Messages from Long Tan, Vietnam: memorialisation, reconciliation, and historical justice

This article explores the changing ways in which Australians and Vietnamese remember and memorialize their involvement in the Vietnam War and how these processes intersect with notions of reconciliation and historical justice in postwar contexts. It uses the Battle of Long Tan of August 1966 as an entrée into these considerations and questions how heritage-making and memorialization processes can facilitate the achievement of reconciliation between parties formerly in conflict. Not surprisingly, the Australian and Vietnamese veterans of the battle and the two states, the Commonwealth of Australia and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, have different motivations for wanting to remember Long Tan. On the Australian side, a sense that reconciliation and atonement are needed is often reflected in official government and veterans’ statements about the war and Australia-Vietnam relations, in the memorialization process at Long Tan and in the involvement of Australian veterans groups engaged in local economic development and community building in Vietnam. On the Vietnamese side, where the Vietnam War played out as a civil as well as an international war, efforts by those who actively supported the former Republic of Vietnam based in Saigon in the south and among the overseas Vietnamese (Viet kieu) to memorialize their engagement in the conflict have been frustrated. The usefulness of the notion of seeking historical justice is therefore questioned in post–civil war situations where people are locked into fixed histories and are unprepared or unable to revisit and retell personal and collective memories and histories.

“People’s law” and restorative justice: the success of circle sentencing in New South Wales

Informal sentencing procedures in remote Indigenous communities of Australia have been occurring for some time, but it was in the late 1990s that formalization of the practice began in urban areas with the advent of Indigenous sentencing and circle courts. These circle courts emerged primarily to address the over-representation and incarceration of Indigenous people in the criminal justice system. The first Indigenous urban court was assembled in Port Adelaide, South Australia in June 1999 and was named the Nunga Court. Courts emerging since in other states are based on the Nunga Court model, although they have been adapted to suit local conditions. The practice of circle sentencing was introduced in New South Wales (NSW) in Nowra in February 2002.

Review of 'Promoting Justice through Clinical Legal Education' by Jeff Giddings, Justice Press, 2013

Review of 'Promoting Justice through Clinical Legal Education' by Jeff Giddings, Justice Press, 2013, 448 pages

The paradox of parity in sentencing in Australia: the pursuit of equal justice that highlights the futility of consistency in sentencing

Parity in sentencing is the principle that offenders who are parties to a crime should, all things being equal, receive the same penalty. While it is a well-established principle, the reality is that its scope is greatly limited by the largely unfettered nature of the sentencing calculus. Things are rarely equal between offenders due to the large number of variables that current orthodoxy maintains are relevant to sentencing. This makes application of the parity principle unpredictable, resulting in the paradox that parity highlights the unfairness that it is meant to mitigate: inconsistency in sentencing. This article contends that parity will remain an aspiration, as opposed to a concrete principle, until the instinctive synthesis approach to sentencing yields to a more transparent and precise decision-making process. The article focuses on Australian jurisprudence, but the analysis applies to all jurisdictions where sentencing has a considerable discretionary component (including the UK and the USA--apart from the limited circumstances where mandatory sentences apply).

Youth justice: challenges in responding to young people convicted of sexual offences

The clinical and criminological literature on adolescents who have committed sexual offences indicates that a pathologisation of young people and a labelling or overly punitive response is likely to be more harmful than rehabilitative. Accordingly, therapeutic counselling and diversionary schemes are seen as preferable to custodial terms in most instances. For adolescents convicted of sex offences, clinicians identify the benefits of comprehensive therapeutic care which involves family and is sensitive to the young person's context and culture. The benefits of this approach are documented and, although data are limited, indications are that recidivism is reduced where adolescents are provided with specialised counselling to encourage positive and non-abusive behaviours. Yet each jurisdiction experiences difficulties in ensuring the provision of equitable and comprehensive therapeutic services, particularly to regionally or remotely located youth. This paper draws on data from a national study of the services to children and adolescents with sexualised or sexual offending behaviours. With attention to the difficulty in providing services to regionally or remotely located adolescents, this paper identifies challenges around lengthy remand terms, the provision of pre-offence diversionary programs, and the provision of specialised services for young people serving community orders. For example, jurisdictions with the largest geographic service areas face enormous difficulties in providing specialised supervision for community-based orders. At present there are several jurisdictions where regionally and remotely located adolescents may serve the duration of a youth justice order without receiving sepcialised counselling to assist them in modifying their behaviours. The paper identifies the risks where specialised counselling cannot be provided, but also identifies specific initiatives designed to fill these gaps in service provision to youth justice clients. 

Using theory in criminal justice evaluation

This chapter examines the nature and role of theory in criminal justice evaluation. A distinction between theories of and theories for evaluation is offered to clarify what is meant by ‘theory’ in the context of contemporary evaluation practice. Theories of evaluation provide a set of prescriptions and principles that can be used to guide the design, conduct and use of evaluation. Theories for evaluation include programme theory and the application of social science theory to understand how and why criminal justice interventions work to generate desired outcomes. The fundamental features of these three types of theory are discussed in detail, with a particular focus on demonstrating their combined value and utility for informing and improving the practice of criminal justice evaluation

Recognition, resistance and reconstruction : an introduction to subjectivities and social justice

The aim of this book is to examine new forms of resistance to social injustices in contemporary Western societies. Resistance requires agency, and agency is grounded in notions of the subject and subjectivity. It is a premise of this book that new and/or reconstructed forms of subjectivity are required to challenge social relations of subordination and domination.
Subjectivity is primarily based on lived experience. While subjectivity is sometimes used to explore individualistic strategies for personal meaning, we argue that subjectivity is central to political struggles against regimes of power. Thus, understanding how subjects are constituted is important in fostering the capacity of critical reflection and social transformation.
Our aim  is to understand the relationship between subjectivity and the wider social order. The relationship between the psyche and society is one of the most challenging issues facing social theory. While there is a variety of theoretical approaches to subjectivity, those that explore the links between the subject and society are the most promising in developing strategies for resistance. In this introductory chapter, we review and interrogate what we believe are the most important theoretical approaches to subjectivity, drawing upon Marxism, critical theory, feminism, postcolonialism and post-structuralism. Our aim in this book is not to develop a new theory of subjectivities. Rather, we are more concerned with investigating how diverse subjectivities are constructed and reconstructed.