Principal speaker
Chris Bond and Samantha Jeffries
Despite shifts in Western liberal democracies towards stronger criminal justice responses to domestic violence, the issue of sentencing disparity between domestic and non-domestic violence offending cases remains largely neglected. Further, the sentencing of domestic violence offenders in certain sub-groups (such as Indigenous defendants) has frequently drawn criticism. Using a population of cases sentenced in the New South Wales (Australia) lower courts between January 2009 and June 2012, we report multivariate analyses of the use of imprisonment sentences for domestic violence and non-domestic violence offences.
Results show that when sentenced under statistically similar circumstances, domestic violence offenders are less likely than those convicted of crimes outside of domestic contexts to be sentenced to prison. We also find that leniency in the use of imprisonment applies to non-Indigenous domestic violence cases. For Indigenous cases, those convicted of domestic violence are equally likely to be sentenced to prison as those convicted of violent crimes outsides intimate and familial contexts. Possible explanations for this pattern of findings are explored.
Drs Christine Bond and Samantha Jeffries are both Senior Lecturers in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University. Together, they have a well-established research program in judicial decision-making, as well as interests in the impact of ethnicity, Indigeneity and gender on court processing of criminal offenders.
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RSVP on or before Wednesday 18 June 2014 , by email n.lukacs@griffith.edu.au , or by phone 3735 5978