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Foreword | Confidence in the criminal justice system has emerged as a critical issue at the interface of the administration of justice and political pressures in western democracies. For more than a decade, governments in the West have felt acute pressure to make the criminal justice system more relevant, more transparent and more accountable. The 'crisis of confidence', particularly in judges and sentencing, has led to a range of high profile policy announcements seeking to 'modernise' the criminal justice system.

Foreword | Three-dimensional virtual environments (3dves) are the new generation of digital multi-user social networking platforms. Their immersive character allows users to create a digital humanised representation or avatar, enabling a degree of virtual interaction not possible through conventional text-based internet technologies.

Foreword | Approximately one in four women in most Western nations are at risk of becoming a victim of intimate partner violence (IPV). Interventions for IPV victims have shown to be significant in preventing negative outcomes. Using data from the International Violence Against Women Survey, this paper examines predictors of help-seeking by IPV victims and considers whether such responses are influenced by the severity of abuse experienced.

Foreword | Indigenous over-representation in the justice system is a challenge facing Australian society. Recently, it has been suggested that increased use of diversionary processes could reduce Indigenous over-representation. Reported in this paper are the findings of a project examining the 1990 offender cohorts’ contact with the Queensland juvenile justice system.

Foreword | The low number of prosecutions in Indonesia for illegal logging may not offer a strong enough deterrent against engaging in what is a lucrative crime. However, the movement of offenders and proceeds tied to illegal logging through other countries in the region offers some opportunities to support Indonesia's law enforcement responses. Officials in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia may charge offenders in those jurisdictions with criminal money laundering offences for their involvement in corruption offences in Indonesia.

Foreword | Controversies over how the law should regulate the presentation of expert testimony on DNA forensic science were explored in an experimental study comparing traditional verbal with audiovisual modes of delivery. Pre-trial DNA knowledge, as assessed in 3,611 jury-eligible Australians, was limited. From this group, 470 citizens watched a simulated homicide trial containing a cognitively-sequenced generic tutorial on DNA profiling evidence. The expert tutorial significantly improved DNA knowledge, irrespective of the mode of presentation.

Foreword | In order to transfer money, people in Western societies have, for many years, relied on conventional banks and other financial institutions. In addition to ordinary banking, however, money and other forms of value can be transferred through the use of so-called remittance services which have operated for hundreds of years in non-Western societies.

Foreword | To date, Australia has been relatively quarantined from large-scale, organised terrorist activities such as those which have emerged in central and southeast Asia, Europe and the United States. Nonetheless, as a well-resourced country, Australia is at risk of being a location from which funds for terrorist activities may be drawn—even if the activities themselves are based predominantly in other countries.

Foreword | Few well designed evaluations have found strong support for neighbourhood watch (NW) schemes; in fact there have been no formal, published, peer reviewed evaluations of NW in Australia. This paper argues for a change in focus in what is examined to determine success. Overseas evaluations suggest such schemes are ineffective because they looked at whether NW prevented and reduced the fear of crime, and improved information flows between the community and the police.

Foreword | Funded through the National Illicit Drug Strategy, the Australian Institute of Criminology has undertaken a major study into the drug use and offending careers of Australian prisoners. The results from surveys of adult males and females highlight the diversity and complexity of the offending and drug use histories of incarcerated adult offenders.

Foreword | One of the most intractable crime problems that has arisen in the twenty-first century concerns the criminal misuse of identity - popularly known as identity fraud or identity theft. Computer technologies have enabled documents used to verify an individual's identity to be altered or counterfeited with ease, leading to a problem which, in 2001-02, was estimated to cost $1.1 billion in Australia alone (Cuganesan & Lacey 2003).

Foreword | This study builds on a previous project that examined the link between child maltreatment and juvenile offending. It followed all children born in 1983 in Queensland through any contact they had with the child protection system, and/or any juvenile justice matter that required the child to appear in court or be held in custody. The current study involved the addition of the 1984 birth cohort and formal police cautioning histories to the dataset. This report describes the key findings in relation to cautioning.

Foreword | The criminal justice system is a complex process involving police, courts and corrections. Historically these component parts have tended to act autonomously yet their actions impact on each other. Increasingly criminal justice policy-makers have come to recognise the need to understand the long term impacts of policy changes across the whole system. To effectively and efficiently manage the criminal justice system, policy-makers require analytical tools to project the relative effects of changes to policies based on current system information.

Foreword | Transnational crime constitutes a challenge for even the most advanced industrial nations. The Pacific Islands are culturally, educationally and socially diverse, geographically isolated and sparsely populated. There is a degree of heterogeneity in their respective levels of governance, corruption and law enforcement capacity. Economic weaknesses and their impact upon infrastructure, poverty and general instability may increase the attractiveness of the islands to transnational crime.