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Australia’s incarceration rates are the highest they have been in a century. Bail and remand contribute much to this trend, and yet the reasons why police refuse bail to vulnerable people are currently unclear. What is clear, though, is that a disproportionate number of vulnerable people are being refused bail, resulting in periods of remand incarceration which end up either longer than the prison sentence given by a magistrate, or undue if the alleged offender is found not guilty. This tendency is particularly observable for the most vulnerable: Aboriginal people, children, people with a mental health condition, the homeless, and women. The authors investigated how magistrates grant or refuse bail as part of the court process, then looked at two tipping points bracketing the bail continuum: 1) policing interactions leading to court appearance, and 2) the impact of bail refusal on public health and community safety and well-being in general. In the present article, they examined how authorized police officers consider refusing or granting bail. This new project aims to investigate the police bail decision-making process and generate new knowledge about the impact of bail refusal on vulnerable people. Through an iterative process with national practitioners and international experts, the authors aimed to identify factors to consider when bail involves vulnerable people. Expected outcomes included the development of mechanisms to benefit the full remit of criminal justice, reduce costs, and improve fairness, accountability, and procedural justice.

Since bail legislation was enacted in the 1970s, Australia has experienced a continual increase in the number of prisoners on remand. Amendments to bail legislation and police discretion have been shown to contribute to this increase. Further, an accused’s vulnerability affects whether they are granted or denied bail, with vulnerable people being more likely to be denied bail. Vulnerability in the criminal justice system refers to factors such as race, age, sex and socioeconomic status. Many vulnerable people have multiple intersecting vulnerabilities, which further compounds their contact with the justice system. This study employed a qualitative content analysis of bail legislation for the Australian states of New South Wales (NSW), Tasmania, and Victoria, along with key correlating second reading speeches. The aim was to better understand the way in which bail decision-makers, such as police, consider vulnerability when making decisions about bail, in particular, if and how they are legislated to consider factors relating to vulnerability. The research found that only police in NSW and Victoria were required to consider an accused’s vulnerability explicitly under the law. Although legislation may cater for varying vulnerabilities, intersecting vulnerabilities are not considered.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of location on access to justice for vulnerable defendants seeking bail. Design/methodology/approach Qualitative interviews were conducted with legal practitioners from rural, suburban and urban areas as part of a larger study into bail support services in Victoria, Australia. Findings Interview participants identified a dearth of bail support resources in rural, regional and remote (RRR) areas compared to their urban counterparts. This dearth impacted negatively on some defendants’ outcomes in the justice system, particularly for young people and those experiencing homelessness. Practical implications This study helps in improving policy through greater understanding of issues with RRR service provision; adds to knowledge for service providers on access to justice; highlights specific areas of concern for vulnerable populations; and provides a more nuanced understanding of location-based issues. Originality/value This research found that resourcing issues cannot be understood simply through an RRR/urban binary and that more complex factors impacting access to justice and access to services for vulnerable people should be incorporated into future analysis and policy development. This more nuanced understanding is useful across national and international contexts when developing policies to improve bail support service provision.

This study considers and evaluates the implementation of two strategies to improve student engagement with assessment – the provision of exemplars in conjunction with rubrics, and student co-constr...

In this paper we seek to review the rapid rise in remand in custody rates in Australia. In particular, and in response, we ask and discuss three specific questions: 1. To what extent do defendants applying for bail have vulnerabilities? 2. To what extent can risk analysis tools that seek to predict breach of bail terms be relied upon? 3. To what extent can the emerging pre-trial services programs in Australia reduce remand in custody populations?

The current study examines the factors underlying pathways from out-of-home care into the criminal justice system. Using a multi-method approach—specifically, court observations, file reviews and qualitative interviews—we found evidence of how histories of trauma and situational factors relating to the care environment interact to increase criminalisation. While many policy initiatives have been developed to address this criminalisation, in all parts of our study we found little evidence these are having an impact on practice in relation to care-experienced children. Some innovations we observed in our United Kingdom case study offer potential solutions to address this serious and ongoing problem.

This book arises from a research project funded in Australia by the Criminology Research Council. The topic, bail reform, has attracted attention from criminologists and law reformers over many years. In the USA, a reform movement has argued that risk analysis and pre-trial services should replace the bail bond system (the state of California may introduce this system in 2020). In the United Kingdom, Europe and Australia, there have been concerns about tough bail laws that have contributed to a rise in imprisonment rates. The approach in this book is distinctive. The inter-disciplinary authors include criminologists, an academic lawyer and a forensic psychologist together with qualitative researchers with backgrounds in sociology and anthropology. The book advances a policy argument through presenting descriptive statistics, interviews with practitioners and detailed accounts of bail applications and their outcomes. There is discussion of methodological issues throughout the book, including the challenges of obtaining data from the courts.

Vulnerability is a widely used but contentious concept used by welfare practitioners to understand disadvantaged groups. The chapter examines responses in criminal courts to “vulnerable” defendants at the pretrial stage drawing on quantitative and qualitative data obtained from observing 150 bail applications. The quantitative data indicates that in half of the applications a vulnerability was either relevant to the decision or mentioned by a practitioner. Through looking at transcripts from hearings, the chapter teases out some of the complexities in responses to both individual vulnerabilities (such as having a drug problem) and structural inequalities such as youth, indigeneity and poverty.

This chapter reviews the quantitative and qualitative methods employed in this study. In employing quantitative methods, the study was limited in contrast to many US studies. It was not able to track bail outcomes: whether the defendants attended the next court date or were charged with new offences while on bail. We did, however, obtain valuable findings from observing 150 applications. In employing qualitative methods, there were also difficulties: it is often hard to understand what happens in court without seeing documents available to practitioners. Nevertheless, a combination of observation and interviewing made it possible to understand how bail decisions are made. This thoughtful discussion will interest those pursuing mixed methods research in criminal courts.

The conclusion summarizes the evidence supplied from this case study in Australia and reviews the concepts of risk and vulnerability in relation to bail. Although those with progressive views support a return to the presumption of innocence, bail laws will remain tough, especially when disturbing offences (including a mass killing) are committed by defendants granted bail. The alternative used in some US states of replacing judicial officers by algorithms would not be acceptable in most countries. However, we would recommend greater use of bail information and support schemes, and actuarial guides. Pretrial services are offered in the state of Victoria to 14% of defendants, and this program is expanding. There are practical ways to challenge business as usual and to give magistrates more options. The growth of pretrial programs may eventually lead to a welfare-oriented court in which fewer offenders are imprisoned.

Many progressive reforms and initiatives are happening in criminal courts at a time when the imprisonment rate is rising. This chapter locates these developments as part of debates that started in the eighteenth century on whether the criminal justice system should be concerned with punishing rational offenders or assisting those not responsible for their actions. Restorative justice involves defendants being diverted to conferences in which they apologize to victims. Therapeutic jurisprudence gives judicial officers a healing role in conducting legal proceedings. A third movement, pretrial services, is less well known but has even greater potential to transform the criminal justice system. This chapter provides a critical overview, considering costs and benefits.

This chapter will consider the differences between jurisdictions and how they are changing. There has been major legislative change in New South Wales, and recently major change in Victoria, designed to make it more difficult to obtain basil. Although we found that judicial officers differed in how they interpreted the legislation, it seems likely that most refuse more applications. There were also contradictory policies. In New South Wales, the Attorney General’s Office funded a pilot scheme of Bail Assistance Officers (a bail information scheme) with the aim of encouraging magistrates to grant bail. In Victoria, legislation following the Gargasoulas case was extremely tough, yet the government continued to invest in pretrial services. The political processes are complex and not fully addressed in critical literatures.

This article examines the New South Wales Joint Protocol to Reduce the Contact of Young People in Residential OOHC with the Criminal Justice System (2016 ) from the perspective of residential out-of-home-care providers, police, lawyers and departmental staff involved in the child welfare and criminal justice systems in New South Wales.

Evidence from both Australian and international jurisdictions show that children in residential care are over-represented in the criminal justice system. In the current study, we interviewed 46 professionals who had contact with young people in residential care settings in New South Wales, Australia. Our sample included police officers, residential care service providers, legal aid lawyers and juvenile justice workers, about their perceptions of the link between residential care and contact with the criminal justice system. Factors identified by the participants included the care environment itself, use of police as a behavioural management tool, deficient staff training and inadequate policies and funding to address the over-representation. These factors, combined with the legacy of Australia’s colonial past, were a particularly potent source of criminalisation for Aboriginal children in care.

This article presents qualitative data from interviews with 46 welfare and justice professionals to examine the criminalisation of children who go missing within the Out‐Of‐Home‐Care (OOHC) residential environment. Participants had specific experience with children living in residential facilities, either through the direct provision of care services, the development of OOHC policy initiatives or through their role as law enforcement, legal or justice personnel. The research found that agency practices, which were designed to protect children, actually serve to conflate going missing with criminality, accelerating children's involvement in the justice system and ultimately endangering children's safety.

On 20 January 2017 a man drove his car into a crowded pedestrian mall in Bourke St, Melbourne, Victoria, killing six people and injuring dozens more. The alleged perpetrator had been granted bail b...