On Tuesday 8th November, Histories of Punishment and Social Control: Perspectives from a Periphery will be launched at the Museum of Literature Ireland. You can register for the launch here and event details are below. What regimes made up Ireland’s penal system in the twentieth century? How have these changed? How have the legacies of these penal practices shaped Ireland’s social order today? While discussing these questions, this event will mark the publication of The Histories of Punishment and Social Control: Perspectives from a Periphery. This edited collection shows in rich detail the tr ..read more

Brunel Public International Law Group invites you to the next in its webinar series “International Children’s Rights and the Justice System: Utilising the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to Bring about Change in the Child Justice System”.  This event brings together internationally-recognised experts in the field of children’s rights to discuss how the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has been used in strategic litigation, in detention, and in developing responses to serious offending to bring about change for children in the child justice system.  Th ..read more

Minister Harris, MU President, former students and higher education policymakers launch Unlocking Potential website, toolkit and scholarship fund Monday January 17th saw over 230 persons attend the launch of Unlocking Potential (UP), a project aiming to make higher education more accessible for people with convictions. UP has now published its Fair Admissions Toolkit and other resources on its website (www.unlockpotential.ie), including: • a new podcast series and documentary exploring the project’s aims, and celebrating and amplifying the achievements and stories of graduates with convictions ..read more

This week we are featuring guest blogs from two students in Dr Deirdre Healy’s ‘Introduction to Criminological Theory’ module, in the UCD Sutherland School of Law. Today’s piece was written by Law with Social Justice student Isabel Mooney. We are so pleased to be able to use the site as a place to showcase the excellent undergraduate work being done in Irish universities. Enjoy! An Analysis of the Influences of Labelling Theory in the Children Act 2001 Isabel Mooney Labelling theory proposes that a “person becomes the thing he is described as being” (Newburn, 2017: 231). This is particularly s ..read more

This week we are featuring guest blogs from two students in Dr Deirdre Healy’s ‘Introduction to Criminological Theory’ module, in the UCD Sutherland School of Law. Today’s piece was written by Law student Caroline Doyle. We are so pleased to be able to use the site as a place to showcase the excellent undergraduate work being done in Irish universities. Enjoy! Panicking Our Rights Away? Caroline Doyle For the purposes of this analysis, I will be examining the theory of moral panics, drawing on the work of Stanley Cohen and how this has led to rights infringements within the Irish criminal just ..read more

This guest blog was written by Siobhán Buckley. Siobhán is an Irish Research Council Postgraduate Scholar in the Department of Law, Maynooth University. Her doctoral research concerns ‘“Contrasts in Tolerance?”: A cross-sectoral analysis of punitiveness in the adult and youth criminal justice systems of Ireland, Scotland and the Netherlands 1990 – 2015’. The project looks at differences of approach and transitions between the adult and youth justice systems. Twitter: @SK_Buckley Introduction Punitiveness and tolerance in a criminological context have been studied and examined considerably in t ..read more

Louise Brangan is a Lecturer in Criminology in University of Stirling. Her new book The Politics of Punishment: A comparative study of imprisonment and political culture will be published this spring and is available now to order from Routledge. The prison is everywhere, yet it is not everywhere alike. Despite it being used by governments across the globe to control and reprimand citizens deemed to be transgressive or unruly, in practice imprisonment varies from one country to the next. In The Politics of Punishment I explore why imprisonment and penal politics differs between nations. To expl ..read more

This blog post was written by Niamh Wade. Niamh is an IRC-funded PhD student in the Department of Law, Maynooth University. She lectures in Criminal Law and Evidence. She has previously written an RTE Brainstorm piece on community courts which you can read here. Twitter: @niamhwade27 Problem-Solving Courts Problem-solving courts are an innovative court model that seek to address a particular problem or target group. Examples of problem-solving courts include drug courts, mental health courts, domestic violence courts, youth courts, family drug and alcohol courts, and community courts. These co ..read more

This blog post was written by Liam Dempsey. Liam is currently working as a legal researcher in the Law Reform Commission and was the principal legal researcher on the Commission’s recently published Report on Suspended Sentences (LRC 123-2020). He has an interest in sentencing law and policy, both from a legalist and criminological perspective and has previously written about implicit judicial sentencing bias in the context of socioeconomically deprived offenders, and the duty of District Court judges to give reasons at sentencing. NOTE: The views expressed in this post are those of the author ..read more

This blog piece was written by Shane Conaty. Shane is currently working as a research assistant on Dr Etain Quigley’s IRC New Foundations project ‘Juvenile Sexual Offending: An EU Prevalence and Criminal Justice Response Study.’ Shane is also working with the ACJRD on their online presence in a post-Covid-19 world. Shane completed his MA in Comparative Criminology and Criminal Justice in the Department of Law, Maynooth University. Twitter – @conaty95 Sociologist Robert Merton’s social strain theory is one of the most popular theories of Criminology, and although it was theorised in the context ..read more