Intimate image abuse is a problem that is shared by many societies, and jurisdictions are learning from each other about how best to address this issue. In 2021 Hong Kong enacted four new intimate image abuse offences. Based on 15 semi-structured interviews with service providers and legal professionals, this study explores stakeholder perceptions of the effectiveness of the new offences in Hong Kong. Themes that emerged included why there was a need for specific offences, the impact that the new offences have had and whether further criminal law or non-criminal law reforms are necessary. A key finding from this research is that crafting offences to specifically target intimate image abuse is important to strengthen community awareness of the wrongfulness of intimate image abuse, enhance protection of victims and increase prosecutions. To be most effective, however, criminal law reform should be accompanied by holistic education and police training. Other non-criminal law reforms, such as working with providers and developing alternative complaints mechanisms, are also necessary to successfully combat intimate image abuse.

A vast body of work investigates the consequences of legislative term limits for public policy. However, considerably less research has delved into their effects in noneconomic policy domains. In this article, we develop the argument that implemented term limits increase the effect that a state government’s ideology has on the state’s incarceration rate. When analyzing incarceration rates among all states between 1979 and 2017, we find evidence to support our theoretical expectation. Specifically, for states with term limits, we find that an increase in state government conservatism is associated with a higher incarceration rate. Conversely, for non-term-limited states, we find that the policy preferences of the state government have little influence on the incarceration rate. These findings deepen our insight into how institutional design can affect public policy.

Although expressivism has been studied in relation to criminal justice since the emergence of modern international criminal law, an expressivist perspective in norms and criminal justice research resurfaced in the past decades, inviting a new viewpoint on the dynamic interplay between norms and symbolic action in International Relations (IR). Situated as an account of punishment, expressivism has been criticised for being too abstract and lacking an immanent meaning or for its dialectic position in relation to punishment. Addressing this theoretical shortcoming, this article remediates our understanding of expressivism, establishing new knowledge of the meaning of norm expressivism in IR and clarifying the relationship between expressivism and notions of punishment in criminal justice and norm research. To this end, it hermeneutically deconstructs the rhetoric of country delegates at the United Nations in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It examines crucial examples of expressivism: disagreement pronouncements, denunciation of norm violation, postulation of guilt, and penal analogies. While criminal justice research posits expressivism as a distinct account of punishment, the novelty of this article consists in illustrating how, even in the absence of prosecution in the courtroom, expressivist rationales can have a reinforcing effect on the international legal order.

This paper explores the use of mindset material in terrorism cases. Mindset material is a broad category of evidence, including social media activity and internet search histories, relied on to infer or imply that the accused is affiliated or aligned with terrorists. Although mindset material plays a central role throughout the justice process in terrorism cases, no work to date has explored and discussed its use in depth. In this paper I draw on doctrinal and empirical findings, including interviews, to examine how and why it has come to play such a central role in terror cases. While mindset material is a well-intentioned tool used to selectively enforce broadly drafted and vaguely defined terrorism offences, it is also a blunt tool, and sees great emphasis placed on the accused's inferred status as terrorist (or not). In this paper I explore and problematise the use of mindset material and the inferences drawn from it, specifically in relation to to fantasists, the merely curious, and young autistic defendants. I posit that mindset material is symptomatic of a need to revisit the substantive law and to rethink the proper role of the criminal law in preventing terrorism.

Throughout its two and a half centuries in existence, US mental health policy has repeatedly failed people living with schizophrenia. The failures are cyclical—the inhumane conditions uncovered in the first 75 years of existence were addressed with the construction of state asylums to deliver moral treatment. One hundred years later, the asylums were themselves revealed to be inhumane. Deinstitutionalization, the response to the failure of asylums starting in the 1960s, now drives outcomes such as homelessness, incarceration, and early death for people living with psychotic illnesses. In all cases, well-intentioned policy reform has failed at the level of implementation, largely due to a lack of accountability. The result has been a consistent failure to adequately treat people living with schizophrenia, which is now understood to be a highly treatable condition. As the country passes into a quarter millennium in existence, reform is once again underway. Unlike other points in history, there is good news. Other countries, such as Italy, have successfully leveraged reform to achieve greatly improved outcomes. Understanding US history and the successful implementation of policy change in other countries is imperative and teaches us that accountability in implementation is necessary to break the cycle of policy failure.

While governments have long discussed the promise of delegating important decisions to machines, actual use often lags. Consequently, we know little about the variation in the deployment of such delegations in large numbers of similar governmental organizations. Using data from crime laboratories in the United States, we examine the uneven distribution over time of a specific, well-known expert system for ballistics imaging for a large sample of local and regional public agencies; an expert system is an inference engine joined with a knowledge base. Our statistical model is informed by the push-pull-capability theory of innovation in the public sector. We test hypotheses about the probability of deployment and provide evidence that the use of this expert system varies with the pull of agency task environments and the enabling support of organizational resources—and that the impacts of those factors have changed over time. Within this context, we also present evidence that general knowledge of the use of expert systems has supported the use of this specific expert system in many agencies. This empirical case and this theory of innovation provide broad evidence about the historical utilization of expert systems as algorithms in public sector applications.

This article summarises the BJPsych Bulletin 2024 special edition on mental health in criminal justice and correctional settings. The edition considers issues across a range of settings, including police custody, the courts and prisons, as well as considering wider international questions and systems within the field. In this edition, we assert the right of the individual to healthcare services that should be available, accessible, acceptable and of good quality. Psychiatry must play a significant role in shaping this debate as it moves forward.

Prosecutors in adversarial systems are simultaneously expected to be impartial ministers of justice and partisan advocates. Leaving this tension unaddressed can result in poor-quality prosecutorial decision-making. This article develops a novel “dynamic” framework for prosecutors to navigate between and prioritize these competing considerations, which can be used to understand, evaluate, and improve prosecutorial performance. Under this framework, the prioritization should depend on which function the prosecutor is exercising at any given time. The article then deploys primary data collected in Delhi, through court observation and interviews with judges, lawyers, victims, and victim-support persons, to exemplify and justify the framework.

Why is the police role so broad in the United States today? Carceral state scholars have investigated how and why policymakers have treated so many social problems as policing problems, but they have not yet recognized the degree to which the call-for-service system has marginalized political control over police strategy. This Article traces the historical sources of this arrangement through extensive archival research into its evolution. We find that over the course of the twentieth century, the rise of new communications technologies gradually shifted the power to decide which problems are proper subjects of police attention to private individuals, eventually channeling their demands through centralized call centers that had been stripped of the authority and contextual knowledge needed to govern them in a meaningful way. That process fundamentally altered the character of public oversight over policing, elevating a distinctive set of individual interests as largely unchallenged determinants of the kinds of situations that are policeable. By illustrating how sociotechnical change unintentionally reallocated the authority to define the scope of an important institution’s mandate, this case sheds new light on the factors that shape the police role and the role the public plays in defining it.

Deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) are legal means, alternative to trial, for the resolution of criminal business cases. Although DPAs are increasingly used in the US and are spreading to other jurisdictions, the ethics of DPAs has hardly been subjected to critical scrutiny. We use a multidisciplinary approach straddling the line between philosophy and law to examine the ethics of DPAs used to resolve cases of multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) foreign corruption. Deontologically, we argue that the normativity of DPAs raises critical concerns related to the notion of justice as punishment, with serious cases of international corruption resolved with minimal retribution for offending MNEs. Taking a utilitarian ethical perspective, we also evaluate the effect of DPAs on MNEs’ tendency to self-regulate or re-offend. Our conclusion, supported by critical analysis of the juridical literature and case evidence on MNEs’ recidivism, is that DPAs do not foster ethical behavior.

As the coronavirus pandemic swept the nation in 2020, many emphasized that carceral spaces were hotspots for the virus, leaving Black and Brown people especially vulnerable to infection. In combination with other critiques of racism in the carceral state, these observations created pressure to decarcerate, especially on the political left. How did political elites discuss the carceral state in this changed atmosphere? To answer this question, we analyze rhetoric in public statements across four liberal metropolitan areas during the spring and summer of 2020. In these statements, we find a long-standing discourse of racially paternalist penal welfarism, retrofitted to pandemic times and accompanied by a distinction between “deserving” and “undeserving” criminals. Accommodating portrayals of incarcerated people as vulnerable to COVID-19 and in desperate need of care, this pattern of rhetoric positioned the carceral state as a protector in order to justify continued incarceration.

Japan is often said to have one of the lowest rape rates in the world, and Japanese police claim to solve 97 percent of rape cases. But in reality, only 5–10 percent of rape victims report it to police, and police record half or less of reported cases while prosecutors charge about one-third of recorded cases. The result of this process of caseload attrition is that for every 1,000 rapes in Japan, only 10–20 result in a criminal conviction – and fewer than half of convicted rapists are incarcerated. Similar patterns characterize Japan's criminal justice response to other sex crimes. This article shows that impunity for sex offenders is extremely common in Japan, and it argues that patriarchal social and legal norms help explain this pattern.