CRIMINOLOGY AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE RESEARCH AGENDA

a. Crimes in Space: A criminology approach to criminal acts and deviant behavior in the International Space Station

The International Space Station is one of the most ambitious and transcendental projects of humanity. It will permit the cohabitation of human beings of a mosaic of nationalities and backgrounds in a football-field size platform at several hundred miles from earth in outer space. The International Space Station by its very nature is bound to reproduce conflicts of human behavior in outer space. Due to the isolation conditions and the hostile environment, it is expected that these conflicts will have a high rate of occurrence as has been corroborated in recent multi-culturally diverse experiences in outer space. All these conflicts will have enormous criminal implications.

This research project aims at analyzing the most significant criminological theories to see which one –if any- may be applicable to criminal and deviant behaviour in outer space. The guiding hypothesis is that the unique characteristics of the space environment, together with the exceptional social factors of all involved actors, demand new and specific theories to explain criminal and deviant behavior in the International Space Station. This research project has already resulted in the publication of three articles on different criminological aspects of criminality in outer space.

b. Criminal Justice Reform: A sociolegal approach to law reform in developing countries and democracies in transition

Western scholars and practitioners have been providing legal reform services to emerging economies since the end of the Cold War. Most of these projects have been sponsored by international governmental and non governmental organizations. Legal reform in the developing world comes also as a condition to loans made by international intergovernmental financial institutions, such as the World Bank or the IMF. Most of these projects have proved to be thoroughly inadequate to provide a framework for social change and have exacerbated the problems which they intended to solve, especially in the areas of criminal justice, security, and human rights. Most of these programs failed to attain their proposed goals since they have followed an expert conception of law reform and neglected to consider the importance of participation of those affected by the reform.

The law reform theory underlying most of these projects rests on neo-classical economy theories of wealth maximization and on a legal theory of pragmatic instrumentalism, whereby expert knowledge directs the business of law reform, which has often resulted in the direct extrapolation of laws from the country of the expert legal reformers to the developing world. This has failed to produce progressive social change and aggravated the inefficacies of the criminal justice institutions which the expert legal reforms intend to promote. By neglecting to engage the participation of the local players, and especially by neglecting to embrace the concerns of disaffected groups, these reforms have been unable to meaningfully and positively transform the criminal justice in developing countries and democracies in transition. The engagement of those affected by the reform permits to identify their actual concerns and to clear away any preconceptions of the reformers. The participatory approach thus goes beyond the strictly legal or organizational disciplines and beyond the attribution of generalized behavioral pitfalls to the involved agents.

The research program is directed toward proposing an alternative to the predominant law reform paradigm in a criminal justice context. Essentially, this requires a national effort based on high level of all social actors’ participation. This very practical solution entails a radical change in the concept of law prevailing in expert legal reform theory. It urges a radical departure from a vision that presupposes that expertise backed by empirical evidence in centralized countries is the best vehicle for legal reform. By placing its emphasis on the engagement of the public at large in the law reform process agenda, participatory legal reform accepts the idea that all of society’s normative arrangements constitute legal normativity, worthy of consideration for meaningful and successful social change. In general, when law reform is approached from a participatory –non expert- perspective, in the criminal justice field the products are programs that are inclusive, non repressive, and progressive. This research project has already resulted in the publication of a book chapter on international law reform and several conference presentations.