Exploring recent developments in restorative policing in England and Wales

The evolution of the policing role over the last decade has led to 33 police forces in England and Wales integrating restorative justice practices, in one form or another, into their responses to minor crime committed for the first time by both youths and adults. Most recently, this reform dynamic has been used in response to more serious offences committed by persistent offenders and expanded to include all stages of the criminal justice process. Despite the significant positive rhetoric that surrounds the adoption and use of restorative justice, there are a number of procedural and cultural challenges that pose a threat to the extent to which restorative justice may become embedded within the policing response. This article explores these developments and highlights where potential problems for implementation may arise as well as some strategies to overcome them

Combining the bulk transfer formulation and surface renewal analysis for estimating the sensible heat flux without involving the parameter KB-1

The single‐source bulk transfer formulation (based on the Monin‐Obukhov Similarity Theory, MOST) has been used to estimate the sensible heat flux, H, in the framework of remote sensing over homogeneous surfaces (HMOST). The latter involves the canopy parameter, , which is difficult to parameterize. Over short and dense grass at a site influenced by regional advection of sensible heat flux, HMOST with  = 2 (i.e., the value recommended) correlated strongly with the H measured using the Eddy Covariance, EC, method, HEC. However, it overestimated HEC by 50% under stable conditions for samples showing a local air temperature gradient larger than the measurement error, 0.4 km−1. Combining MOST and Surface Renewal analysis, three methods of estimating H that avoid dependency have been derived. These new expressions explain the variability of H versus , where is the friction velocity, is the radiometric surface temperature, and is the air temperature at height, z. At two measurement heights, the three methods performed excellently. One of the methods developed required the same readily/commonly available inputs as HMOST due to the fact that the ratio between and the ramp amplitude was found fairly constant under stable and unstable cases. Over homogeneous canopies, at a site influenced by regional advection of sensible heat flux, the methods proposed are an alternative to the traditional bulk transfer method because they are reliable, exempt of calibration against the EC method, and are comparable or identical in cost of application. It is suggested that the methodology may be useful over bare soil and sparse vegetation.This research was funded by CERESS project AGL2011–30498 (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of Spain, cofunded FEDER), CGL2012–37416‐C04‐01 (Ministerio de Ciencia y Innovación of Spain), and CEI Iberus, 2014 (Proyecto financiado por el Ministerio de Educación en el marco del Programa Campus de Excelencia Internacional of Spain)

Understanding Compliance Dynamics in Community Justice Settings

This article seeks to expand the existing literature on compliance in community justice settings by highlighting the importance of service user participation in efforts to achieve compliance. The article’s central argument is that although co-productive strategies can enhance service user participation, the degree to which co-production is achievable in penal supervision is perhaps uncertain, and has received insufficient theoretical or empirical attention. To address the gap in knowledge, the article draws on the data generated from a study of compliance in Wales, United Kingdom, and employs the Bourdieusian concepts of habitus, field, and capital to argue that the convergence of two key factors undermines the viability of co-productive strategies in penal settings. One factor is the service users’ habitus of powerlessness which may breed passivity rather than active participation. The second also relates to the power dynamics that characterize penal supervision contexts. Within these contexts, practitioners are statutorily empowered to implement and enforce the requirements of community orders. In the current target-focused policy climate in England and Wales, practitioners may prioritize measurable compliance over forms of compliance that stem from service user participation and engagement perhaps because these are not readily quantifiable

Forward to the past: reinventing intelligence-led policing in Britain

Drawing on archival, secondary material and primary research, this paper examines 'Total Policing', the strategy recently adopted by London's Metropolitan Police. It situates that analysis within a critical examination of other innovative policing strategies previously employed in Britain. It argues that the prospects for Total Policing depend upon the resolution of long-standing problems such as: the inadequacy and inefficiency of local intelligence work; the paucity of evidence for the success of commanders' previous efforts to harness together the component parts of their forces in pursuit of a single mission; and, above all, a seeming inability to learn the lessons of the past. © 2013 © 2013 Taylor & Francis

Death and Display in the North Atlantic: The Bronze and Iron Age Human Remains from Cnip, Lewis, Outer Hebrides

YesThis paper revisits the series of disarticulated human remains discovered during the 1980s excavations of the Cnip wheelhouse complex in Lewis. Four fragments of human bone, including two worked cranial fragments, were originally dated to the 1st centuries BC/AD based on stratigraphic association. Osteoarchaeological reanalysis and AMS dating now provide a broader cultural context for these remains and indicate that at least one adult cranium was brought to the site more than a thousand years after the death of the individual to whom it had belonged

Exploring the cultural dimensions of environmental victimization

It has become increasingly clear in recent years that our understanding of ‘victimisation’ is informed by a whole range of societal and political factors which extend well beyond whatever particular form of words appears in any given directive, code or legislative instrument concerning crime, crime victims or criminal justice systems. In this paper, I will seek for the first time to apply recent developments in our understanding of so-called 'cultural victimology' to the issue of environmental harm and its impact on human and non-human animals. McCGarry and Waklate (2015) characterise cultural victimology as broadly comprising of two key aspects. These are the wider sharing and reflection of individual and collective victimisation experiences on the one hand and, on the other, the mapping of those experiences through the criminal justice process. In this discussion I will examine how environmental victimisation is viewed by and presented to society at large and will argue that such representations often fail, as a form of testimony, to adequately convey the traumas involved. Nor is this achieved through the application of present models of criminal, civil or administrative justice regimes in many jurisdictions. This lack of cultural acknowledgement of the harms vested on environmental victims, it is argued, afford us a clearer understand of the continued reticence amongst lawmakers, politicians and legal practitioners to adequately address the impacts of such victimisation through effective justice or regulatory mechanisms. This is unfortunate given that the often collective nature of environmental victimisation makes this particularly suited to a more cultural analysis and understanding. It is argued that various forms of environmental mediation processes might hold the key to this cultural reticence to accept environmental harm as a 'real' and pressing problem as compared to other criminal and civil justice concerns

Criminal redress in cases of environmental victimisation: a defence

In recent years growing concern has been voiced in the environmental justice literature regarding the ability of criminal justice mechanisms to adequately address environmental harms, especially when such harms are perpetrated by large corporations. Commentators argue that criminal justice processes are often ill-suited to the particular features of environmental cases, where the chain of causation between wrongful actions/omissions and environmentally harmful consequence can be very complex and extend over the course of many years. As an alternative, many such commentators now favour the adoption of more administrative resolutions when corporate bodies breach their environmental obligations (which may or may not amount to ‘crimes’). Others favour the use of civil sanction regimes, which is now the preferred approach of the UK Environment Agency. In this paper I will argue that the debate on how best to respond to environmental harm has so far neglected to factor in the perspective of the victims of those harms and, in particular, their need for redress. I will argue that by incorporating such a perspective, as opposed to focusing largely on questions of efficiency and cost-effectiveness, the criminal justice route still has much to recommended it, especially in relation to the provision of meaningful redress and/or compensation to the victims of environmental harm. Consequently, this paper will provide a victimological defence of the criminal justice process, and of criminal penalties, in their application to cases of environmental harms

Mead-halls of the Oiscingas: a new Kentish perspective on the Anglo-Saxon great hall complex phenomenon

Widely cited as a metaphor for the emergence of kingship in early medieval England, the great hall complex represents one of the most distinctive and evocative expressions of the Anglo-Saxon settlement record, yet interpretation of these sites remains underdeveloped and heavily weighted towards Yeavering. Inspired by the results of recent excavations at Lyminge, this paper undertakes a detailed comparative interrogation of three great hall complexes in Kent and exploits this new regional perspective to advance understanding of the agency and embodied meanings of these settlements as ‘theatres of power’. Explored through the thematic prisms of place, social memory and monumental hybridity, this examination leads to a new appreciation of the involvement of great hall sites in the genealogical strategies of 7th-century royal dynasties and a fresh perspective on how this remarkable yet short-lived monumental idiom was adapted to harness the symbolic capital of Romanitas

Environmental harm and environmental victims: scoping out a ‘green victimology'

In this paper I intend to discuss the adaptability of victimological study to the question of ‘environmental victimisation’. The impact on those affected by environment crime, or other environmentally damaging activities, is one that has received scarce attention in the mainstream victimological literature (see Williams, 1996). The role or position of such victims in criminal justice and/or other processes has likewise rarely been topic of academic debate. I have recently expanded upon various aspects of this subject and surrounding issues at greater length (Hall, 2013) but for the purposes of this article I wish to expand specifically on what a so-called ‘green victimology’ might look like, together with some of the particular questions and challenges it will face

Harnessing tissue-specific genetic variation to dissect putative causal pathways between body mass index and cardiometabolic phenotypes

Body mass index (BMI) is a complex disease risk factor known to be influenced by genes acting via both metabolic pathways and appetite regulation. In this study, we aimed to gain insight into the phenotypic consequences of BMI associated genetic variants which may be mediated by their expression in different tissues. First, we harnessed meta-analysed gene expression datasets derived from subcutaneous adipose (n=1257) and brain (n=1194) tissue to identify 86 and 140 loci respectively which provided evidence of genetic colocalization with BMI. These two sets of tissue-partitioned loci had differential effects with respect to waist-to-hip ratio, suggesting that the way they influence fat distribution and anthropometric traits may vary despite them having very similar average magnitudes of effect on BMI itself (adipose=0.0148 and brain=0.0149 per 1-SD change in BMI). For instance, BMI colocalized with TBX15 expression in adipose tissue only, which likely influences BMI due to its role in skeletal development, whereas genes which colocalized using brain tissue may be more likely to influence BMI due to their role in energy balance (e.g NEGR1). Leveraging these tissue-partitioned variant sets using a multivariable Mendelian randomization framework provided strong evidence that the brain tissue derived variants are predominantly responsible for driving the genetically predicted effects of BMI on cardiovascular disease endpoints (e.g. coronary artery disease: OR:1.05, 95% CI:1.04-1.07, P=4.67x10-14). In contrast, our analyses suggested that the adipose tissue variants may predominantly be responsible for the underlying relationship between BMI and measures of cardiac function, such as left ventricular stroke volume (Beta: 0.21, 95% CI: 0.09-0.32, P=6.43x10-4)