Research Projects
- DNA Technology and Criminology
- The Historical Sociology of Suicide in Quebec from 1800 to 2000
- The Philosophy of Law and of the State
- Penology. Determining Sanctions in Penality, the Hypothesis of a Vindicatory Sociality in Everyday Life
- Socio-Political Analysis of Intervention in a Correctional Setting
- Are Innovations in Criminal Law Worth the Effort?
- Theatre and Dance in Prison
- Reflexive Criminology
- Escorts and their Clients: Negotiating Sexuality and Intimacy
- Political Violence and Armed Conflict
- Miscarriages of Justice
- The Political Economy of Human Security
- Criminalized Women
- Children's and Women's Empowerment through Human Rights Education in Latin America
- Effectiveness of Criminal Justice Responses to Intimate Partner Violence
- Crime Prevention
DNA Technology and Criminilogy
Influenced by the Actor-Network Theory, Dominique Robert and Martin Dufresne attempt to follow DNA identification technology as it is applied in the criminal justice system as well as analyse how this technology transforms the discipline of Criminology.
The Historical Sociology of Suicide in Quebec from 1800 to 2000
Patrice Corriveau and André Cellard are currently conducting a study entitled Sociologie historique du suicide au Québec de 1800 à 2000 (historical sociology of suicide in Quebec from 1800 to 2000). For this study, they analyze the changes in society’s reaction to suicide, which is a spectacular example of the social deconstruction of a crime. In 17th and 18th century New France, suicide was considered one of the most heinous crimes anyone could commit. The cadaver of a person suspected of “having homicided themselves” would be taken to court. If found guilty, the deceased would then be dragged face down behind a cart, hung by their feet in the public square and thrown into the dump. Society’s reaction to this form of “deviance” would decrease in intensity in the 19th and 20th centuries until the “crime” of attempted suicide (punishable by imprisonment) was struck from the Criminal Code of Canada in 1972. Long considered an individual weakness, suicide came to be seen as a “societal problem”. In 2006, 42% of Quebec’s population considered suicide as “something acceptable” (Association québécoise de la prévention du suicide, September 2006). The social history of this deconstruction is what the authors want to analyze through the commentaries of the main players: the suicide victims themselves and those close to them.
The Philosophy of Law and of the State
Line Beauchesne has a doctorate in political science with a specialization in the philosophy of law and of the state, and is a full professor in the Department of Criminology of the University of Ottawa and an associate professor at the Université de Sherbrooke. She is also the author of several briefs, articles and books on the issue of drugs. Her achievements include a guide for parents on preventing drug abuse entitled Drogues : mythes et dépendance. En parler avec nos enfants (2005), three books on drug policies and health promotion: Les drogues : légalisation et promotion de la santé (2006), Les drogues : les coûts cachés de la prohibition (©2003, reprinted and updated in 2006), La légalisation des drogues… pour mieux en prévenir les abus (©1991, reprinted in 1999), and a book she co-wrote with Éric Giguère, entitled Les sports et la drogue (l994). In addition, Ms. Beauchesne has been teaching about police forces for 25 years, and has written a book about women and the police force, Être policière : une profession masculine (2001), and another book in collaboration with Yves Dubé, Désarmer la police? : un débat qui n'a pas eu lieu (1993). Although currently on sabbatical, Ms. Beauchesne is working on a new piece, provisionally entitled Pour en finir avec la police communautaire. She is a founding member of the Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy (www.cfdp.ca), and a former member of the board of directors of CACTUS Montréal and of AITQ (Association des intervenants en toxicomanies du Québec). She is also involved in several international research groups on drugs.
Penology. Determining Sanctions in Penality, the Hypothesis of a Vindicatory Sociality in Everyday Life
Francoise Vanhamme is particularly interested in the field of penology, that is to say penalties, its uses, functions, and the arguments in support of it. Most of her research is in the determination of penalties in a narrow sense (court rulings) and in a larger and macro social sense: the context-specific definition of punishable actions, the legal justification for theoretical and practical punishment, the functions of penalties, the history of reforms in sentencing in the west, and so on. However, in order to better understand the social logic surrounding criminal penalties, part of her research—conducted in collaboration with V. Strimelle—currently covers the reaction and sanction modes and systems in community and day-to-day life, which inevitably leads to the exploration and systematization of things that raise problems for individuals and social groups. This study is guided by the hypothesis of a vindicatory sociality.
Socio-Political Analysis of Intervention in a Correctional Setting
Bastien Quirion: my interests essentially focus on the socio-political analysis of social and clinical intervention strategies for individuals who are subject to judicial control. Although any therapeutic activity is always defined in relation to a normative horizon and involves a certain form of authority, the matter of the political issues related to intervention comes up in a very specific way in the restrictive context of the penal and correctional world. Our field of research covers the changes that have occurred over the last decades in the area of intervention with correctional clients. More specifically, we analyze certain contemporary trends, such as the growing popularity of cognitive programs, the multiplication of risk assessment tools and the movement towards greater accountability by inmates for their own management. We analyze these changes from a critical perspective, in an attempt to define the related ethical and policy issues.
Are Innovations in Criminal Law Worth the Effort?
Jean-François Cauchie has been an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa since January 2005. He has a Master’s and a Doctorate in Criminology, and is a sociologist by training (Bachelor’s degree with specialization and Master’s).
In view of at least two hundred years of modern criminal law’s warrior mentality, Professor Cauchie posits whether new criminal sanctions or sanctions adapted to current trends (mediation, respite, electronic bracelets, community work) raise issues about some of the fundamental principles of modern criminal law when these sanctions acquire a most important penal role. Could these bridge the passage from cruelty to refinement? Or would they merely symbolize a finer form of cruelty? In modern times, sentencing often rhymes with exclusion and suffering, punishment and stigmas. But behind these new sanctions hovers a broader debate, in this case symbolized by three questions: is it possible to penalize without incarcerating? Is it possible to sanction without punishing? Is it possible to denounce/report without sanctioning?
Theatre and Dance in Prison
A graduate of Cambridge University in England, Sylvie Frigon ventures an original take on the universe of women’s prisons. Through fiction, theatre and dance, Sylvie Frigon, a full professor of the department of criminology, seeks to better define the logic, process and impact of incarceration. Écorchées (2006), her first novel, provides a rather intimate account of the story and experience of two women in prison. Écorchées has been adapted for professional theatre, and for the last two years a number of criminology and drama students have performed it in prisons as part of one of her courses. Together with Claire Jenny, choreographer and director of the Paris contemporary dance company Point Virgule, Sylvie Frigon will soon publish a book about dancing in prison. She is currently preparing a book for children on prison.
Photo: Résilience, choreography by Claire Jenny (Prison de Fresnes, France).
Reflexive Criminology
Jon Frauley is currently writing a book for Palgrave Macmillan (New York) called Criminology, Deviance and the Silver Screen: the Fictional Reality and the Criminological Imagination. The book situates criminological theory within the broader tradition of social theory and explores and explicates existing criminological theory and the practice of theorizing. It argues for the pedagogical usefulness of 'fictional reality', elaborated as an alternative to the dominant ‘history of ideas’ approach to theory, and illustrates how this can help promote within criminology a circumspect practice of constructing and operating concepts. A second project, tentatively entitled Higher Education and the Regulation of Economic Insecurity, utilizes critical realist meta-theory and the work of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu to describe and explain the intersection of higher education and economic security and how this ties into crime control. In other words, it views higher education criminologically, situating it within the realm of crime control; the project is especially concerned with issues of governance, policy formulation, and institutional transformation as they relate to the regulation of subject formation and academic labour.
Escorts and their Clients: Negotiating Sexuality and Intimacy
Building on their previous studies into various sectors of the sex industry (in-call, street-based, erotic dance) Colette Parent and Chris Bruckert are in the process of completing an SSHRC- funded study of escorts and their clients. For this study, the two authors conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with 20 male, 20 female and 5 transgendered workers. They also conducted an additional 20 interviews with the clients of male and female sex workers. This highly innovative project breaks new ground in the field. Starting from a labour perspective, the researchers are extending the analysis to integrate complex questions around the experience of, and negotiation of, sexuality and intimacy.
Political Violence and Armed Conflict
Maritza Felices is interested in researching political violence and armed conflicts from the point of view of the civilian players directly involved in the phenomenon. After interviewing female “terrorists” involved in the Peruvian and Irish conflicts, and French mercenaries, she is currently developing a project on the career of police and military personnel in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Analyzing interviews with these and other civilian players (private military forces, social movement activists, war journalists, etc.) through a multi angled and multi level theoretical approach allows a better understanding of the dynamics involved when these “problematic situations” occur. Concepts such as career, identity and stigma shed useful insight into the factors that cause a person to take part in a conflict: institutions, citizenship and gender (masculinities and femininities) contribute to an understanding of the civilian players’ motivations for and experiences of their involvement, while the notion of state, sovereignty and social contract are key to obtaining a more complete picture of the underlying issues at stake when civilian players are involved in instances of political violence and armed conflict.
Miscarriages of Justice
Kathryn M. Campbell has been researching the nature and extent of wrongful conviction in Canada for the past seven years. Her research has examined how the wrongly convicted cope with imprisonment, Canadian policy responses to this problem and the impact of medical errors in pediatric forensic pathology on convictions. Her current research covers how the courts treat different types of evidence, particularly confessions and expert evidence, and how this may contribute to instances of miscarriage of justice. Kathryn Campbell is also involved in a large international study funded by the International Development Research Centre that is examining how social capital may mitigate against youth involvement in gangs; the three research sites of the study encompass Ottawa-Carleton, Canada, Managua, Nicaragua and San Salvador, El Salvador. Finally, after completing an SSHRC-funded study into family violence in a northern Aboriginal community, Kathryn continues to be interested in Aboriginal justice initiatives.
The Political Economy of Human Security
Michael Kempa is generally interested in the political economy of human security: the ways in which we have defined and set up institutional arrangements for achieving the "well-being of the population’’. Three important empirical points of departure on these themes are: (1) an investigation into how state policing agencies can best partner with market regulatory agencies and responsible corporate citizens to reduce white collar crime and enhance market integrity (in collaboration with the Bank of Canada and the RCMP); (2) an examination of competing programs for regulating the private security industry in Canadian provinces and the state governments of South Africa; (3) an evaluation of the objectives and tools for measuring success in Canadian support of international policing reform initiatives (in collaboration with the RCMP), using the case of Haiti/Dominican Republic as a point of departure.
Criminalized Women
Professor Jennifer Kilty’s primary area of research interest is criminalized women – their experiences of incarceration and reintegration, their adoption of self-harming behaviours, and their construction as ‘violent’, ‘dangerous’ and/or ‘risky’. Using identity and citizenship theories, Professor Kilty examines how different health and mental health statuses come to affect the construction, maintenance, and negotiation of identity in prison and post incarceration. Much of this work is based on discussions of rights and ethics of care, and is framed by a prison abolitionist standpoint.
Professor Kilty is currently conducting a small-scale study of volunteer motivations for working with Circles of Support and Accountability (COSA), a community-based support program for warrant expired sexual offenders, with Visiting Fellow Dr. Stacey Hannem. She is also working on a national community-based research project led by Dr. Colleen Anne Dell at the University of Saskatchewan, in which they are investigating the role of stigma and identity in the healing journey for Aboriginal women attending culturally specific substance use treatment.
Children’s and Women’s Empowerment through Human Rights Education in Latin America
Christine Gervais’ research explores how Latin American children and women understand, engage in and advocate for human rights. It traces the participants’ journeys from their moments of discovery, through the discernment process and towards instances of dissidence. By examining the various strategies that children and women have employed to better cope with human rights violations, the study sheds light on women’s and children’s experiences of agency, resistance, resilience and resourcefulness. The project also documents women’s and girls’ conceptions and articulations of human rights, [in]justice, [in]equality and solidarity. Current project locations include Bolivia, Honduras and Nicaragua
Effectiveness of Criminal Justice Responses to Intimate Partner Violence
In recent years, the criminal justice system has adopted a more pro-active and interventionist response to intimate partner violence. Pro-charging and pro-prosecution policies are widespread and many provinces and territories in Canada have implemented specialized domestic violence courts to respond to these cases. While some studies have examined the functioning of these courts, little is known about the effectiveness of the criminal justice response from the victim’s perspective. The important question is: Does this aggressive response improve the safety of women and their children, and what are the effective elements? As part of the SSHRC-funded Canadian Observatory on the Justice Response to Intimate Partner Violence, Holly Johnson is involved in developing data collection instruments to capture information about the experiences of victims of intimate partner violence who report to the police. These instruments will be developed in consultation with local organizations combating violence against women and in collaboration with researchers at several universities, including Simon Fraser, Guelph, Montréal and New Brunswick, as well as researchers in Australia and the United Kingdom.
Crime Prevention
Harnessing knowledge to prevent crime is the goal of the Institute for Prevention of Crime (IPC) at the University of Ottawa. It works with provinces and municipalities in Canada and abroad (see www.prevention-crime.ca), including one province that is investing $500 million influenced by the work of the IPC. The current director of the Institute is Ross Hastings. Holly Johnson and Irvin Waller are co-founders. The focus of most of Irvin Waller’ work is on Less Law, More Order—a book intended to influence politicians and concerned citizens—and international action to implement internationally recognized rights for victims of crime. Learn about Holly Johnson´s work on intimate partner violence.