The British Journal of Criminology 54(4)

The British Journal of Criminology, July 2014: Volume 54, Issue 4

Bridging Structure and Perception: On the Neighbourhood Ecology of Beliefs and Worries About Violent Crime
Ian Brunton-Smith, Jonathan Jackson, and Alex Sutherland

Applying Robert Sampson’s (2012) work on interdependent spatial patterns in a new setting, we link structural characteristics of the neighbourhood to public beliefs and worries about neighbourhood violence via two intermediate mechanisms: (1) collective efficacy and (2) neighbourhood disorder. Analysing data from face-to-face interviews of 61,436 individuals living in 4,761 London neighbourhoods, we find that the strength of informal social control mechanisms and the extent of low-level breaches of common standards of behaviour communicate information about the prevalence and threat of violent crime in one’s neighbourhood. Moreover, collective efficacy partially mediates many of the statistical effects of structural characteristics of the neighbourhood on beliefs and worries about violent crime. Theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.

Officers as Mirrors: Policing, Procedural Justice and the (Re)Production of Social Identity
Ben Bradford, Kristina Murphy, and Jonathan Jackson

Encounters with the criminal justice system shape people’s perceptions of the legitimacy of legal authorities, and the dominant explanatory framework for this relationship revolves around the idea that procedurally just practice increases people’s positive connections to justice institutions. But there have been few assessments of the idea—central to procedural justice theory—that social identity acts as an important social-psychological bridge in this process. Our contribution in this paper is to examine the empirical links between procedural justice, social identity and legitimacy in the context of policing in Australia. A representative two-wave panel survey of Australians suggests that social identity does mediate the association between procedural justice and perceptions of legitimacy. It seems that when people feel fairly treated by police, their sense of identification with the superordinate group the police represent is enhanced, strengthening police legitimacy as a result. By contrast, unfair treatment signals to people that they do not belong, undermining both identification and police legitimacy.

Parenting and Time Adolescents Spend in Criminogenic Settings: A Between- and Within-person Analysis
Heleen J. Janssen, Maja Deković, and Gerben J. N. Bruinsma

Although there has been increasing interest in explaining adolescents’ crime involvement by the time adolescents spend in criminogenic settings, little is known about its determinants. We examine the extent to which (change in) parenting is related to (change in) time spent in criminogenic settings. Time spent in criminogenic settings is measured in a comprehensive way by including social and environmental characteristics of micro settings (200 by 200 m). Longitudinal multilevel analysis on two waves of panel data on a Dutch sample of 603 adolescents (age 12–19) showed that more parental monitoring, more parental limit setting and a higher quality of the parent adolescent relationship were related to less time spent in criminogenic settings (between-person). Decreases in parental limit setting and in the quality of the parent–adolescent relationship were related to increases in the amount of time spent in criminogenic settings over time (within-person). These findings emphasize the important role parents continue to play during adolescence.

Legal Cynicism and Parental Appraisals of Adolescent Violence
Brian Soller, Aubrey L. Jackson, and Christopher R. Browning

Research suggests that legal cynicism—a cultural frame in which the law is viewed as illegitimate and ineffective—encourages violence to maintain personal safety when legal recourse is unreliable. But no study has tested the impact of legal cynicism on appraisals of violence. Drawing from symbolic interaction theory and cultural sociology, we tested whether neighbourhood legal cynicism alters the extent to which parents appraise their children’s violence as indicative of aggressive or impulsive temperaments using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. We find that legal cynicism attenuates the positive association between adolescent violence and parental assessments of aggression and impulsivity. Our study advances the understanding of micro-level processes through which prevailing cultural frames in the neighbourhood shape violence appraisals.

Trajectories to Mid- and Higher-level Drug Crimes: Penal Misrepresentations of Drug Dealers in Norway
Victor L. Shammas, Sveinung Sandberg, and Willy Pedersen

While the Nordic countries represent a zone of penal moderation, drug offences remain subject to harsh punishment. Based on 60 interviews with incarcerated drug dealers, we present four trajectories and turning points to the higher tiers of the illegal drug economy. The first trajectory is characterized by criminal entrepreneurship, but three other trajectories were equally evident: (1) Many drug dealers experienced poor parenting, parental substance abuse and early involvement with substance-using peers; (2) for others, marginalization processes started in adulthood, related to job loss and the breakdown of intimate relationships; (3) for some, drug dealing was interwoven with substance abuse. The findings suggest that drug control policies rest on misleading ideas about the trajectories of persons convicted of drug crimes.

‘F**king Freak! What the Hell Do You Think You Look Like?’: Experiences of Targeted Victimization Among Goths and Developing Notions of Hate Crime
Jon Garland and Paul Hodkinson

Greater Manchester Police’s categorization of targeted attacks on ‘alternative subculture’ members as hate crimes prompted extensive debate about whether such incidents are comparable to those of recognized hate crime groups. Hate crime experts have contributed to this debate, but there is a lack of detailed empirical research on the subject. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 21 respondents mostly affiliated to the goth scene, this article uncovers extensive experience of verbal harassment and, for some respondents, repeated incidents of targeted violence. The nature and impact of such experiences, we argue, bear comparison with key facets of hate crime. Such evidence informs and underlines the importance of conceptual arguments about whether hate crime can or should be extended beyond recognized minority groups.

Deconstructing the Poaching Phenomenon: A Review of Typologies for Understanding Illegal Hunting
Erica von Essen, Hans Peter Hansen, Helena Nordström Källström, M. Nils Peterson, and Tarla Rai Peterson

This review explores the way that the illegal hunting phenomenon has been framed by research. We demarcate three main approaches that have been used to deconstruct the crime. These include ‘drivers of the deviance’, ‘profiling perpetrators’ and ‘categorizing the crime’. Disciplinary silo thinking on the part of prominent theories, an overreliance on either a micro or a macro perspective, and adherence to either an instrumental or normative perspective are identified as weaknesses in existing approaches. Based on these limitations in addressing sociopolitical dimensions of the phenomenon, we call for a more integrative understanding that moves illegal hunting from being approached as a ‘crime’ or ‘deviance’ to being seen as a political phenomenon driven by the concepts of defiance and radicalization.

The Changing Nature of Contemporary Maritime Piracy: Results from the Contemporary Maritime Piracy Database 2001–10
Anamika A. Twyman-Ghoshal and Glenn Pierce

The accurate monitoring of piracy tactics is imperative for understanding the changing nature of piracy. Using the most comprehensive, global piracy data set available to date—the Contemporary Maritime Piracy Database (CMPD), this article documents the change in piracy, identifying that the new form of piracy that emerged in the 1990s became the dominant type of piracy in the study period. The CMPD suggests that even though the escalation of piracy in Somalia has affected the profile of piracy overall, other forms of piracy, which display a different set of characteristics, still remain.

Online Victimization of Andaman Jarawa Tribal Women: An Analysis of the ‘Human Safari’ Youtube Videos (2012) and Its Effects
Debarati Halder and K. Jaishankar

In 2012, some tour operators in Andaman Islands used the Jarawa tribal women as private advertisements (Human Safari). The British Journalist Gethin Chamberlain brought this issue to the world’s attention (The Guardian, 7 January 2012). Later, some of the videos of this Human Safari were published in the YouTube, and these videos gave wide opportunities to objectify the Jarawa women as black female sex objects. Based on Chamberlain’s report, the Indian criminal justice agencies have taken steps to stop Human Safaris’ in Andaman. However, the online circulation of Jarawa Human Safari videos could not be stopped by anyone and this had done more harm to its victims, and this article is an attempt to analyze the effects of this victimization.