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ANU Law School · ANU College of Law, Governance and Policy
Prison Clinic is a course where you will engage with the criminal justice system in technicolour, and discover tangible realities of the law. In this course, the law is no longer just books and paper, but bricks and mortar - and, most importantly, people. This course is challenging in both form and substance: your learning activities will be different to anything you've done at law school so far, and you will be engaging with layered, complex, and meaningful content. In the first half of semester, you will visit numerous criminal justice institutions and carceral settings in Canberra, including the Alexander Machonochie Centre and the ACT Watch House. You will have the chance to speak to people with lived experience of incarceration, tour the ACT Supreme Court and view legal proceedings in action. Across different workshops, you will be able to engage personally with judicial officers, barristers, court sheriffs, police and correctional officers, Prisoners Aid staff - and to ask them your own questions. You can have the chance to submit an article to About Time, the national prison paper founded by a graduate of this Clinic, and to assist in putting together furniture packs for detainees who are rejoining the community with housing assistance. Underlying these coalface activities, we will engage with philosophy and theory on criminal justice, punishment, state accountability and correctional management. We will critically examine the real-world impact of how prison/ers, criminality and punishment are represented in media, films, fictional literature, and more. You'll design a digital learning resource about a relevant area of law, for detainees and their families, or policy makers and the community, using teaching and learning theory. You will also plan and execute a research project of your choosing (both in form and substance) addressing a problem or an injustice relating to the prison setting. Students must apply to undertake this course. Please go to Law Professional Experience for application information.
The proposed means of assessment for this course will provide students with at least two pieces of assessment, including one piece during the semester. More information about the means of assessment, including the relationship between the assessment and the learning outcomes of the course, will be available in the Class Summary and on the course WATTLE page.
Learning outcomes 1
- Classes offered in non-standard sessions will be taught on an intensive base with compulsory contact hours (approximately 26 hours of face to face teaching). The course will also require advanced preparation through assigned readings. In total, it is anticipated that the hours required for completion of this course (class preparation, teaching and completion of assessment) will not exceed 120 hours. - Classes offered during semester periods are expected to have three contact hours per week. Click here for the LLM Masters Program course list Work Integrated Learning Placements Clinical courses allow students to engage with real clients, real problems and real deadlines in a real-world environment. Placements are undertaken at Alexander Maconochie Centre (AMC), offering students a unique opportunity to work with detainees in a prison setting. Students in the Prison Legal Literacy Clinic will attend the AMC to deliver six legal literacy sessions for a cohort of detainees chosen by AMC management. These sessions provide legal information only, rather than legal advice and cover topics that may include criminal law, evidence, sentencing, appeals, parole, administrative law, human rights law and tort law. The emphasis is on students working as a team to develop informative, engaging and interactive sessions. Other Information Enrolment is limited with selection based on a competitive process. Application information can be located on the ANU College of Law Website.
Students must rely on the approved Class Summary which will be posted to the Programs and Courses site approximately two weeks prior to the commencement of the course. Alternatively, this information will be published in the Program course list when known.