Conference: Crime, Justice and Surveillance

A TWO-DAY International Conference hosted by the Centre For Criminological Research, University of Sheffield in association with www.surveillance-and-society.org on Wednesday 5th and Thursday 6th April 2006.

In the UK the last decade has seen an unprecedented deployment of surveillance technologies and practices in the name of crime control. Drug testing, electronic monitoring, DNA testing and video monitoring have all expanded rapidly. Actuarial practices based on risk assessment and offender profiling have become central to proactive based policing strategies that ‘target the criminal and not the crime', and intelligence gathering has been put at the heart of policing. In addition multi-agency partnerships, which integrate police, probation, education, social services and health departments in a ‘joined up' approach to crime reduction have led to new practices of information exchange. This is aimed at both identifying potential deviants for pre-emptive intervention and subjecting known criminals to ‘intensive supervision and surveillance' in the community. The criminal record has now been enhanced and expanded with the development of searchable data-base technologies, specialist registers, and facilities to allow access to externally held databases.

These developments are not unique to the UK, and this conference seeks to explore the British experience in the context of developments in Europe and beyond and to consider the social, political and legal issues that arise from the expansion of surveillance. The conference aims to be truly inter-disciplinary and intends to include contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, criminologists, socio-legal scholars, historians, economists and social scientists researching surveillance practices and technologies.
Full announcement.