British Journal of Criminology 53(2)

British Journal of Criminology, March 2013: Volume 53, Issue 2

Crime and War in Afghanistan: Part I: The Hobbesian Solution
John Braithwaite and Ali Wardak

This article views Afghanistan less as a war, and more as a contest of criminalized justice systems. The Taliban came to power because they were able to restore order to spaces terrorized by armed gangs and Mujahideen factions. After the Taliban’s ‘defeat’ in 2001, their resurgence was invited by the failure of state justice and security institutions. The Taliban returned with a parallel court system that most Afghans viewed as more effective and fair than the state system. Polls suggest judges were perceived as among the most corrupt elements of a corrupt state. Police were widely perceived as thieves of ordinary people’s property, not protectors of it. While the US diagnosis of anomie in Afghanistan up to 2009 was aptly Hobbesian, its remedy of supporting President Hamid Karzai as a Leviathan was hardly apt. The West failed to ask in 2001 ‘What is working around here to provide people security?’. One answer to that question was jirga/shura. A more Jeffersonian rural republicanism that learnt from local traditions of dispute resolution defines a path not taken.

Crime and War in Afghanistan: Part II: A Jeffersonian Alternative?
Ali Wardak and John Braithwaite

In Part I of this article, US President, Barack Obama, is reported as saying to his inner circle that their objective in Afghanistan is not to build a Jeffersonian democracy. Part II is about the idea that a more Jeffersonian architecture of rural republicanism in tune with Afghan traditions is a remedy to limits of the Hobbesian analysis of cases like Afghanistan in Part I. Anomic spaces where policing and justice do not work are vacuums that can attract tyrannical forms of law and order, such as the rule of the Taliban. Peace with justice cannot prevail in the aftermath of such an occupation without a reliance on both local community justice and state justice that are mutually constitutive. Supporting checks on abuse of power through balancing local and national institutions that deliver justice is a more sustainable peace-building project than regime change and top-down re-engineering of successor regimes.

Community-Driven Youth Justice and the Organizational Consequences of Coercive Governance
Randolph R. Myers and Tim Goddard

This article offers a descriptive analysis of the youth crime prevention and intervention strategies of three community-based organizations in the western United States. The article first identifies shared philosophies and practices of organizations that orient to crime as a product of social injustice. It then casts light on the broader issues of cultural resonance and specific governmental hindrances faced by organizations, including how the tracking of performance measures and market-based funding schemes impact the actual operation of community approaches. Through this analysis, the article sketches some of the key elements needed for constructing a theoretical framework to explain how neo-liberal forces may lead to the proliferation or demise of organizations working to create a progressive alternative to United States-style youth justice.

Sentencing Riot-Related Offending: Where Do the Public Stand?
Julian V. Roberts and Mike Hough

This article examines public attitudes to the sentencing offences associated with the rioting which took place in England in August 2011. Findings are based on a nationally representative survey of adults. The study uses a randomized split-sample experimental design to compare sentencing preferences for actual offences committed during the riots with preferences for similar offences committed under normal circumstances. The riot sub-sample generally ‘sentenced’ more severely than the non-riot sub-sample, but much less severely than the courts. The majority also thought that a non-custodial sentence with a reparative element was an acceptable alternative to custody. These trends suggest an unusual divergence of perspectives between the community and the courts: although the public are generally critical of the courts for leniency, with respect to non-violent offending during the riots, the latter appear more punitive.

Pressures to Plead Guilty: Factors Affecting Plea Decisions in Hong Kong’s Magistrates’ Courts
Kevin Kwok-yin Cheng

Guilty pleas are the primary mode of case dispositions in the common law world, and its propensity is seen to undermine due process principles. Hong Kong for many remains a steadfast protector of due process despite its handover back to China. The written law in Hong Kong, while emphasizing the importance of ensuring defendants make their plea decisions free from any improper pressure, neglects the intrinsic pressures brought upon by having to go through the criminal justice process. Results from courtroom observations in two Hong Kong magistrates’ courts indicate that defendants who made an admission, represented themselves and were denied bail were more likely to plead guilty. Overall, defendants plead guilty to terminate as quickly as possible the ‘punishment’ of being caught up in the criminal justice system.

Business and The Risk of Crime in China
Roderic Broadhurst, Brigitte Bouhours, and Thierry Bouhours

The results of a large victimization survey conducted in 2006 of 5,117 businesses in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Xi’an are reported. Over one-quarter (26.2 per cent) of businesses reported at least one incident of crime over the past year, but higher risks of commercial crimes (i.e. fraud, bribery, extortion and intellectual property offences) than common crime (i.e. robbery, assault and theft) were found. Across the cities, the rate of commercial crime (22.6 per cent) was 3.4 times that of common crime (6.7 per cent) and businesses in Shenzhen were at higher risk of commercial crime (27.9 per cent) than those in Xi’an (25.3 per cent) and Hong Kong and Shanghai (19.5 per cent). Just over 6 per cent of respondents mentioned incidents of bribery. Larger businesses were most at risk especially of fraud and differences between the cities were small. The survey shows that the level of crime reported by businesses located in China was lower than other emerging economies as well as Western and Eastern Europe. Explanations about the level of crime against business in China are discussed at the macro level using Durkheimian ideas about modernization and crime and at the meso/micro levels by drawing from opportunity and routine activity theories.

Involvement in Crime, Individual Resources and Structural Constraints: Processes of Cumulative (Dis)Advantage in a Stockholm Birth Cohort
Anders Nilsson, Olof Bäckman, and Felipe Estrada

In this article, we study how a central welfare outcome, labour market attachment, develops for different groups defined on the basis of their criminal involvement over the life course. Can we see the pattern of increasing inter-group disparities in labour market attachment that would be predicted by cumulative disadvantage theories? If so, is this a result of the criminal history of individuals or should criminal involvement be seen as one element in a negative life trajectory in a more general sense? And what role do circumstances at the structural level play in such a process? The Swedish economic recession of the 1990s and an examination of how a Stockholm cohort entered, lived through and then exited the unemployment crisis provide an opportunity to study how macro events affect different groups of individuals in a specific socio-historical situation. Our results show that both individual resources and historical events at the structural level are important when it comes to describing individual biographies and events in the life course.

Daily Trends and Origin of Computer-Focused Crimes Against a Large University Computer Network: An Application of the Routine-Activities and Lifestyle Perspective
David Maimon, Amy Kamerdze, Michel Cukier, and Bertrand Sobesto

Cybercrime has been the focus of public attention during the last decade. However, within the criminological field, no prior research initiatives have been launched in an effort to better understand this phenomenon using computer network data. Addressing this challenge, we employ the classical routine-activities and lifestyle perspective to raise hypotheses regarding the trends and origin of computer-focused crime incidents (i.e. computer exploits, port scans, and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks) against a large university computer network. We first propose that computer-focused crimes against a university network are determined by the university users’ daily activity patterns. In addition, we hypothesize that the social composition of the network users determines the origin of computer attacks against the university network. We use data recorded between the years 2007 and 2009 by an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) to test these claims. Consistently with our theoretical expectations, two important findings emerge. First, computer attacks are more likely to occur during university official business hours. Second, an increase in the number of foreign network users substantially increases the number of computer-focused crimes originating from Internet Protocol (IP) addresses linked with these users’ countries of origin. Future directions for subsequent studies are discussed.