British Journal of Criminology 53(3)

British Journal of Criminology, May 2013: Volume 53, Issue 3

‘Fighting is the Most Real and Honest Thing’: Violence and the Civilization/Barbarism Dialectic
John J. Brent and Peter B. Kraska

Over the past two decades, the activity of ‘cage-fighting’ has attracted massive audiences and significant attention from media and political outlets. Underlying the spectacle of these mass-consumed events is a growing world of underground sport fighting. By offering more brutal and less regulated forms of violence, this hidden variant of fighting lies at the blurry and shifting intersection between licit and illicit forms of recreation. This paper offers a theoretical and ethnographic exploration of the motivations and emotive frameworks of these unsanctioned fighters. We find that buried within the long-term process towards greater civility rest the seeds for social unrest, individual rebellion and ontological upheaval. By revealing the dialectical relationship between contemporary mechanisms of control and these uncivil performances, we argue these transgressions are a visceral reaction to today’s highly rationalized modes of state and social governance. More broadly, we attempt to understand the interrelationship between contemporary controls and sport fighting as a microcosm of the long-running struggle between civility and barbarism.

Making Sense of Disaster: Towards a Contextual, Phase-Based Understanding of Organizationally Based Acute Civilian Disasters
Howard Davis

Notwithstanding their visibility and the evident harm they cause, criminological attention to organizationally based acute civilian disasters (OBACDs) has been sporadic and the field has been left, in the main, to practitioners and scholars from other disciplines. This article suggests a research template for the contextual analysis of OBACDs examining the actions and omissions of key stakeholders through a succession of phases. A review of disaster literature was undertaken using this framework and used to develop a simple model of OBACDs elucidating issues around three criminological themes: the origins of OBACDs; the impact of and response to OBACDs; and the processes of sense-making, learning and accountability that follow OBACDs.

Former Refugees and Community Resilience: ‘Papering Over’ Domestic Violence
Gail Mason and Mariastella Pulvirenti

The efforts of new, former refugee communities to grow their legitimacy as citizens often in hostile host environments puts community needs at odds with individual needs. From an analysis of interviews with service providers across two states in Australia, and borrowing the concept of ‘papering over’, we demonstrate how these tensions impact on women in these communities building resilience to domestic violence. Despite community being vital for building individual resilience, ‘papering over’ operates to keep communities quiet about domestic violence and reliant on definitions of violence that serve to save the face of communities. While this is a challenge for how former refugee communities respond to domestic violence, it is also a challenge for how we conceptualize resilience across intersecting subject positions.

‘You Have to do it for Yourself’: Responsibilization in Youth Justice and Young People’s Situated Knowledge of Youth Justice Practice
Jo Phoenix and Laura Kelly

Drawing on governmentality theories, accounts of the responsibilizing effects of policy and practice have dominated recent studies of youth justice in England and Wales. This article develops this debate by asking: what can it mean to claim that young offenders are responsibilized by contemporary modes of governing youth offending? An exposition of the dominant ways in which ‘responsibilization’ is conceptualized highlights the theoretical foreclosures that, within such frameworks, make the subjective experiences of young offenders ‘unknowable’. We suggest that an empirical analysis of young people’s situated knowledge helps elucidate what responsibilization could mean in relation to young offenders: that they came to know there was no one else to help them change their lives.

Official Bias in Intergenerational Transmission of Criminal Behaviour
Sytske Besemer, David P. Farrington, and Catrien C.J.H. Bijleveld

We investigated to what extent children of convicted parents might have a higher risk of a conviction themselves because criminal justice systems, such as the police and courts, focus more attention towards certain criminal families—a concept called official bias. Bias was measured using several variables: a convicted parent, low family income, low family socio-economic status, poor housing and a father’s poor job record. A convicted parent as well as poorer social circumstances such as a father’s poor job record, low family income and poor housing predicted an increased conviction risk while controlling for self-reported offending. The results support the official bias mechanism, but also suggest that other mechanisms are needed to explain intergenerational transmission of criminal convictions.

Crime as a Price of Inequality?: The Gap in Registered Crime between Childhood Immigrants, Children of Immigrants and Children of Native Swedes
Martin Hällsten, Ryszard Szulkin, and Jerzy Sarnecki

We examine the gap in registered crime between the children of immigrants and the children of native Swedes. We follow all individuals who completed compulsory schooling during the period 1990–93 in the Stockholm Metropolitan area (N = 63,462) up to their thirties and analyse how family of origin and neighbourhood segregation during adolescence, subsequent to arriving in Sweden, influence the gap in recorded crimes. For males, we are able to explain between half and three-quarters of the gap in crime by reference to parental socio-economic resources and neighbourhood segregation. For females, we can explain even more, sometimes the entire gap. In addition, we tentatively examine the role of co-nationality or culture by comparing the crime rates of randomly chosen pairs of individuals originating from the same country. We find only a small correlation in the crime of individuals who share the same origin, indicating that culture is unlikely to be a strong cause of crime among immigrants.

China’s Death Penalty: The Supreme People’s Court, the Suspended Death Sentence and the Politics of Penal Reform
Susan Trevaskes

This paper examines the issue of judicial discretion and the role of the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) in death penalty reform since 2007. The SPC has been encouraging judges to give ‘suspended’ death sentences rather than ‘immediate execution’ for some homicide cases. Lower court judges are encouraged to use their discretion to recognize mitigating circumstances that would allow them to sentence offenders to a suspended death sentence. The SPC has used ‘guidance’ instruments which include ‘directives’ and other SPC interpretations and a new ‘case guidance’ system which provides case exemplars to follow. We explore these guidance instruments as a way of deepening our understanding of how law, politics and judicial practices are interwoven to achieve reform goals.

The Politics of China’s Death Penalty Reform in the Context of Global Abolitionism
Michelle Miao

This paper explores the influences of worldwide anti-death penalty campaigns in the local institutional environment in China and its implications for China’s capital punishment reforms in recent years. It found a ‘concentric pattern’ of the dissemination of human rights values and anti-death penalty activisms may explain the varying attitudes towards human rights and international activism among different social groups across the Chinese society. Divergent interests of and perceptions held by national-level and lower-level legal elites are likely to be one of the causes for China to adopt an incremental reformist stance. Further, this study shows that the Chinese legal elites were poorly informed of the current status of public opinion on capital punishment. A populist-sentiment-driven administration of capital punishment is closely tied to reliance on capital punishment.