self-narratives of reform. Narrative Study of Lives, 5, 59–97. Maruna, S. (2001). Making good: How ex-convicts reform and rebuild their lives. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

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Maruna, S. (2011). Reentry as a rite of passage. Punishment & Society, 13(1), 3–28. Maruna, S. (2016). Forward. In R. Earle (Ed.), Convict criminology: Inside and out. Bristol: Bristol University Press. Maruna, S. (2017). Desistance as a social movement. Irish Probation Journal, 14, 5–20. Maruna, S., LeBel, T., Mitchel, N., & Naples, M. (2004). Pygmalion in the reintegration process: Desistance from crime through the looking glass. Psychology, Crime and Law, 10(3), 271–281. Maruna, S., & McEvoy, K. (2015). Why Irish criminology? In D. Healy, C. Hamilton, Y. Daly, & M. Butler (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of Irish criminology. Abingdon: Routledge. Matza, D. (1964). Delinquency and drift. New Brunswick: Transaction. McNeill, F. (2006). A desistance paradigm for offender management. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 6(1), 39–62. Moffitt, T. E. (1993). Life-course-persistent and adolescence-limited antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy. Psychological Review, 100(4), 674–701. Mulcahy, A. (2008). The impact of the northern ‘troubles’ on criminal justice in the Irish Republic. In P. O’Mahony (Ed.), Criminal justice in Ireland. Dublin: Institute of Public Administration. Rafter, N. H. (1997). Creating born criminals. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Stewart, M. (2017). Nothing about us without us, or the dangers of a closedsociety research paradigm. Romani Studies, 27 (2), 125–146. Tietjen, G. (2019). Convict criminology: Learning from the past, confronting the present, expanding for the future. Critical Criminology, 27, 1010–1114. Toch, H. (1997). Corrections: A humanistic approach. Guilderland, NY: Harrow and Heston. Travis, J. (2005). But they all come back: Facing the challenges of prisoner reentry. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute. Yeo, K., & Moore, K. (2003). Including disabled people in poverty reduction work: “Nothing about us, without us”. World Development, 31(3), 571–590.

Appendix A

Locations of North South Criminology Conference since its inception in 2005 Year

Event

Location

2005

1st Annual North South Criminology Conference 2nd Annual North South Criminology Conference 3rd Annual North South Criminology Conference 4th Annual North South Criminology Conference 5th Annual North South Criminology Conference 6th Annual North South Criminology Conference 7th Annual North South Criminology Conference 8th Annual North South Criminology Conference 9th Annual North South Criminology Conference

Queens University Belfast, Belfast

2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

University of Limerick, Limerick University College Dublin, Dublin Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin University College Dublin, Dublin University of Ulster, Ulster School of Business, Institute of Technology, Sligo University College Dublin, Dublin Centre for Criminal Justice and Human Rights, University College Cork, Cork

(continued)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 O. Lynch et al., Reflections on Irish Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60593-3

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APPENDIX A

(continued) Year

Event

Location

2016

10th Annual North South Criminology Conference Autumn Criminology School 11th Annual North South Criminology Conference 12th Annual North South Criminology Conference 13th Annual North South Criminology Conference

Maynooth University, Kildare

2016 2018 2019 2020

Blackwater Castle, Co. Cork, Cork Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin, Dublin Criminology, University College Cork, Cork School of Law University of Limerick - Cancelled due to COVID

Appendix B

Course namea Rep. Ireland b BA Criminology Law Criminology and Criminal Justice BA (Arts) Criminology BCL Law and Criminology BA Criminal Justice BA Criminal Justice Studies MA in Comparative Criminology and Criminal Justice MA Criminology MSc Criminology and Criminal Justice LLM Criminology and Criminal Justice MA Criminology Northern Ireland b BA Criminology BSc Criminology and Sociology BSc Criminology and Social Policy LLM Criminology and Criminal Justice LLB Law with Criminology BSc Politics with Criminology BSc Social Policy with Criminology BSc Sociology with Criminology BSc Criminology with Criminal Justice

Institution

Student intake per cohortc

UCC NUIG MU MU UL WIT MU UCC UCD UCD TU

71 25 300–350 30–50 30 45–60 13–25 20 17 10 20

Queens Queens Queens Queens UU UU UU UU UU

35 20 20 40 35 30 30 40 65

a Only level 8 on the National Framework for Qualifications (NFQ) Ireland or equivalent are listed. A range of level 7, certificate and special purpose criminology courses are also available in public and private higher education institutions b Data gathered from the CAO and PAC sites as well as from University Home pages c Student intake estimates from Course co-ordinators/teaching/admin staff

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 O. Lynch et al., Reflections on Irish Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60593-3

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APPENDIX B

Conversations with Criminologists Podcast Files The podcasts that informed this book were recorded by Helen Russell, sound was by Kevin Hosford and they were produced by Dr Orla Lynch Prof. Ian O’Donnell https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZ m0vcy9kZmU4OWIwL3BvZGNhc3QvcnNz/episode/OGZkND ljOGMtYzg4Ny0wOThkLTU3N2ItOGI2Y2RkYTdkMGE3?sa=X& ved=2ahUKEwjU8pTZ9IPrAhVKFcAKHegzALcQkfYCegQIARAF Dr Deirdre Healy https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZ m0vcy9kZmU4OWIwL3BvZGNhc3QvcnNz/episode/NjMzOT I4NzUtYTZkZC00ZjE5LWEyZWItMDFjNjg0MWJjYzY1?sa=X& ved=2ahUKEwjU8pTZ9IPrAhVKFcAKHegzALcQkfYCegQIARAF Prof. Claire Hamilton https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3 IuZm0vcy9kZmU4OWIwL3BvZGNhc3QvcnNz/episode/NTk 3NTJjN2ItM2UzMC1lYzhlLTgwODQtOWQwZjQyYWZlZTA2? sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjU8pTZ9IPrAhVKFcAKHegzALcQkfYCeg QIARAF Dr Jennifer O’Mahoney https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZ m0vcy9kZmU4OWIwL3BvZGNhc3QvcnNz/episode/MjhkMm U5YmQtN2ZhNC1hMzc4LTZiN2MtODgyYzljOWFmMGNj? sa=X&ved=0CA0QzsICahcKEwjIs4ro9IPrAhUAAAAAHQAAAA AQIA Dr Cheryl Lawther https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZ m0vcy9kZmU4OWIwL3BvZGNhc3QvcnNz/episode/YzYzZGJlN

APPENDIX B

163

WMtODZmMi1hZjdlLTkwYmItN2M0MzA5NjViMTlm?sa=X& ved=0CBUQzsICahcKEwjIs4ro9IPrAhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQIA Prof. Shane Kilcommins https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZ m0vcy9kZmU4OWIwL3BvZGNhc3QvcnNz/episode/NmNjMD FiOWYtMzc4ZC02YWM0LTVhOWEtZGViMDQwMTFiNGI4? sa=X&ved=0CBMQzsICahcKEwjIs4ro9IPrAhUAAAAAHQAAAA AQIA Prof. Mary Rogan https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZ m0vcy9kZmU4OWIwL3BvZGNhc3QvcnNz/episode/NDQ0Zj VkYTMtZDkzNC1jZWYzLWQwYjEtM2M2ZGJmZWYzZjk2? sa=X&ved=0CA8QzsICahcKEwjIs4ro9IPrAhUAAAAAHQAAAA AQIA Dr Diarmuid Griffin https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZ m0vcy9kZmU4OWIwL3BvZGNhc3QvcnNz/episode/Y2E2Mz Q0ZWYtMmYwYi00N2RmLTJmZGYtYWE0MmIzY2M5ZjQ1? sa=X&ved=0CBcQzsICahcKEwjIs4ro9IPrAhUAAAAAHQAAAA AQIA Prof. Maggie O Neill https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3 IuZm0vcy9kZmU4OWIwL3BvZGNhc3QvcnNz/episode/MTk 2NjNiNWQtMDNjYy04NTk4LTY3NzktOTRkNDI3NjM0NjFk? sa=X&ved=0CAsQzsICahcKEwjIs4ro9IPrAhUAAAAAHQAAAA AQIA

164

APPENDIX B

Prof. Shad Maruna https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZ m0vcy9kZmU4OWIwL3BvZGNhc3QvcnNz/episode/MmJmMD NhNjQtZDAxNC05ZjJjLWNjMzAtMjE1MjJjNDJjY2Iw?sa=X& ved=2ahUKEwjU8pTZ9IPrAhVKFcAKHegzALcQkfYCegQIARAF

Index

A adult development, 143, 144 advocacy work, 131, 156 An Garda Siochana, 92 arts and sociology/criminology, 131 Association for Criminal Justice Research Development (ACJRD), 51, 150, 154

B The Belfast Train, 89

C Capital Punishment, 112 carceral archipelago, 12, 50, 85, 87 Central Research Unit (CRU), 6 coercive confinement, 2, 12, 15, 16, 37, 50 community service orders, 104 convict criminology, 140, 152 Cork Rape Trial, 91 COST Action, 32, 33 counter-terrorism, 48

crime prevention, 14 criminal careers, 146, 147 criminal justice, 2–7, 12, 14, 15, 22, 23, 28, 32, 43, 45–48, 50, 51, 75, 82–84, 86, 87, 89, 90, 92, 100, 102, 103, 107, 110–112, 114–116, 120, 121, 124, 139–141, 144, 147, 151, 155, 156, 159, 161 criminal law, 44, 86, 91, 110, 111 critical feminist theory, 125 critical theory, 5, 56, 125 cultural sociology, 126 culture(s) of control, 12, 15, 44, 46, 48, 86, 87, 96, 100, 112 D dark tourism, 72, 74 Deaths in custody, 105 decision making (in criminal justice), 110, 112 desistance, 29, 31, 34, 36, 140, 141, 146–148, 150–155 disclosing victimhood, 59

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 O. Lynch et al., Reflections on Irish Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60593-3

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INDEX

disposable population, 130 E enable people, 34 Ethnomimesis, 131 European Convention on Human rights, 86 European Journal of Criminology, 2, 3, 83, 87 F feminist aesthetics, 126 flying squad, 12, 14 G Garda Ombudsman, 111 global criminology, 49 guide for survivors, 87 H heritage, 61, 68 history of penology, 61 history of violence, 12, 15 human development, 143 humanise, 31 human rights, 5, 18, 42–44, 49, 68, 70–72, 98, 100, 101, 104 human rights (in prison), 18, 98, 101 I ill-treatment (of prisoners), 104 Inside Out, 152 intimate partner violence, 128 Irish narratives of femininity, 62 Irish Penal Reform Trust, 13, 14, 97, 102, 116, 154 isolation (in prison), 12 J judicial discretion, 120

L labelling theory, 149 legal interpretation, 119 legal philosophy, 85, 96, 98 legal rules, 84–86, 90 leveraging reforms, 48 life imprisonment, 20, 110–113, 117 loyalty and betrayal, 72, 76

M Magdalenes Laundries, 37, 60 Magee vs the Attorney General, 89 marital privacy, 89 mass incarceration, 147, 148, 155 mass surveillance, 48 Minister for Justice, 97, 102, 113 modernity, 82 moral panic, 43 Mount joy, 2

N ‘netnography’, 58

O oral history, 29, 35, 57, 63, 134 outcasts, 30, 149

P parole, 111–117, 119 parole board, 113–119 participatory research, 125, 132 Penology, 12, 14, 15, 84–87, 112 photovoice, 33, 34 policing, 3, 7, 46, 69, 78, 92, 106, 129 policing authority, 134 policy analysis, 100 policy transfer, 96, 100

INDEX

post-colonial/post-colonialism, 7, 140, 155 post conflict, 68, 71 praxis, 125, 127, 132, 133 pre-emptive measures, 45 prison experience, 140, 151 prison oversight bodies, 103 prison policy, 98, 105, 106 prison regimes, 14 prison system, 100–102, 106, 118 probation service, 7, 29, 35, 102, 107, 151, 154 probation supervision, 32, 36 proportionality, 117 Prostitute Outreach Workers, 132 Q qualitative methods, 5, 28, 124 R rape culture, 58 recidivism, 22, 28, 31 reconceptualising penalty, 47 reconciliation, 68, 72, 76 reduce offending, 32 rehabilitation, 148, 151 reintegration, 75, 145, 148, 149, 155, 156 release, 14, 46, 60, 61, 112–116, 118, 140 reoffending (likelihood of), 114 reparation, 68, 69, 72, 75 representation, 63, 64, 68, 74, 113, 116, 152 resistance, 7, 100, 101 responsibility, 16, 70, 75, 76 restorative justice, 42, 56, 68, 75, 155, 156 risk assessment, 110, 112, 114, 116, 119 rite of passage, 143, 148

167

Royal Irish Constabulary, 7

S second generation (academics), 142 securitisation, 42, 44, 45 sentenced to death, 20 separate system versus silent system, 17 servitude for life, 20 sexual violence, 69, 128, 150 sex workers, 124, 127, 128, 130, 132–134 social censure, 5 social change, 59, 62, 63, 97 social deviance, 84 social justice, 99 social policy, 96, 100, 143, 161 social practices, 5 social theory, 5, 27, 28, 55, 68, 82, 96, 110, 125 States of Denial, 70 storytelling, 59, 124, 132, 133 suicide prevention, 13

T theatre based (research), 134, 135 transitional justice, 67, 68, 70, 71, 75 the Troubles, 2, 4, 5, 7, 156 truth, 68, 69, 71, 72, 75, 76 truth recovery, 68, 72, 76

V victimhood, 56, 72–75, 82 victim impact statement, 87 victimology, 32, 56, 57, 83, 87

W walking based (research), 134 Waterford Memories Project, 60