Aims

This activity develops students’ abilities to contextualise an individual case study within wider historical developments, legal factors and/or criminological concepts. It encourages critical reflection on different factors and causes of crime.

Task

1. Transcription: Students complete the transcription of at least one historical record from Victoria’s prison system on the Criminal Characters website. A guide advising students on how to complete the transcription through the online system is available as part of the activity’s resources. Instructors should also complete a transcription prior to having their students make the attempt in order to familiarise themselves with the process and provide support. While transcribing the information (and before they have submitted the completed transcription), students should make notes about the prisoner in the offender profile worksheet provided as a resource for the activity. Approximate time to allow for this step: 30 minutes.
2. Research offender: Students then conduct research online to see what other information they can find out about the offender’s life history. The Trove newspaper database is particularly useful for this, and a guide to help students conduct researches within it is provided under the Resources section below. As students will know from the prison record when and where the offender was born, they will also be able to find important life event information in births, deaths and marriages registries. A guide to searching within these is also found in Resources. Finally, other types of government records – particularly military enlistment records – can be found online through the National Archives of Australia. Note that for legal studies students, it might be more relevant to have them concentrate on building a timeline of the offender’s case history, rather than entire life history, by using Trove. Students can record information about different events in the life or legal case of the offender that they are looking at in one of the timeline worksheets found under the Resources section. Three different timeline worksheets are available: one for history students, one for legal studies students, and one for criminology students. Approximate time to allow for this step: 30 minutes.
3. Contextualising the case study: Once students have plotted events in the life history of the offender, or events in their criminal prosecution, there is then a column on the worksheet where they can start to contextualise these experiences within wider developments or concepts. For history students, this will be by relating events experienced by the individual to wider political, social, economic and cultural developments or attitudes from the period. For criminology students, this will be by drawing on relevant criminological concepts that might apply to explaining the offending, given the individual’s life history. For legal studies students, this will be by relating events in the legal process experienced by offender to the relevant statutory and case law in effect during the period. Handouts for each discipline are available under Resources that give a brief overview to important historical events, criminological concepts and legal developments that students might want to consider during this step. Other suggestions about how students can source information for contextualising their case studies is available under Extensions below. Approximate time to allow for this step: 20 minutes.
4. Reflection: Students can share and discuss their case studies within small groups, and/or instructors can invite discussion among the whole class using some of the questions listed under Extensions. Approximate time to allow for this step: 20 minutes.

Extensions

History prompts: Questions that instructors might want to pose to history students include: What major political, social or technological events occurred in this period, e.g. wars, population or migration booms, moral panics? Would any of these have had relevance to the life of the prisoner, or affected their offence or conviction? How did economic prosperity fluctuate over the prisoner’s lifetime? What was the prisoner’s job, and what would this have meant for their economic security in this timeframe? How were gender roles imagined in this period? Were values around gender undergoing a process of challenge/change? How might the prisoner’s gender have influenced their life and criminal offending? What types of attitudes around religion, ethnicity and nationality were common at this time? How would the prisoner’s religion, nationality or ethnicity have affected how others – including authorities, employers and social peers – perceived them? Students might be able to more deeply explore these questions by reviewing the National Museum of Australia’s defining moments timeline.

Criminology prompts: The general questions students should consider are: How might the prisoner’s criminal offending be explained under criminological theories of offending? Do different life events offer support for different theories? This exercise is particularly useful for exploring life-course theories of offending, so instructors may want to set appropriate readings on this to enable students to draw on these perspectives in their discussions. Some suggestions can be found under Readings below, with chapters 4 and 5 of Godfrey et al.’s Criminal Lives: Family Life, Employment, and Offending in particular recommended. The Australian Institute of Criminology database also provides useful resources that students may draw on in contextualising their case study.

Legal studies prompts: For legal studies students, it will probably be more useful for them to focus on identifying important events/factors in the history of the criminal case, than in the life history of the individual. The questions that should drive their contextualisation of their case study include: Were there important legal developments in this period that might have affected the way that the prisoner was policed, tried, sentenced or punished in prison? What statutory legislation or case law would have impacted upon the prisoner’s encounters with the justice system? They can research the exact legislation and case law that would have been in effect at the time using the Australian Legal Information Institute database.

Interdisciplinary exploration: While pathways have been mapped out to ensure that this exercise is as useful to separate disciplines as possible, instructors may want to challenge their students to take an interdisciplinary approach to contextualising the case study. This can be done simply by providing them with the handouts intended for the other disciplines, so that they can review the types of factors and developments that would be considered relevant within those subjects, then asking which might apply to their case study.

Digital timeline: Students can present their work more formally by plotting the events within the life history or case history of the offender they are examining into a digital timeline. Detailed instructions on how to create an interactive digital timeline on Timeline JS can be found in the Resources section below. These timelines can incorporate images, video, audio or other multimedia, as well as descriptive text annotations about the events recorded. It should be impressed upon students that their annotations should not be simply descriptive – i.e. stating that such an event happened to x – but offer critical reflection about how or why that event happened to x by contextualising it within broader historical developments, legal factors or criminological concepts.

Mode of delivery

Face-to-face: This activity can be attempted entirely during a face-to-face class, but at least 2 hours working time will need to be available to allow for sufficient student engagement. Ideally, to allow students to get as much value out of the exercise as possible, it would be better if some of the steps could be completed separately. For instance, instructors might have students complete the transcription activity in class in the previous week (perhaps pairing it with Activity 1 or 2), so that in the class for this activity they only have to do further research and then undertake the contextualisation discussion. If necessary, time can be saved by having students work in small groups to contextualise a case study, rather than doing so as individuals. Computers or digital devices would be needed for students to complete this task in class.

Blended: This activity is probably best suited to a blended approach in which students undertake steps 1 and 2 prior to coming to class, and can then engage in steps 3 and 4 in class through discussion with other students and under the guidance of an instructor to provide them with prompts as to the types of issues they might consider. In order to ensure students complete the pre-class work, it should be made clear to them from the outset how this work will be used in class and that they will need to have done the research to participate in this class activity. Students are also more likely to comply with completing pre-class activities if they regularly form part of the week-to-week administration of the subject.

Online: This activity can be used within online-only classroom settings by having students complete steps 1, 2 and 3 by a certain date and time, and then having them complete step 4 through a discussion forum or live chat session.

Assessment: This activity can be used as an assessment task by having students produce a digital timeline that contextualises their case study, as outlined in the section on digital timelines under Extensions above. It is suggested that annotations for this timeline should total around 500 words, consisting of around 100 words each for five different events. Students pursuing this as an assessment task may benefit from consulting the extensive list of thematically-organised readings about the history of crime and criminal justice in Australia available on the Criminal Characters website here.

Resources

Guide to Criminal Characters Transcription: There are detailed instructions on the transcription process on the website itself, but this provides a quick overview for students to get started. 

Offender Profile Worksheet: This worksheet lets students fill out details about the offender from the prison record in order to be able to compare how closely their demographic and offending background matches those of other offender profiles.  

Guide to Trove Newspaper Searching: Advice to students about the best way to search for newspaper articles related to offenders.

Guide to Births Deaths Marriages Searching: Advice to students about the best way to search for information related to offenders on different births, deaths and marriages registers.

History Timeline Worksheet: This worksheet helps students capture information about events in their offender’s life, and compare and contrast that with other social, economic and political developments that were taking place at the time.

Historical Developments Handout: This handout provides students with a brief outline of the timing of some important social, political and economic events in Australia across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Criminology Timeline Worksheet: This worksheet helps students capture information about events in their offender’s life, and link these events to different criminological concepts.

Criminological Concepts Handout: This handout provides students with brief definitions of some of the main criminological theories of offending that they might link to particular life events in offenders’ histories to explain their actions.

Legal Timeline Worksheet: This worksheet helps students capture information about events in the offender’s case, and contextualise this within relevant legal factors that would have been in effect at the time.

Legal Developments Handout: This handout provides students with a brief outline of the timing of some important legal developments in Australia across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Timeline JS Instructions: This handout provides a detailed set of instructions for creating an interactive digital timeline using the open-source tool Timeline JS.

Readings

Alker, Zoe, and Barry Godfrey. “War as an Opportunity for Divergence and Desistance from Crime, 1750-1945.” In Criminology and War: Transgressing the Borders, edited by Sandra Walklate and Ross McGarry, 77-93. London; New York: Routledge, 2015.

Godfrey, Barry S., Paul Lawrence, and Chris A. Williams. “Changing Perceptions of Criminality.” In History and Crime, 69-88. London: Sage, 2008.

Godfrey, Barry S., David J. Cox, and Stephen D. Farrall. Criminal Lives: Family Life, Employment, and Offending.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Ireland, Haidee. “The Case of Agnes Jones: Tracing Aboriginal Presence in Sydney through Criminal Justice Records.” History Australia 10, no. 3 (2013): 236-51.

Kilday, Anne-Marie and David Nash. Law, Crime and Deviance since 1700: Micro-Studies in the History of Crime. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.

Piper, Alana, and Victoria Nagy. “Risk Factors and Pathways to Imprisonment among Incarcerated Women in Victoria, 1860-1920.” Journal of Australian Studies 42, no. 3 (2018): 268-84.

Sullivan, Christopher J. “Change in Offending across the Life Course.” In The Oxford Handbook of Criminological Theory, edited by Francis T. Cullen; Pamela Wilcox, 205-25. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.