Carolyn McKay’s research while affiliated with The University of Sydney and other places

Since the COVID-19 pandemic forced prisons into extended lockdowns, people-in-prison have been increasingly reliant on remote access technologies such as videoconferencing to interact with the outside world from their carceral context. During the pandemic, both corrective services and criminal courts found that these communication technologies could adequately facilitate court appearances, legal conferencing, health services and visitations. Now, despite the lessening panic regarding COVID-19, there are suggestions that authorities are keen to continue, if not increase, the usage of videolinks meaning that people-in-prison will experience decreasing human contact. The argument is that COVID-19 “successes” are being used as an excuse to cement remote hearings and visits. This points to a future of absolute confinement uninterrupted by “inconvenient” physical court attendance or human visitors. This article will focus on the “digital vulnerability” of people-in-prison, that is, the intersection between the vulnerabilities of incarcerated people with the use of remote communication technologies such as videoconferencing or videolinks, and the digital inequalities that may be provoked or solved. The article will draw on qualitative research – fieldwork interviews with judicial officers, lawyers and associated criminal justice professionals – that reveal critical perspectives on the impacts of digital transformation on vulnerable people-in-prison. For instance, when asked about the vulnerabilities of people-in-prison, one defence lawyer (DL1) expressed the view that “no one cares about defendants” or their vulnerabilities, nor their abilities to engage with videolinks, comprehend or play any role in their own remote legal matters. We analyse our source materials through a framework of vulnerability theory and the developing concept of digital vulnerability. In this way, we seek to offer new knowledge regarding prison digital transformation, specifically the relationship between digital technologies in correctional environments and the vulnerable incarcerated population.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced criminal courts to suspend jury trials, adjourn hearings and ‘pivot’ to remote procedures. Integral to this sudden change has been an array of digital communication technologies: audio and audio-visual links as well as third-party proprietary platforms. COVID-19 outbreaks continue to impact criminal courts with intermittent lockdowns necessitating the ongoing use of digital technologies to keep the wheels of justice turning. The era of digital criminal justice has, undoubtedly, begun. The situation has prompted judicial commentary on the ‘place’ or ‘space’ of the remote, dispersed or virtual courtroom. For legislative purposes, does a ‘courtroom’ include a network of diverse remote access technologies? This chapter adopts Castell’s (2010) network approach to draw a distinction between ‘place’ and ‘space’ and question whether virtual courtrooms are perhaps a ‘space’, not a ‘place’.KeywordsVirtual courtroomsAudio-visual linksCOVID-19Digital criminal justice

Prisons are on the cusp of a technological transformation as twenty-first-century digital connectivity in ‘free’ society permeates prison design and offender management. This article will begin with an overview of the digital technologies in ‘smart’ prisons. Two limbs are emerging: technologies that are embedded into the infrastructure of prisons to benefit authorities through heightened security, and technologies that may benefit prisoners by providing them with positive opportunities to access justice, maintain family relationships and engage in programs aimed at optimising their post-release circumstances and rehabilitation. However, recent case law paints a picture of prison life devoid of human contact during the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing isolation and heightened anxiety. Through the lens of emergent conceptions of digital criminology, this article will analyse Australian case law to examine whether the automated, smart or digital prison offers a utopian vision of safe detention and rehabilitation or a dehumanised and punitive dystopia.

Risk assessments are conducted at a number of decision points in criminal procedure including in bail, sentencing and parole as well as in determining extended supervision and continuing detention orders of high-risk offenders. Such risk assessments have traditionally been the function of the human discretion and intuition of judicial officers, based on clinical assessments, framed by legislation and common-law principles, and encapsulating the concept of individualised justice. Yet, the progressive technologisation of criminal procedure is witnessing the incursion of statistical, data-driven evaluations of risk. Human judicial evaluative functions are increasingly complemented by a range of actuarial, algorithmic, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools that purport to provide accurate predictive capabilities and objective, consistent risk assessments. But ethical concerns have been raised globally regarding algorithms as proprietary products with in-built statistical bias as well as the diminution of judicial human evaluation in favour of the machine. This article focuses on risk assessment and what happens when decision-making is delegated to a predictive tool. Specifically, this article scrutinises the inscrutable proprietary nature of such risk tools and how that may render the calculation of the risk score opaque and unknowable to both the offender and the court.

Police organisations across much of the Western world have eagerly embraced body-worn video camera technology, seen as a way to enhance public trust in police, provide transparency in policing activity, reduce conflict between police and citizens and provide a police perspective of incidents and events. Indeed, the cameras have become an everyday piece of police ‘kit’. Despite the growing ubiquity of the body-worn video camera, understandings of the nature and value of the audiovisual footage produced by police remain inchoate. Given body-worn video camera’s promise of veracity, this article is interested in the aesthetics of the camera images and the socio-cultural construction of the cameras as tellers of truth. We treat body-worn video cameras as image-making devices linked to techniques and technologies of power, which construct and frame police encounters in specific ways, and we suggest that the aesthetics and point-of-view nature of the image contribute greatly to the truth-value that the images acquire. This article begins by providing an historical context for the use of cameras and images in policing. We then introduce our framework of visual criminology and present theories of point-of-view as a construct in the diverse areas of gaming, pornography and the visual arts, as well as in television and cinema. The article deploys the cinematic use of point-of-view to unpack the affective impact and aesthetic of the police body-worn video camera footage. We suggest that viewers of the footage are placed in the position of the corporeally absent police officer whose experience has been recorded by a viewfinderless device. This generates a vacillating interplay between subjectivity and objectivity, given that the alleged faithful recording of the event by the body-worn video camera presents a singular perspective and incomplete document that may not necessarily capture the full context of the law enforcement event.