Biography
Dr Heather Strang is Director of the Jerry Lee Centre of Experimental Criminology and its M.St. Degree in Applied Criminology and Police Management. She is also Director of Studies in the Cambridge Police Executive Programme at the Institute of Criminology, where she has developed expertise in the management of randomized controlled trials. Internationally recognized for her British and Australian experiments in police-led restorative justice conferences, she was for ten years the Director of the Centre for Restorative Justice at the Australian National University. Prior to her appointment at ANU, she was Executive Research Officer at the Australian Institute of Criminology, where she founded the Australian national reporting system for homicide, after serving on the research staff of the Australian National Committee on Violence.
Dr Strang's research interests include the effects of crime and justice on victims of crime, the diversion of cases from prosecution to alternative disposals, and restorative justice conferences as both a supplement to and diversion from prosecution. In 2013 her research team published the Campbell Collaboration Systematic Review of the Effects of Restorative Justice Conferences on Offender Recidivism and Victim Satisfaction. She also researches police responses to domestic violence and has recently completed with colleagues a five-year experiment with the Hampshire Constabulary testing the CARA programme, which successfully reduced offending in domestic abuse.
Dr Strang was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology in 2002 and was a member of the Scientific Commission of the International Society of Criminology from 2006 to 2012. In recent years she has been invited to lecture on her research by universities, learned societies and governments in Japan, Colombia, Norway, Uruguay, Sweden, USA, Turkey, Israel, Ireland, Scotland and Belgium. She is an Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland and in 2014 was appointed a Senior Fellow of the Cambridge Centre for Evidence-Based Policing. She is Academic Editor of the Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing.
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Research
Dr. Strang is an experimental criminologist who has worked with police departments and criminal justice agencies in Australia, the US and UK. As Director of the Centre for Restorative at the Australian National University, she managed a ten-year follow-up of over 3,000 victims and offenders who had participated in restorative justice meetings in Canberra, London, Northumbria and Thames Valley. Her publications include her book Repair or Revenge: Victims and Restorative Justice (Oxford University Press, 2002).
In the early 1990s Dr Strang conducted a series of studies monitoring the character of homicide in each Australian jurisdiction based on information collected from police files. From 1995 until 2000 she directed the RISE (Reintegrative Shaming Experiments) project, evaluating restorative justice conferences delivered by the Australian Federal Police as an alternative to normal criminal justice processing. After 2001 she continued this research as co-director of the Justice Research Consortium, with eight experiments funded by the British Home Office involving the development and testing of restorative justice programmes for different kinds of offences and offenders at various points in the justice system. She has a special interest in victims of crime which continues to be the focus of her own research. In 2013 her research team published the Campbell Collaboration Systematic Review of the Effects of Restorative Justice Conferences on Offender Recidivism and Victim Satisfaction. She also researches police responses to domestic violence and has recently completed with colleagues a five-year experiment with the Hampshire Constabulary testing the CARA programme, which successfully reduced offending in domestic abuse.
Publications
Selected recent publications:
Books
- 2007, Lawrence Sherman & Heather Strang, Restorative Justice: The Evidence, London, Smith Institute.
- 2002, Heather Strang, Repair or Revenge: Victims and Restorative Justice, Oxford, Oxford University Press. (paperback edition published 2004)
- 2002, Heather Strang & John Braithwaite (eds) Restorative Justice and Family Violence, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
- 2001, Heather Strang & John Braithwaite (eds) Restorative Justice and Civil Society, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
- 2000, Heather Strang & John Braithwaite (eds) Restorative Justice: From Philosophy to Practice, Ashgate, Aldershot, 224 plus xv pp.
Peer-reviewed journal articles
- 2017, Strang, H. Sherman, L.W., Ariel, B., Chilton, S., Braddock, R., Rowlinson, A., Cornelius, N., Jarman, R. & Weinborn, C. ‘Reducing the harm of intimate partner violence: a randomized controlled trial of the Hampshire Constabulary CARA experiment.’ Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, 1.
- 2015, Strang, Heather & Sherman, Lawrence, ‘The Morality of Evidence: Second Annual Restorative Justice Lecture’. Restorative Justice: An International Journal, vol 3, no. 1, pp1-15.
- 2014, Strang, Heather, Neyroud, Peter & Sherman, Lawrence, ‘Tracking the Evidence for a “ Mythical Number”: Do UK Domestic Abuse Victims Suffer an Average of 35 Assaults Before Someone Calls the Police?’ Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice. doi: 10.1093/police/pau016
- 2012, Strang, Heather, ‘Coalitions for a Common Purpose: Managing Relationships in Experiments’ in Special Issue The Journal of Experimental Criminology, ‘Managing Field Experiments’, Heather Strang (ed), vol 8, no 3, pp 211-225.
- 2012, Strang, Heather, ‘Conferencing and Victims’ in Estelle Zinsstag & Inge Vanfraechem (eds) Conferencing and Restorative Justice: International Practices and Perspectives, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
- 2010, Strang, Heather, ‘Exploring the Effects of Restorative Justice on Crime Victims for Victims of Conflict in Transitional Societies’ in S Shoham and P Knepper (eds) International Handbook of Victimology, London, Taylor & Francis.
- 2007, Tom Tyler, Lawrence W Sherman, Heather Strang, Geoffrey C Barnes & Daniel J Woods, ‘Reintegrative Shaming, Procedural Justice and Recidivism: The Engagement of Offenders’ Psychological Mechanisms in the Canberra RISE Drinking-and-Driving Experiment’, Law and Society Review, 41 (3), 553-586.
- 2006, Heather Strang, Lawrence W Sherman, Caroline M Angel, Daniel J Woods, Sarah Bennett, Dorothy Newbury-Birch & Nova Inkpen. ‘Victim evaluations of face-to-face restorative justice conferences: A quasi-experimental analysis.’ Journal of Social Issues, 62 (2), 281-306.
- 2005, Lawrence W Sherman, Heather Strang, Caroline Angel, Daniel J Woods, Geoffrey C Barnes, Sarah Bennett, Meredith Rossner and Nova Inkpen, ‘Effects of face-to-face restorative justice on victims of crime in four randomized controlled trials’, Journal of Experimental Criminology, vol 1, no 3, pp367-395.
- 2004, Lawrence W Sherman & Heather Strang, ‘Verdicts or Inventions? Interpreting Results from Randomized Controlled Experiments in Criminology’ American Behavioral Scientist (special issue devoted to Experimental Methods in the Political Sciences edited by Donald P Green and Alan S Gerber, Yale University), vol 47,no 5, pp 575-607.
- 2004, Heather Strang, ‘The Threat to Restorative Justice Posed by the Merger with Community Justice: a Paradigm Muddle’ Contemporary Justice Review, vol 7, no 1, pp 75-79.
- 2003, Heather Strang & Lawrence W Sherman, ‘Repairing the Harm: Victims and Restorative Justice’ Utah Law Review, vol 2003, no 1, pp 15-42.
