1. Criminal Justice Stream 2

2. What we’re going to cover  Technical and framing aspects of criminal justice debates  Politics and discrimination  Philosophy of criminal justice

3. Quickly  Rehabilitation  Retribution  Safety  Deterrence

4. Technical Points

5. Place Setting  At university debates aren’t generally “place set” to Australia or anywhere  This is problematic, because even generally similar countries like the UK and Norway have wildly different criminal justice systems

6. Solving Place Setting  Build your own policy set that you support (on both sides), coopt Aff model  Why?  Avoid confusion  Avoid defending terrible things

7. Politics and Discrimination

8. Why are Politics Relevant?  What policies is it likely that governments will end up implementing?  How might future policies change in the future as a result of the model?  Criminals are really unpopular  They are invisible  People hate them  They are black

9. Racism in the Criminal Justice System  The prison system has obliterated entire racial communities In the developed world, particularly African Americans and Australian Aboriginals  Statistical analysis indicates that basically every agent in the criminal justice system disproportionately targets racial minorities  Police  Judges  Juries  Prison systems  Parole boards

10. Why should we care?  Inequality is intrinsically unjust  It destroys communities when vast numbers of men are removed from them  It perpetuates the cycles of crime that lead to breakdown in those communities

11. What can we do about it in debates?  Make the justice system more objective?  Introduce affirmative action requirements?  Make the justice system more lenient?

12. Philosophy and Criminal Justice

13. Huh?  A strong case is rigorous about exactly what the normative considerations are  The most important distinction is between instrumental and non-instrumental concerns  (Aka “utilitarian”, “consequentialist”)

14. In what ways might the criminal justice system be non-instrumental?  “Retributive Justice”  Caveats: Closure for victims, Deterrence, vigilantism  Prioritising Victims over Perpetrators  Equality

15. Utilitarian Justice  Getting rid of all the previously discussed concerns would require a quite radical overhaul of criminal justice  It would probably be a lot more lax (though you might dispute this)

16. How this plays out in debates  The validity of utilitarianism is up for extensive debate  Utilitarianism produces outcomes that seem really unjust  Maybe our moral intuitions aren’t really that rational  Reflect on these ideas and be conscious of them in debates and you will add clarity to your cases