Venue: Larry Saha Room (HA2175), Haydon-Allen Building #22 - Lunch to follow seminar
BENTHAM IN THE ANTHROPOCENE.
GREEN CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND THE END OF CRIMINOLOGY.
Professor Pat O’Malley
Calls for a Green criminology rarely spell out what a ‘Green criminal justice’ system could look like. One option is for a focus on harms and their compensation to displace moral outrage and punishment. Following Jeremy Bentham’s 19th century proposal we could give harms a money value, and focus ‘criminal’ justice on money compensation. It is a model that already dominates civil law where the focus is not on wrongdoers (or their pathologies and their corrections) but on compensation. Such compensation is predominantly covered and paid by insurance. As money sanctions in the form of fines already are the dominant criminal sanction, the envisaged shift is not so radical. A resource greedy prison system is largely displaced, reserved for the few who are too dangerous to be at large. And a ‘science of criminals’ – itself resource greedy and with a lamentable history of class, race and gender discrimination – could be dispensed with.
Pat O’Malley FASSA is Distinguished Honorary Professor at the ANU and until recently Honorary Professor of Law at the University of Sydney where until 2013 he had been Professorial Research Fellow. Since the early 1990s, most of his research has focused on risk as a framework for governance, especially in relation to criminal justice, insurance and illicit drug use. Over the past decade the pivotal place of money sanctions in civil and criminal justice have become a major focus of his work, despite this having almost no impact on his fellow criminologists.