Making Offenders Visible

Abstract

The UK Home Office has announced (December 2009) a new policy to publicise the criminal court judgments on individual offenders to the local communities in which those offenders live. The Home Office believes that this is public information obtained fairly from the public forum of the criminal court and that such publicising is merely boosting the job previously carried out by local reporters and newspapers covering the local criminal court. The initiative follows the Casey (2008) report that sought to find ways to reassure the general public on matters of confidence in the criminal justice system. This article considers how this initiative might work in practice based on earlier experiences of making offenders more visible to the communities from which they come.

Are criminal convictions a public matter? The USA and Spain

“…By contrast, Spain, like other European countries (except the UK; Thomas, 2007; Thomas and Thompson, 2010), recognizes rights of privacy, dignity, and honor that protect the individual from governmental and non-governmental disclosure of criminal record information. The Criminal Code (art.…”

“…1.While there are differences in detail among European countries, especially the UK (Padfield, 2011; Thomas, 2007; Thomas and Thompson, 2010), all of these countries are much more restrictive than the USA in making criminal records available. One can therefore speak of a ‘European position’ which is also reflected and reinforced by the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with Regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data (see ‘The right to personal data protection’ later).…”

Legal protections against criminal background checks in Europe

“…It might seem odd to assert that a criminal conviction is confidential since judgments are made in public (Jacobs and Larrauri, 2012;Thomas and Thompson, 2010). 32 Therefore, and in my opinion, an important protection against the expansion of CBCs in continental Europe is to insist that only when there is a law explicitly authorizing it may an employer ask for a CRC, otherwise he does not have the right to request it 33 unless exceptionally justified by business necessity (as explained in the 'anti-discrimination model').…”

“…It might seem odd to assert that a criminal conviction is confidential since judgments are made in public (Jacobs and Larrauri, 2012; Thomas and Thompson, 2010). 32 However, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has recently confirmed (case of M.M.…”