Robbers have always seen themselves as the cream of the underworld, at the top of the criminal aristocracy, both in and out of prison. Gangland Robbers follows the stories of the men and women who go to great lengths to organise heists which, if all goes well, will keep them in luxury for many years, if not for life. If their plans fail, then often it is another sort of life. Bestselling Gangland authors Morton and Lobez cover the best stories of the past 200 years: from the tunnel-digging burglary of the Bank of Australia in 1828 through to the hold-ups of the bushrangers; Squizzy Taylor and his crew; the train robbers of the 1930s; Jockey Smith; ‘Mad Dog’ Cox; the ill-fated Victorian Bookie Robbery, as well as the less well-known ‘Angel of Death’, ‘The Pushbike Bandit’ and ‘The Gentleman Bandit’. Gangland Robbers explores the lives—their own and others—that these bandits ruined, those who went to the gallows, and the very few who redeemed themselves.

This book arises from a research project funded in Australia by the Criminology Research Council. The topic, bail reform, has attracted attention from criminologists and law reformers over many years. In the USA, a reform movement has argued that risk analysis and pre-trial services should replace the bail bond system (the state of California may introduce this system in 2020). In the United Kingdom, Europe and Australia, there have been concerns about tough bail laws that have contributed to a rise in imprisonment rates. The approach in this book is distinctive. The inter-disciplinary authors include criminologists, an academic lawyer and a forensic psychologist together with qualitative researchers with backgrounds in sociology and anthropology. The book advances a policy argument through presenting descriptive statistics, interviews with practitioners and detailed accounts of bail applications and their outcomes. There is discussion of methodological issues throughout the book, including the challenges of obtaining data from the courts.

"This book is about my journey through the Australian prison system. You'll have heard a few of these stories before, but not like this. It's a step-by-step history of my twenty three years behind bars; what day to day life was really like in jail, what I did to survive and why I'll never go back. It's not a nice story. I was not a nice prisoner..." Mark "Chopper" Read is over fifty years old and has spent almost half that time in prison. He is a man who knows the Australian prison system better than any other. He knows how the definitive school of hard knocks turns juvenile delinquents into hardened criminals. How it feels to be thrust into a world of violent psychopaths and be changed, irrevocably, into the worst of their number. He also knows how it feels to get stabbed (a massive punch with a cold pin in the middle). How it feels to lose your ears to a prison-issue razor blade (a gurgling sound like a little brook). How it feels to fight, maim and mutilate to stay alive. And what it means when that way of life no longer makes sense. This book is Chopper's redemption. It is the real story of the man, the criminal and the prisoner, told with black humour and surprising insight.

Managing Fear examines the growing use of risk assessment as it relates to preventive detention and supervision schemes for offenders perceived to be at a high risk of re-offending, individuals with severe mental illness, and suspected terrorists. It outlines a number of legislative regimes in common law countries that have broadened ‘civil’ (as opposed to criminal) powers of detention and supervision. Drawing on the disciplines of criminology and social psychology, it explores how and why such schemes reflect a move towards curtailing liberty before harm results rather than after a crime has occurred. Human rights and ethical issues concerning the role of mental health practitioners in assessing risk for the purposes of preventive detention and supervision are explored, and regimes that require evidence from mental health practitioners are compared with those that rely on decision-makers’ notions of ‘reasonable belief’ concerning the risk of harm. Case studies are used to exemplify some of the issues relating to how governments have attempted to manage the fear of future harm. This book aims to educate mental health practitioners in the law relating to preventive detention and supervision schemes and how the legal requirements differ from clinical assessment practices; examine the reasons why there has been a recent renewal of preventive detention and supervision schemes in common law countries; provide a comparative overview of existing preventive detention and supervision schemes; and analyse the human rights implications and the ethics of using forensic risk assessment techniques for preventive detention and supervision schemes.