School of Social and Political Science

Description

“Digital justice” is already an established phase in criminal justice discourse in Scotland, and elsewhere. It denotes the application of “digital” (read “information and communication”) technologies within and between criminal justice agencies, most notably the police but now including prosecution services, courts, in the 21st century, prisons and probation services. It isn’t an isolated development – it needs to be seen in the context of more general “political” moves towards the creation of “digital public services” and, more abstractly, “digital governance”. The official/public rationale of all this is invariably cost-efficiency, and beyond that the implication is that the social goals traditionally associated with public service and criminal justice will be more effectively achieved. But, in everyday life, and especially especially among its more ardent champions, the term “digital” has been invested with a political, economic and cultural cachet that presents it as a good and desirable thing in its own right – the keystone of modern, convivial living - almost irrespective of its utilitarian merits.

One aspect of the discourse on “digital justice” – often shied away from by the people who are implementing it - has been its intrinsic open endedness. The digitisation of administrative processes has – or had, until recently - no obvious endpoint: there would always be a further upgrade available, and then an upgrade beyond that (resources permitting, of course). In the last five years Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being widely acknowledged as the inevitable, necessary and desirable endpoint of digitalisation, although that raises its own questions about the consequences – and endpoint – of its adoption for traditional forms of public service and criminal justice. It is an intriguing sign of the times that a Council of Europe committee began work last year on the implications of using AI in prisons and probation services, different committees having earlier addressed policing and sentencing. Whilst we are moving towards the use of AI in criminal justice – the increased use of it, in fact, for some forms of it are already operational - the scale and pace of its adoption in different jurisdictions remains uncertain and contestable, and there is room for ethical and political argument about how the process might be shaped, which I will explore in this lecture.

Mike Nellis is Emeritus Professor of Criminal and Community Justice in the Law School, University of Strathclyde. Formerly a social worker with young offenders in London, he has a PhD from the Institute of Criminology in Cambridge, and was long involved in the training of probation officers at the University of Birmingham. He has written widely on the fortunes of the probation service, alternatives to imprisonment and particularly the electronic monitoring (EM) of offenders. He was actively involved between 2005-14 in the organisation of the CEP EM conferences, and between 2011 and 2013 acted as an expert adviser to a Council of Europe committee which drew up an ethical recommendation on EM. He co-edited ‘Electronically Monitored Punishment: International and Critical Perspectives’, with Belgian colleagues Kristel Beyens and Dan Kaminski in 2103, and served on the Scottish Government's EM Working Party 2014-16 . He is the international editor of the Journal of Offender Monitoring. He teaches a Master’s degree course on "surveillance, technology and crime control" at Strathclyde.