British Journal of Criminology 50(1)

Functional Fear and Public Insecurities About Crime
Jonathan Jackson and Emily Gray

Fear of crime is widely seen as an unqualified social ill, yet might some level of emotional response comprise a natural defence against crime? Our methodology differentiates between a dysfunctional worry that erodes quality of life and a functional worry that motivates vigilance and routine precaution. A London-based survey shows that one-quarter of those individuals who said they were worried about crime also viewed their worry as something akin to a problem-solving activity: they took precautions; these precautions that made them feel safer; and neither the precautions nor the worries reduced the quality of their lives. Fear of crime can therefore be helpful as well as harmful: some people are both able and willing to convert their concerns into constructive action.

The Governance of Securities: Ponzi Finance, Regulatory Convergence, Credit Crunch
Nicholas Dorn

The unfolding market crisis reveals evasions of regulatory controls and frauds that were less visible in buoyant markets. International networking of regulators and those they regulated resulted in convergence of regulatory standards—and creation of common ‘blind spots’—corresponding to private sector assumptions, ‘models’, data and mood. Moving forward, this paper suggests that the literature on security governance can be used to re-frame market regulation. Going against calls for a tightening of convergence between regulatory regimes, the paper argues for regulatory diversity as a means for reducing market ‘herding’ and the consequent systemic risks. Regulatory diversity would correspond to a political strategy of democratic steering of regulatory agencies, diluting, if not displacing, the currently dominant notion of financial market regulation as a purely ‘technical’ discourse. In concrete terms, this implies shifting systemic regulatory oversight responsibilities away from ‘independent’ agencies, to government bodies and/or departments that are held accountable to their parliaments and electorates.

A Deadly Consensus: Worker Safety and Regulatory Degradation under New Labour
Steve Tombs and David Whyte

This paper documents the vulnerability of the UK workplace safety regime to ‘regulatory degradation’. Following a brief overview of this regime, the paper examines the dominant arguments within academic literature on appropriate and feasible regulatory enforcement, arguing that the approaches to regulation thereby advocated have been easily degraded as a result of their compatibility with neo-liberal economic strategy. A subsequent analysis of empirical trends within safety enforcement reveals a virtual collapse of formal enforcement, as political and resource pressures have taken their toll on the regulatory authority. Finally, the paper indicates that the increasing impunity with which employers can kill and injure is particularly problematic as we enter sustained economic recession, and underlines the urgent need for regulatory alternatives.

The Impact of Co-Offending
Martin A. Andresen and Marcus Felson

Co-offending has a major impact on the arithmetic of crime rates and the burdens on the justice system. This paper studies co-offending by single year of age using data that comprise 750,000 negative police contacts (those charged, chargeable and suspected in criminal offenses) in a largely metropolitan dataset from British Columbia, Canada, 2002–06. We find that shifts in co-offending rates within teenage years are extremely rapid and highly sensitive to sample age ranges, such that a single co-offending rate for all teenagers is misleading. Co-offending opens a range of policy options and issues concerning the presence of youth hangouts and offender convergence settings that can assist the search for suitable co-offenders.

Understanding Illicit Drug Markets in Australia: Notes towards a Critical Reconceptualization
Robyn Dwyer and David Moore

The dominant Australian approaches to the study of illicit drug markets are surveillance and criminological research. In this paper, we outline the main features of these approaches before presenting a critical discussion of some of their methods, assumptions and modes of analysis. We argue that these approaches are limited in terms of their methods; reliance on neo-classical economic models; abstraction from local contexts; oversight of social, cultural and political processes; exclusive focus on commercial transactions; under-theorizing of the market; and narrow conceptions of drug market subjects. We conclude by beginning to outline an alternative framework that draws on the anthropology and sociology of markets and that may lead to more nuanced understandings of illicit drug markets.

Criminal Trajectories in Organized Crime
M. Vere van Koppen, Christianne J. de Poot, Edward R. Kleemans, and Paul Nieuwbeerta

This paper investigates criminal trajectories of individuals who are involved in organized crime. A semiparametric group-model is used to cluster 854 individuals into groups with similar developmental trajectories. The most important findings of the study relate to the substantial group of adult-onset offenders (40 per cent) and a group without any previous criminal records (19 per cent), next to a group of early starters (11 per cent) and a group of persisters (30 per cent). Up to date, no trajectory study has discovered such a vast share of adult-onset offenders. Furthermore, the findings turn out to be quite robust, if trajectory analyses are applied to different kinds of criminal activities and to different roles in criminal groups.

Introducing Conservation Criminology: Towards Interdisciplinary Scholarship on Environmental Crimes and Risks Carole Gibbs, Meredith L. Gore, Edmund F. McGarrell, and Louie Rivers, III

Environmental crimes, noncompliance and risks create significant harm to the health of humans and the natural world. Yet, the field of criminology has historically shown relatively little interest in the topic. The emergence of environmental or green criminology over the past decade marks a shift in this trend, but attempts to define a unique area of study have been extensively criticized. In the following paper, we offer a conceptual framework, called conservation criminology, designed to advance current discussions of green crime via the integration of criminology with natural resource disciplines and risk and decision sciences. Implications of the framework for criminological and general research on environmental crime and risks are discussed.

British Journal of Criminology, January 2010: Volume 50, Issue 1