102709 Introduction to Criminal Justice

Task:

Question 1

Discuss the role that the media plays in influencing public perceptions of crime, the different stages of the criminal justice process, and criminal justice policy. In your discussion, you might choose to focus on the unequal treatment afforded to certain minorities in our community. Illustrate your arguments by using contemporary examples.

In answering your question, you may choose to use these aspects of the question as a framework for your essay structure. 

The question also allows you to focus on a particular population (queer or indigenous people, for example), and to consider how the media influences the public perceptions of this particular population.

Importantly, the question asks you to use contemporary examples. In so doing, you are looking for the ways in which the media distort, misrepresent, fabricate, etc. crime news.

Question 2

Aboriginal Australians constitute approximately 2.5 per cent of the nation’s population. Yet they are twenty times more at risk than non-Aboriginal people of coming into contact with the criminal justice system, and they account for over 25 per cent of the adult prison population. The staggering figures are strong evidence that Aboriginal people are seriously disadvantaged and marginalized. This has led to systematic discrimination at every level of the criminal justice and welfare system and not just at the gatekeeper level of power.

Discuss the above argument by critically evaluating the dynamics of criminal justice and Aboriginal relations and the role of the judiciary in this process. End your discussion by suggesting ways to reduce the level of over-representation of Aboriginal people in the criminal justice system. Support your arguments with referenced examples