About the Centre

Aims & Objectives

The Centre's research is aimed at academic, policy and practitioner audiences. Valuable links have been established with 'external' institutions at home and abroad. ICCCR is formally partnered with the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, based in London. International networks have been established with the EPSRC funded International Centre for Advanced Research in Identification Science.

Between 2006 and 2009 the ICCCR was part of the CRIMPREV consortium of 31 universities and research institutes across the EU working on a three-year project aimed at producing comparative knowledge about perceptions of crime and deviance and crime prevention strategies. The project was funded by the EU under FP 6. The Open University hosted the conference that concluded the project in the summer of 2009.

The Centre hosts the academic journal Youth Justice: An International Journal (in partnership with University of Liverpool), Members sit on the editorial boards of the British Journal of Criminology, and Criminal Justice Matters.

The Centre's key areas of expertise lie in the broad fields of:

Policing

• Contemporary policing and social divisions
• Forensic psychology, police surveillance, suspect identification, and witness memory and evidence

Justice, rights and regulation

• Youth justice policy and reform
• Corporate and environmental regulation
• Restorative justice initiatives

Prisons and penology

• The sociology of imprisonment
• Social support in prisons

Coherence between these subject areas is maintained through a shared interest in comparative methodologies (historical and/or cross-cultural) and in a concern for processes of governance and regulation. A key concern of the Centre is to analyse how the meaning of crime, policing and criminal justice is embedded within changing local and international, historical and cultural contexts.

Centre members have strong research interests in contemporary and emerging forms of governance and strategies of policing and regulation. This includes the role of the criminal law in identifying and investigating 'social harms', the shifting boundaries between public and private agencies, the submersion of social policy matters into law and order agendas, the role of the media in constructing public notions of crime and punishment and changing forms of institutional regulation and accountability.

Last updated: 18 April 2013