Criminal Justice Systems

This unit is offered in the First Year Model where you will study the unit intensively over a four-week block. In this unit we will explore the concepts of crime and criminality. This is because how we as a society understand these concepts, shapes how we construct and use our criminal justice systems in order to respond to crime. We will see that there are many different ways in which ideas about crime and criminality are produced and shared amongst members of society, including those representations of crime produced by, for example, stories circulated by the media, case law produced through the courts, statistics produced by government bodies, speeches made by politicians, and expert analysis produced by academics. By doing this, we shall see that the concepts of crime and criminality are complex. As we shall also see, these complex ideas about what crime is are linked to the systems through which crime is addressed. Through our studies in this unit we shall begin to appreciate the complexity of the Australian criminal justice systems.