Aims

This activity provides a tangible demonstration to students of typical and atypical trends in relation to offending and offender backgrounds. Students reflect on the common patterns found within criminal offending historically, and can compare these trends to popular representations of crime and/or trends in other jurisdictions or time periods.

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 below. 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 below. Approximate time to allow for this step: 30 minutes.
2. Match-up: Students compare the characteristics of the offender that they profiled with those of their classmates, and identify which other offender is the best ‘match’ for their offender in terms of similarity. The amount of time this step will take depends on mode of delivery and number of students. Approximate time to allow for this step assuming face-to-face delivery for a class of about 25: 30 minutes.
3. Reflection: Students report back on their experiences to the whole class with instructors guiding discussion. Some suggestions of questions that can be used as prompts provided under Extensions below. The length of this discussion will depend on the talkativeness of the class and the number of questions the instructor poses. Approximate time to allow for this step: 20 minutes.

Extensions

Discussion prompts: The object of the exercise is to have students reflect critically on the reasons why some offender profiles are easy to cluster together with many similar offenders, and why other offender profiles are more difficult to match up. Some questions to pose to students to generate discussion on these points include: How difficult was it for you to find other offenders that were similar to the one you profiled? Was there more than one profile that could have been ‘matched’ to yours? Which factors or characteristics were unique to your offender? Which factors or characteristics did they share with others? How did you decide which offender was the best ‘match’ for yours? Did you base the ‘match’ simply on the highest number of shared characteristics, or did you place particular importance on certain characteristics in assessing overall similarity?

Crime trends: Students should be encouraged to consider how their experiences during the activity relate to historical crime trends. Ask the class – either as individuals, small groups or as a whole – to construct a profile of a ‘typical’ historical offender based on their experiences during the activity, or create a list of what seem to have been typical trends among offenders. Ask them how this profile aligns with what they have learned about historical crime in the subject so far, or through the week’s readings. The Chris McConville reading (listed under Readings below) may be particular useful here.

Assumptions about crime: Instructors might wish to use this exercise to have students unpack some of their preconceived notions about crime, and where these assumptions come from. In this case, prior to the first step of the task, give students around 5 minutes to write down a list of characteristics that they expect will appear among the offenders whose records the class transcribes. During class discussion, have students share how their expectations compared to the reality. Encourage students to reflect on where these expectations have come from, e.g. popular culture, news reporting, personal experiences.

Contemporary comparison: Another point of discussion might be how the historical crime trends suggested by the activity compare with contemporary patterns. Having students review some contemporary criminal statistics might help inform this discussion. A link to one such report by the Australian Institute of Criminology can be found here.

Cross-jurisdictional comparison: If students are studying crime from a transnational perspective, they might also be asked about the extent to which the historical trends witnessed in the jurisdiction of Victoria were replicated in other jurisdictions. One useful tool for investigating this is England’s Old Bailey Online database, which students could look up to try to find a ‘match’ for their offender within records from London’s central criminal court.

Mode of delivery

Face-to-face: Provided students have access to computers or digital devices, all elements of this task can be completed during around 90 minutes of class-time. If students have no access to digital technologies – either at home or in class – a work-around would be for the instructor themselves to complete a number of offender profiles for distributing to students in class.

Blended: This task lends itself to a blended learning approach, in which students complete the transcription and offender profile worksheet as a pre-class activity. The match-up exercise and reflective discussion then take place face-to-face. 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 for the match-up exercise in class and that they will need to have a completed profile 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: There are also various ways that this activity can be undertaken in an online-only unit. Having students ‘match’ up their offenders to one another can be simplified by having students enter the characteristics of their offenders into a google spreadsheet to which everyone has shared access. Students can then find their match by analysing the spreadsheet. Alternatively, students can simply post their offender profile worksheet to the discussion forum by a nominated date, and after this date they can read through the different posts to find their ‘match’. Class discussion can likewise take place through forum posts, or through a synchronous online chat session.

Assessment: This could be used as a short assessment task in which students are asked to write a 500-word reflection about the activity using questions from those outlined under Extensions as prompts. Students might be asked to contextualise the findings or trends that emerged in the class group’s experiences by referencing relevant scholarship on offending patterns and offender characteristics. 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

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 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.

Readings

Anthony, Thalia. “Historicizing Colonial and Postcolonial Indigenous Crime and Punishment.” Indigenous People, Crime and Punishment. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2013.
Australian Institute of Criminology. “Australian Crime: Facts and Figures – Offenders.” http://www.crimestats.aic.gov.au/facts_figures/2_offenders/
Kaladelfos, Andy and Mark Finnane. “Immigration and Criminality: Australia’s Post-War Inquiries.” Australian Journal of Politics and History 64, no. 1 (2018): 48-64.
McConville, Chris. “From ‘Criminal Class ‘to ‘Underworld’.” In The Outcasts of Melbourne: Essays in Social History, edited by Graeme Davison, David Dunstan and Chris McConville, 69-90. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985.
Mukherjee, Satyanshu K., Evelyn N. Jacobsen, and John R. Walker. Source Book of Australian Criminal and Social Statistics 1804-1988. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 1989.
Piper, Alana, and Victoria Nagy. “Versatile Offending: Criminal Careers of Female Prisoners in Australia, 1860-1920.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 48, no. 2 (2017): 187-210.