Insider Accounts of Institutional Corruption: Examining the Social Organization of Unethical Behaviour
Garry C. Gray
Institutional corruption involves influences that implicitly or purposively serve to distort the independence of a professional in a position of trust. The concept brings into focus the everyday norms, practices and scripts of professional life that can systematically influence unethical behaviours. To make visible these often implicit influences, insider accounts are particularly valuable. This is demonstrated through an analysis of insider accounts by Jack Abramoff, the American lobbyist who was criminally charged in 2006. From these accounts, I develop a typology of techniques that perpetuate the social organization of institutional corruption in lobbying and Congress. More broadly, the institutional corruption concept provides an empirical pathway that can rejuvenate inquiries into the world of professional misconduct and unethical behaviour.
Criminology à La Française: French Academic Exceptionalism
Renaud Colson
On 13 February 2012, a decree established criminology as a new discipline in the French university system. Six months later, the new Ministry of Higher Education and Research rolled back the reform and abolished the newly created section of criminology. Because French university governance remains centralized and corporatist, any project that transforms an interdisciplinary field of research into a fully fledged academic discipline is difficult to carry out, all the more when the latter bears a political and utilitarian dimension as criminology does. It comes, then, as no surprise that, in the hyper-disciplined French university, the disciplinary enterprise of institutionalizing criminology is fraught with difficulties, not least of which is the existence of an undisciplined academia.
Making History: Academic Criminology and Human Rights
Thérèse Murphy and Noel Whitty
David Garland has written that ‘an engagement with human rights is essential for 21st century criminology that aspires to depth and relevance’. But what does it mean to do human rights criminologically? Also, should it be viewed as a new phenomenon or are there histories of engagement with rights to be found within academic criminology? And what is the relationship between any such histories and the methods and goals that are influencing contemporary criminological positions on human rights? This article engages with these questions, though it will not answer them. Its goal is a preliminary one: to explain why academic criminology ought to enquire into its own history with human rights. Given the range of engagements with, and repudiations of, rights discourse over time, that history is likely to be complex. But understanding it, we suggest, is important for criminology going forward.
Shaking the Foundations: On the Moral Economy of Criminal Justice
Philip Whitehead and Paul Crawshaw
During the last three decades, criminal justice, in England and Wales, has been subjected to ethico-cultural disturbances. Fiscal realignments, punitive and bureaucratic expansion, reducing cultural divides between probation and prison, and the diminution of psychosocial curiosity are some of the features which have eroded the concept of moral economy. There are also pressing threats and dangers, during 2010–15, as the criminal justice system is embedded within a new material platform through deeper integration into the circuits of capital accumulation and market expansion. This article advances an intellectual case for reanimating the lineaments of moral economy through dialectical contestation, to renew interest in justice, truth and fairness, by forging links between Judaeo-Christian ethics and Continental philosophy.
‘With Scenes of Blood and Pain’: Crime Control and the Punitive Imagination of The Meth Project
Travis Linnemann, Laura Hanson, and L. Susan Williams
This article takes aim at an image-based methamphetamine (meth) intervention programme in the United States, to reveal disparate images of meth users organized along a binary system of value, pitting the sexual vulnerabilities of young women against the violent predation of young men. We argue the programme structures a particular visuality or way of seeing the supposed ills of meth use that agitates white middle-class social anxieties, through a ‘meth epidemic’ unfairly imagined as ‘white’ and ‘rural’. Following self-justifying drug war logics, the project battles an epidemic it helps to create and sustain. Thus, we see the programme as an important site of cultural production where its punitive visualities contribute to structures of ideological penal policies and practices or ‘imaginary penalities’ that obfuscate alternatives for harm reduction and the ills of the neo-liberal order.
Storytelling at the Police Station: The Canteen Culture Revisited
Merlijn van Hulst
Police storytelling is an understudied aspect of police culture(s). In the literature, two views can be found. One view is that storytelling helps officers to learn the craft of policing. Another view is that storytelling is merely part of a ‘canteen culture’ that deals with the lack of excitement in real police work. On the basis of a two-year ethnographic study in a Dutch police station, I claim that the practice of storytelling is a crucial part of everyday police station life. However, the work police stories do and the forms they have differ from one backstage context to the next.
Public Assessments of the Police in Rural and Urban China: A Theoretical Extension and Empirical Investigation
Ivan Y. Sun, Yuning Wu, and Rong Hu
Although the past decade has witnessed the burgeoning of studies on Chinese evaluations of the police, several issues remain under-addressed, including the perceptions of rural residents, the multidimensional nature of assessments of the police, and the effects of social and political activities. This study addresses these concerns by analysing data collected from both rural and urban China. Contrary to Western evidence, villagers were found to display lower degrees of satisfaction with their police than urbanites. Chinese trust in the police is one-dimensional in nature and is distinguishable from and predicted by satisfaction with the police. Chinese assessments of the police were significantly linked to trust in neighbourhood committees, participation in conflict resolution, perceived law and order, and quality of life.
The Scammers Persuasive Techniques Model: Development of a Stage Model to Explain the Online Dating Romance Scam
Monica T. Whitty
This study examined the persuasive techniques employed by criminals in the online dating romance scam. Twenty participants were interviewed, including financial and non-financial victims. The paper first examines errors in decision making and finds victims make similar errors compared with victims of other mass marketing frauds. It is also proposes that the near-win phenomenon is useful in explaining why individuals remain in the scam and why some become re-victimized. A model called the Scammers Persuasive Technique Model is developed to highlight the processes involved in the scam. It provides a description of the victim and highlights how criminals groom victims prior to any financial requests. The various stages that follow to keep the victim involved in the scam are highlighted.
The Influence of Event Characteristics and Actors’ Behaviour on the Outcome of Violent Events: Comparing Lethal with Non-Lethal Events
Soenita Minakoemarie Ganpat, Joanne van der Leun, and Paul Nieuwbeerta
This study examines to what extent event characteristics and actors’ behaviour contribute to the escalation of an event into a lethal outcome. We examined Dutch court files of 267 events in which offenders were convicted for either lethal violence (i.e. homicide, N = 126) or non-lethal violence (i.e. attempted homicide, N = 141). Pronounced differences were found between lethal versus non-lethal events with respect to event characteristics and to actors’ behaviour in particular. Also, several situational characteristics including event characteristics and actors’ behaviour were found to be significantly predictive of the lethality of violent events, especially regarding alcohol use by victims, firearm use by offenders, victim precipitation and the absence of third parties.
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