UCL CLP: The Medical Model in Criminal Justice - Prof. Ian Loader

CURRENT LEGAL PROBLEMS LECTURE SERIES 2009-10:

Is it NICE?
The Appeal and Limits of the Medical Model in Criminal Justice
Professor Ian Loader, University of Oxford

Chaired by
The Rt Hon Lord Justice Moses

on 15 October 2009, from 6-7pm

Venue:
UCL Law Faculty
Bentham House, Endsleigh Gardens
London WC1H 0EG

This event is sponsored by

About this lecture
Against a backdrop of concerns about the 'politicization' of criminal justice, several proposals have recently been made for the establishment of a criminal justice equivalent to the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE). Such as body would disseminate guidance on best practice in criminal justice and help fund programmes in the light of research demonstrating what works and doesn't work to reduce crime. This, the argument runs, would produce criminal justice policy and practice that is more evidence-based and less driven by political ideology and calculation. In this lecture, Professor Loader examines the appeal of this proposal to extend a medical model of decision-making to the justice arena and consider what its emergence tells about the present relations between politics and criminal justice. He then consider the limits of such efforts to insulate criminal justice from political and popular pressure and render it more 'evidence-based'. In so doing, he uses the case of NICE as a window though which to examine how we might best understand the interplay between expertise/public opinion, reason/emotion and knowledge/politics in the making of criminal justice policy.

About the speaker:
Ian Loader is Professor of Criminology, Fellow of All Souls College, Director of the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford.

Ian’s work over recent years has been situated in two related fields of enquiry: (i) contemporary transformations in policing and security and (ii) cultural sensibilities towards crime, order and justice – areas in which he published four books and numerous articles in journals and edited collections. His work has been concerned to examine the place that crime and policing occupy in lived social relations, and the contemporary possibilities of producing order and security in ways that sustain considerations of justice and democracy. In so doing, he displays a commitment to producing criminological work that operates at the intersection between social and political theory, empirical enquiry and contemporary dilemmas in public policy.

Profesosr Loader arrived at Oxford in 2005 from Keele University, where he had worked since 1992 in the Department of Criminology. Prior to that (from 1990-92) he was Lecturer in Criminology and Jurisprudence at the University of Edinburgh.