Dr Warren Brookbanks1
1Aut Law School, Mount Eden, Auckland, New Zealand
Recent writing around violence and its psychological precursors has revealed some compelling insights into the motivations for violence and its emotional drivers. Understanding these might better equip policy-makers, public officials, judges and corrections officials to respond more accurately to particular manifestations of violence, but without the need to engage increasingly harsh and punitive sanctions in an attempt to deter violent crime.
The paper begins by examining notion of ‘projective disgust’ and its relevance to violent offending, before considering the oblique concept of ‘pale criminality’ as a psychological catalyst for some forms of violence. The axiomatic role of shame as a precursor to violence is also considered, noting that it often precedes and provides the motivation for the commission of violent acts. The paper then discusses the notion of hope as an essential element of recovery and restoration. This moves into a consideration in the final section of how therapeutic jurisprudence might provide some insights into how the law can best deal with the problem of violence beyond traditional carceral and punitive responses.
Biography:
Professor Dr Warren Brookbanks, LLB, LLM, BD, LLD
Warren was with Faculty of Law at Auckland University from 1983 to 2016, where he was made a professor in 2006 and was awarded the Doctor of Laws degree in 2014 . Since April 2016 he has been Professor of Criminal Law and Justice Studies and Director of the Centre for Non-Adversarial Justice at AUT University Law School. Warren has an international reputation in the fields of criminal law, mental health law and therapeutic jurisprudence. He is co-author of the leading text Simester and Brookbanks, Principles of Criminal Law, (4th edn (2012), and co-author of Bell and Brookbanks Mental Health Law in New Zealand (3rd edn, 2017). He has co-edited texts on criminal justice and forensic psychiatry and law and was the author of Competencies of Trial: Fitness to Plead in New Zealand in 2011. In September 2015 Therapeutic Jurisprudence: New Zealand Perspectives (Brookbanks, ed) was published. Merry and McCall Smith Errors, Medicine and the Law (2nd edn), which Warren co-authored with Professor Alan Merry was published in 2017.