Science-fiction visions of dystopian societies, such as Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron and Philip K Dick’s Minority Report, all three turned into successful films, are increasingly evoked in discussions of changes in society, individual freedoms and state control of criminal justice. These stories, in the eloquent words of Lucia Zedner, tap into our worst fears of:
"..a shift from a post- to a pre-crime society...in which the possibility of forestalling risks competes with and even takes precedence over responding to wrongs done. In consequence, the post-crime orientation of criminal justice is increasingly overshadowed by the pre-crime logic of security. [...] Pre-crime, by contrast, shifts the temporal perspective to anticipate and forestall that which has not yet occurred and may never do so." (2007: 262)
In Predicting Young Criminals, his recent article for CrimeTalk, Sean Creaney is therefore in good company in seeing parallels between Minority Report, with its pre-crime social exclusion of predicted murderers, and the pre-emptive turn in youth justice developments. He reflects on the role of practitioners required to assess the likelihood of young people becoming offenders, using fallible methods, and then to direct them onto youth offending programmes before they have offended.
Known by some as merely a location for stag parties and bus tours, Latvia has recently been identified as an unlikely example of an economy bucking the global recessionary trend. This was not always the case. When I was there, between 2000 and 2010, Latvia was overwhelmed by the complexities associated with the nearly 5 decades of Soviet occupation. Banking crises, calls for currency devaluation, and a lack of political stability contributed to economic insecurity and growing income inequality. International interactions led to calls for prison and probation reform to provide ‘evidence-based’ alternatives for those in conflict with the law. Despite widespread concerns about prison conditions, economic challenges and a lack of naational political will hampered early justice reform efforts.
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