FRIPROSJEKT-FRIPROSJEKT

Criminal justice agencies, in Norway as in most European countries, have in recent years undergone an intense process of digitalization as well as restructuring and reform. Digital technologies, often promoted by management- and IT-consultancies, are redefining the meaning of knowledge and expertise, thereby, redefining and shaping the nature of criminal justice and crime policy. Privatization of crime control and security has been one of the most salient and intensely debated issues within criminal justice in the last three decades. However, despite this we know quite little about the privatization of knowledge production. CRIMKNOW fills this gap. It is the first systematic attempt to develop an understanding of the role of private expertise in contemporary criminal justice policy development and implementation. It brings focus on the connections between digitalization and privatization. We are in the process of collecting empirical data on police reforms and reform of the courts in Norway and examine how commercial and private knowledge regimes become encoded into state practices, affecting the understanding of expertise, as well as the nature and quality of decision-making, particularly its transparency and public nature. Heidi Mork Lomell and Katja Franko is currently conducting an empirical investigation of consultancy companies knowledge production, and Birgitte Ellefsen and Lomell have recently published a study on police intelligence work in a historical perspective. Ellefsen and Lomell are also currently conducting archival research on the development of the police use of digital technologies in the 1950’s and 60s. PhD-candidate C. L. Langeland studies evidence-based policing as a significant template for global police reform. By using an empirical approach, she tracks the development and dispersion of these practices from their origin in the USA, to a global benchmark for modern criminal justice. PhD-candidate T. Myrvang examines the changing role and function of the courts in the face of digital restructuring processes, and how new forms of knowledge, practices, and power relations are established. Her research will examine how commonly accepted benefits of digitalization may conflict with long established legal traditions and actual experiences of the users when implemented in practice.

What happens to matters of public interest, when their knowledge foundations are shaped by private actors? How do commercial interests or advocacy shape the nature of expertise and the political decisions it gives rise to? CRIMKNOW addresses a fundamental issue of modern science: the boundaries between public and private knowledge. Criminal justice agencies have in recent years undergone an intense process of digitalization as well as restructuring and reform. Digital technologies, often promoted by management- and IT-consultancies, are redefining the meaning of knowledge and expertise, thereby, redefining and shaping the nature of criminal justice and crime policy. Privatization of crime control and security has been one of the most salient and intensely debated issues within criminological and criminal justice scholarship in the last three decades. However, despite the considerable breadth of scholarship on the topic, one important part of the development has been missing from the discussion: the privatization of knowledge production. CRIMKNOW fills this gap. It is the first systematic attempt to develop an understanding of the role of private expertise in contemporary criminal justice policy development and implementation. It brings focus on the connections between digitalization and privatization. Through its interdisciplinary design, combining criminological and socio-legal perspectives with the sociology and history of knowledge, and science and technology studies (STS), the project examines how commercial and private knowledge regimes become encoded into state practices, affecting the understanding of expertise, as well as the nature and quality of decision-making, particularly its transparency and public nature.