This course is designed to introduce students to critical issues in criminal justice. Using a combination of readings, lectures, discussions and media, students will be familiarised with the basic characteristics of the criminal justice system and asked to use this knowledge to critically analyse various aspects of that system and to consider possible alternative systems of justice.
We will begin with a discussion of how behaviour becomes criminalised and will explore how criminal justice and broader notions of justice may be conceptualised. We will then examine various issues in criminal justice, beginning with the treatment of victims and specifically victims of family violence, to critically evaluate whether the current criminal justice system meets their needs and explore alternative approaches including parallel justice and transformative justice. We then turn to offenders and examine non-adversarial justice and solution-focused courts and forms of youth and Indigenous justice.
The second part of the course then focuses on human rights and examines the treatment of those caught up in the justice system, in relation to the insanity defence, dangerousness and risk assessment, and miscarriages of justice. We then finish by examining the outer limits of criminal justice and the use of torture, inhuman and degrading treatment both in New Zealand and elsewhere.
The course employs an international, comparative approach and students will be exposed to materials from New Zealand, the US, the UK, Australia and elsewhere, and expected to relate them to each other.