The Centre for Criminology at the 2015 ASC Conference

The 2015 annual conference of the American Society of Criminology (ASC) was held from 18-21 November in Washington, DC, with the theme of ‘The Politics of Crime and Justice.’ A few members of the Centre for Criminology attended and contributed to the conference as presenters and roundtable participants.

Dr Rachel Condry organised a roundtable session on ‘Prisoners’ Families, Punishment, and Social Inequality,’ which explored the impact of imprisonment on families and its intersection with patterns of social inequality, including, among others, issues of unequal treatment, punishment beyond the legal offender, human rights, citizenship and exclusion, and social justice. In a panel on Domestic Violence and Adolescence, Dr Condry presented a paper entitled ‘Responding to Adolescent to Parent Violence Within a Domestic Violence Framework,’ which draws upon data from her three year ESRC-funded study ‘Investigating Adolescent Violence towards Parents’ in the UK. The presentation explored the conceptualisation of adolescent to parent violence (APV) as domestic violence and considered the implications for responses to the problem, contending that APV requires a response that’s as rigorous as the response to domestic violence.

Dr Alpa Parmar presented a paper, ‘Post-colonial Policing and the Indian Diaspora: Exploring Transnational Identities,’ in a panel on Policing Around the Globe. Her presentation discussed the policing and governance of South Asian males in the UK and India, arguing that the construction of masculinities, ethnicities, citizenship, and belonging require an analysis that appreciates the connections and disruptions between coloniality and postcoloniality in order to understand the ways in which profiling and fears of crime are then mapped and recast in different contexts.

In a panel on The Role of Defendants' Age in Case Processing, Professor Julian Roberts co-presented (with Richard S. Frase, University of Minnesota Law School, and Rhys Hester, University of Minnesota Law School) on ‘Aging Out of Crime and into Prison: A Multi-State Analysis of the Impact of Criminal History Scores on Aging Offenders.’ The paper presents findings of a study examining the repercussions of high criminal history scores on older offenders using felony sentencing data from several guidelines jurisdictions, estimating the prison-bed (and concomitant monetary expenditure) impact for these older, low-severity, high-history offenders.

The next annual conference of the ASC will take place in New Orleans on 16-19 November 2016.