Cybercrime and Cyberpunishment: my latest Huff Post

"The digital age brings new freedoms, new convenience, but also new irritations - and new forms of crime. The world of justice struggles to keep up with the myriad ways cyber criminals use the internet, social media and smartphones to steal our money, privacy and time.

New crimes mean new punishments. Sticking some autistic nerd in a prison cell is both archaic and counterproductive: he (always he...) will only make himself a Wifi connection out of soap and boot polish and escape down the information superhighway. What’s needed are cyber-punishments that fit the cyber-crimes. It’s not so much a case of what would Raskalnikov have done (worked out some sort of phishing scam to snare Alyona, I imagine, though not necessarily her sister) - it’s the punishment he’d receive. Would we sentence him to the UK version of Siberia (i.e., Suffolk) or be more... restorative in our justice..?"

Read the rest of my latest Huff Post here