Professor Elena Marchetti2, Ms Anne Edwards1
1Queensland Sentencing Advisory Council, Brisbane, Australia, 2Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia
Since the re-establishment of the Queensland Sentencing Advisory Council in late 2016, the Council has strived to design and deliver a range of professional products to fulfil its legislated functions. To date the Council has completed a number of major public policy reviews and research publications designed to influence public, political and professional considerations about sentencing. The Council universally agreed that their capacity to establish and sustain a strong reputation and influence sentencing-related conversations required a commitment to designing and delivering quality research within the applied environment. This presentation provides an insight into how the Council combined the skills of its appointed academic adviser and Deputy Chair with the experience of practitioners attached to the Council and its Secretariat to design its research agenda. The presentation will use two Council initiatives to highlight its integrated approach. The first initiative directly brings practitioners and academics together to discuss sentencing related research, policy issues and topics of interest to promote collaboration and the exchange of ideas in an open forum. The second initiative describes the approach adopted for one of the Council’s formal Terms of Reference, balancing the imperatives of the applied environment such as time and resource constraints, with the need to design a research approach that delivers a quality product that upholds the reputation of the Council as a serious and professional body within sentencing research and the broader criminal justice system.
Biography:
Professor Marchetti – Elena is the Acting Chair of the Queensland Sentencing Advisory Council and is a Professor and ARC Future Fellow at Griffith Law School, Griffith University. She has a long history of research in relation to Indigenous criminal justice programs and sentencing courts and ample experience in conducting and supervising research projects that involve marginalised groups. Elena has been awarded two ARC funded fellowships. The first which was awarded in 2009 focused on the use of Indigenous sentencing courts for partner violence offending. The second which was awarded in 2015 and which is currently ongoing, focuses on better ways of evaluating Indigenous-focused criminal justice programs.