Gail Super
This article is concerned with the spectacle of crime in the ‘new’ South Africa. I offer a sociological explanation for why crime plays such an important role in governance in South Africa. I identify both continuities and shifts between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ techniques of rule, showing how the very construction of crime and controversies about measuring it are constituted by and constitutive of power relations within society. The interconnected themes that I address are the changing relationship between crime and politics as the African National Congress went from being a resistance organization to governing party and the changing relationship between crime and race. The period that my research covers is from 1976 to 2004.
Discipline, Docility and Disparity: A Study of Inequality and Corporal Punishment
Laurie A. Gould and Matthew Pate
Corporal punishment as a sanction for criminal offenders has a long global history. While most North American and European countries have abandoned such methods, corporal punishment is still a mainstay of criminal justice in many parts of the world. Employing a Foucauldian framework, we posit that the distribution of social power plays a determinative role in the retention of corporal punishment practices. Using economic disparity as a proxy for social power, we find that countries with greater relative economic inequality are more likely to employ corporal punishment as a possible sanction against criminal offenders.
Disciplining the Drifter: The Domestication of Travellers in the Netherlands
Marianne van Bochove and Jack Burgers
Recent criminological literature, mainly based on experiences in the United States and the United Kingdom, suggests that Western societies have witnessed a shift from rehabilitation to repression and from inclusion to exclusion. However, in a socio-historical case study of national and local policies dealing with Travellers in the Netherlands—a group regarded as highly deviant—we found that rehabilitation remains the primary aim, albeit that the policy of rehabilitation recently has taken on a much more compulsory character. This policy can be conceived of as a practice of ‘repressive inclusion’. Only detailed and empirical research on policies directed at strategically chosen groups in different institutional settings can decide whether this policy of repressive inclusion is a specific Dutch experience or has a more general application.
Exploring Paradigms of Crime Reduction: An Empirical Longitudinal Study
Keith Soothill, Mogens N. Christoffersen, M. Azhar Hussain, and Brian Francis
Using Danish registers for a 1980 birth cohort of 29,944 males with parental information and following up these cases for 25 years, the study considers four paradigms of crime reduction (parental child rearing, structural factors around adolescence, locality and individual resources). Focusing on offenders with first-time convictions for shoplifting (n = 1,989), for burglary (n = 1,324) and for violence (n = 1,901), all four paradigms made a contribution to risk of first-time offending for all three crimes. The counter-factual analysis indicated that a focus on structural issues within a society may have more widespread benefits, but the assumed causal links need to be further explored. The use of population registers, under controlled conditions, provides an important window on criminal careers.
'The Dragon Breathes Smoke': Cigarette Counterfeiting in the People's Republic of China
Anqi Shen, Georgios A. Antonopoulos, and Klaus Von Lampe
This article aims at providing an account of the social organization of the cigarette counterfeiting business in the People's Republic of China—a business that has been feeding the cigarette black markets around the globe. Specifically, we aim to exhibit the scale and nature of cigarette counterfeiting in mainland China, describe the practices and actors in the different phases of the trade, and examine the role of corruption and violence in the particular business. We argue that cigarette counterfeiting is one of the side effects of China's reform and ‘opening up’ policy, and a feature of the country's economic development process.
A Typology of British Police: Locating the Scottish Municipal Police Model in Its British Context, 1800–35
David G. Barrie
This article represents the first serious attempt to compare Scottish policing with other British municipal police and improvement models between 1800 and 1835. It is concerned with assessing whether the Scottish experience was distinct from other parts of the United Kingdom and the implications of this for British police historiography and typology. It argues that the Scottish model was much closer to English experience than has hitherto been contended, but which, nonetheless, had distinguishing characteristics tailored to meet specific indigenous needs, customs and practices. Any attempt to construct a British police typology must move beyond the institutional confines of accountability and organization and take account of legal, cultural and intellectual structures and influences.
'Any Girl Can Call the Cops, No Problem': The Influence of Gender on Support for the Decision to Report Criminal Victimization within Homeless Communities
Laura Huey and Marianne Quirouette
In this paper, we examine the influence of the ‘anti-snitching code’ on attitudes towards reporting criminal victimization among the homeless. Using research data from a study of criminal victimization, we analyse how gender structures attitudes towards crime reporting, creating what we term a ‘chivalry exception’ to the ‘anti-snitching code’. In essence, the chivalry exception is a form of benevolent sexism that embodies the belief that women are inherently vulnerable and thus in need of greater protection. This exception is rejected by many women, some of whom reject it as symbolic of female vulnerability, whereas others remain fearful of retaliatory violence. These findings have larger implications for future efforts to address failures to report crime by homeless female victims.
Public Confidence in the Police: Testing the Effects of Public Experiences of Police Corruption in Ghana
Justice Tankebe
Nearly every study of police corruption hypothesizes that public experience of police corruption undermines the moral standing of the police. However, scarcely any studies actually test the hypothesis. My aim in this empirical study is to compare the effects of three dimensions of police corruption on perceptions of police trustworthiness, procedural justice and effectiveness. These three dimensions of corruption are personal experience, vicarious experience and subjective evaluations of police anti-corruption measures. The data come from a survey of people living in Accra, Ghana. The findings show that both vicarious experiences of corruption and satisfaction with reform measures explain assessments of police trustworthiness, procedural justice and effectiveness, but that personal experiences of police corruption do not do so.
Why Do The Police Use Deadly Force?: Explaining Police Encounters in Mumbai
Jyoti Belur
This paper attempts to answer the question: why do the police use deadly force in a democratic country? Police shootings in India are better known as encounters, a term that refers to a specific type of police contact—a spontaneous, unplanned ‘shoot-out’ between the police and alleged criminals, in which the criminal is usually killed, with few or no police injuries. The police use of deadly force remains largely unquestioned or unaccountable. This paper explores the wider structural and systemic factors that create conditions in which killing ‘hardened’ criminals seems to be the last resort for the police to gain some control in the fight against crime. Wider cultural and specifically police sub-cultural factors that make police killing of alleged criminals both feasible and acceptable in a democratic country are discussed. Based on a qualitative study of Mumbai police officers’ narratives accounting for use of deadly force, the paper draws upon wider policing literature in the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, South Africa and certain Latin American countries to explain why this form of police violence occurs.
Applying the Flashpoints Model of Public Disorder to the 2001 Bradford Riot
David P. Waddington
It is 21 years since the publication of the author's Flashpoints: Studies in Public Disorder. In this book, and in subsequent publications, David Waddington and his colleagues have outlined and refined the so-called Flashpoints Model of Public Disorder, which has underpinned separate analyses of orderly and disorderly crowd events in Britain, Europe, Asia, Australasia, and North and South America. The model has had its critics and detractors—the most recent being Paul Bagguley and Yasmin Hussain, who level several criticisms at the model in their book, Riotous Citizens: Ethnic Conflict in Multicultural Britain, an analysis of the 2001 Bradford riot. This paper not only addresses these criticisms, but uses Bagguley and Hussain's own account as the basis of a re-analysis of the Bradford riot in terms of the flashpoints model.
Reading Difference Differently?: Identity, Epistemology and Prison Ethnography
Coretta Phillips and Rod Earle
Prison ethnographers have tended to downplay the epistemological and methodological dilemmas relating to identity and positionality, which have been more commonly rehearsed in anthropological and sociological ethnographies. This paper explores these issues through a reflexive interrogation of a study of prisoner identities and social relations in two male prisons, with a particular focus on race/ethnicity, class and gender. Drawing from interactions with two prisoners as case studies, it applies Walkerdine et al.’s (2001) psycho-social analytical frame to illustrate how the subjectivities and biographies of researchers are implicated in the dynamics of prison research encounters and analysis. In doing so, it considers the epistemological implications of reflexive practice for interpreting the prison field.
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