Despite the high hopes of victims' rights advocates, and contrary to the warnings about negative consequences, the evidence demonstrates that victim impact statements (VISs) have had little influence on criminal proceedings and court outcomes. This study, based on interviews with judges, prosecutors, and defense counsels charged with the implementation of the VIS scheme in South Australia, shows that practitioners routinely objectify, and thereby minimize, the injuries sustained by victims, and impose an implicit “reasonable victim” test to evaluate VISs. Professionals' responses are analyzed according to Sykes and Matza's notion of techniques of neutralization as a case study of the ways in which law reform endeavors are subordinated to the competing value systems and organizational imperatives of court workgroups.

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Internationally, the 200 year honeymoon with the prison may be ending. Research showing that imprisonment is ineffective in reducing crime is finally being heeded by some conservative governments committed to cost cutting. But, as this case-study of Victoria, Australia, again highlights, punishment regimes are neither universal nor rational. Bucking the trend, prison numbers in Victoria have increased dramatically over the last decade and are set to rise higher. The lingering lure of the prison here, we argue, is a manifestation of Australia's colonial history in which punitiveness has always competed with pragmatic innovation. Although the research findings are inconclusive, we contend that Electronic Monitoring (EM), while differently fraught, better meets the key objectives of sentencing. Using a counterfactual social science thought experiment in the form of an imagined Cabinet submission, we show how political decision makers might be persuaded to effect a shift from prison to EM if it is framed within the competing visions of Australian national identity. We argue that understanding how social policy decisions are made sharpens the scholarly research agenda and also highlights how the convergence of a unique set of non-rational cultural assumptions can shape major shifts (or near misses) in the history of punishment in a particular society.

Infanticide is an important and historically prevalent crime. It is also a "female" crime. The challenge for feminist criminological theory is to account for infanticide without falling into the trap of "essentialising" the offence and its perpetrators.Two current broad feminist theoretical positions (the androgynous approach and the social control perspectives) are applied to infanticide. It is argued that their explanatory usefulness is limited since both in various ways distort the "true" dimensions of the crime. The inability of these current perspectives to account for infanticide raises serious questions about their general applicability for feminist criminological theory. IntroductionAfter more than a decade of feminist criticism and research a cloud hangs over the contribution which feminism has made to criminology and, more significantly, its future direction (Heidensohn, 1987). Many key questions remain unanswered: