Dr Mark Brown

• Senior Lecturer

• Chair Research Committee - ARC Mentor

B.A. (Hons)(Massey), Ph.D (Victoria University of Wellington)
Phone: 8344 6559
E-Mail: mark.brown@ unimelb.edu.au
Location: Room 411, John Medley Building, Parkville Campus

Background

Dr Brown's primary teaching and research interests lie in the areas of penality, corrections and colonial penal history. He has written extensively on the subject of dangerousness and legislative measures to deal with serious offenders. He has co-edited with John Pratt Dangerous Offenders: Punishment and Social Order (Routledge, 2000) and is a co-editor of The New Punitiveness: Current Trends, Theories, Perspectives (Willan, 2005). His research in penal history concentrates upon British India and is concerned with colonial ideas of native criminality and the interplay between the emerging academic disciplines of criminology and anthropology and the task of colonial governance. Dr Brown has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Delhi Law School and travels regularly to Delhi and London to utilise the India Office Records archives. He teaches the undergraduate subjects Punishment and Social Control and Global Criminology, and a Masters subject The New Punitiveness.

Subjects Taught:

• 191-312 Punishment and Social Control
• 191-311 Global Criminology
• 191-440 The New Punitiveness

Selected Recent Publications and Papers

Book Chapters

Brown, M. (2008) ‘True Crime: W.H. Sleeman and the Thugs’ in K. Brittlebank (Ed.) Significant Events and People of British India. Melbourne: Monash University Press.
 
Brown, M. (2008) ‘Risk, punishment and liberty’ in C. Cunneen and T. Anthony (Eds.) The Australasian Critical Criminology Reader. Sydney: Federation Press.
 
Brown, M. (2008) ‘The road less travelled: Arts-based programs in youth corrections’ in A. O’Brien and K. Donelan (Eds.) Risky Business (chapter accepted, publisher under negotiation).
 
Brown, M. (2007) ‘Prisons’ in B. Galligan and W. Roberts (Eds) The Oxford Companion to Australian Politics. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

Brown, M. (2005) ‘Corrections’, In D. Chappell and P. Wilson (eds) Issues in Australian Crime and Criminal Justice. Chatswood NSW: LexisNexis: Butterworths.

Brown, M. (2005) ‘Liberal exclusions and the new punitiveness’, In J Pratt, D Brown, M Brown, S Hallsworth and W Morrison (eds) The New Punitiveness: Trends, Theories and Perspectives. Devon, UK: Willan Publishing.

Brown, M. (2005) ‘Colonial history and theories of the present: Some reflections upon penal history and theory’, In BS Godfrey & G Dunstall (eds) Crime and the Empire 1840-1940: Criminal Justice in Local and Global Context. Devon, UK: Willan Publishing.

Ward, T., & Brown, M. (2003) ‘The risk-need model of offender rehabilitation: A critical analysis’, In Ward, T., Laws, D. R., & Hudson, S. H. (Eds.), Sexual Deviance: Issues and Controversies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Eccelston, L., Brown, M. & Ward, T. (2002) ‘The assessment of dangerous behaviour’, In P. Shohov (Ed.) Advances in Psychology Research. Huntington, NY: Nova Science.

Brown, M. (2000) ‘Calculations of risk in contemporary penal practice’, in M. Brown and J. Pratt (Eds.) Dangerous Offenders: Punishment and Social Order. London: Routledge.

Refereed Journals

Brown, M (2005) ‘That heavy machine’: Reprising the colonial apparatus in 21st century social control. Social Justice, 32, 41-52.

Brown, M. (2004) Crime, liberalism and empire: Governing the Mina tribe of northern India, Social and Legal Studies, 13, 191—218.

Ward, T. & Brown, M. (2004) The good lives model and conceptual issues in offender rehabilitation, Psychology, Crime and Law, 10, 243-57.

Brown, M. (2003) Ethnology and colonial administration in nineteenth century British India: The question of native crime and criminality, British Journal of the History of Science, 36, 1—19.

Brown, M. (2002) Crime, governance and the Company Raj: The discovery of Thuggee. British Journal of Criminology, 42, 57-75.

Brown, M. (2002) The politics of penal excess and the echo of colonial penality. Punishment and Society: The International Journal of Penology, 4, 403-423.

Brown, M. & Chan, K.Y. (2002) ‘We are neutral therapists’: Psychology, the state and social control. Australian Psychologist (Special Issue on The Rehabilitation of Offenders), 37, 165-71.

Brown, M. (2001) Race, science and the construction of native criminality in colonial India. Theoretical Criminology, 5, 345-368.

Brown, M. (2001) 'The most desperate characters in all India': Reconsidering law and penal policy in British India. Punishment and Society: The International Journal of Penology, 3, 433-440.

Research Interests

Risk and Dangerousness

My interests in this area have changed fairly substantially over time. I began with the question of how best to predict the post-release behaviour of prisoners and the related question of how parole boards made their release decisions. Since then I have moved increasingly toward a more critical and theoretical approach to the idea of risk and the related concepts of dangerousness and prediction. My writing in this area challenges the characterisation of risk assessment produced and promulgated by psychologists. It examines the way different conceptions of risk are held by a variety of actors within the justice system (including judges, parole board members, probation officers, psychologists) and how these views of risk and the practices that flow from them reflect widely differing views of human nature and agency.

Penal History

The majority of works on the history of criminology represent its development as a modern Anglo/American enterprise. To be sure, there were influences from continental Europe in the early days, but it was the development of research on crime and criminals in Britain and the United States that is presented as fundamentally shaping the ideas we work with today. I am interested in a much-neglected aspect of the discipline's development: the way notions of criminality were constructed in Britain's empire. Here I am looking specifically at the way ideas about dangerousness and hereditary or habitual criminality were invoked in British India. Because India never became a settler colony English institutions such as universities and their 'disciplines' never grew up alongside and in the service of the bureaucracy, as they did in colonies like Australia and later New Zealand. Yet in the official discourse of India's administrator/scholars there is to be found much debate on the nature of Indian criminality, and much that fed its way back into metropolitan debates in Britain. I am current writing a book on the so-called criminal tribes of India, a group upon whom much of the theorising about native crime and criminality was based.

Sentencing and Penal Policy

On the basis of my work on risk and dangerousness I have been concerned with the way notions of 'high risk' and 'dangerous' offenders are taken up in political and policy discourses and find their way into statute and sentencing practices. Particularly, I have addressed the trend present in a number of common law jurisdictions in recent years of 'bifurcation'. By this is meant the separation of sentencing and penal regimes for so called ordinary offenders and offenders who are presumed to present a danger to the public. I collected data in New Zealand prior to such changes there that have allowed me to conduct before/after comparisons of both existing sentencing arrangements and a range of alternative approaches. All point toward fatally flawed assumptions about who 'dangerous' offenders are and the sort of penal measures that might stem their criminal behaviour.