Editor's choice: Fieldwork, Biography and Emotion: Doing Criminological Autoethnography
Stephen Wakeman
This article presents an introductory yet critical overview of autoethnographic research in criminological contexts. Drawing on experiences of participant observation with heroin and crack cocaine users and dealers, as a former user and dealer of these drugs myself, the article demonstrates how the domains of fieldwork, biography and the emotions intersect to render clear a progressive account of heroin addiction. However, this is offset against some negative occurrences directly reducible to doing ethnography where biographical congruence exists between the researcher and the researched. Ultimately, it is argued here that an increased consideration of the self—biographically and emotionally—both permits and facilitates the presentation of analytic yet stylized data in the form of what is termed below, ‘lyrical criminology’.
Temple Looting in Cambodia: Anatomy of a Statue Trafficking Network
Simon Mackenzie and Tess Davis
Qualitative empirical studies of the illicit antiquities trade have tended to focus either on the supply end, through interviews with looters, or on the demand end, through interviews with dealers, museums and collectors. Trafficking of artefacts across borders from source to market has until now been something of an evidential black hole. Here, we present the first empirical study of a statue trafficking network, using oral history interviews conducted during ethnographic criminology fieldwork in Cambodia and Thailand. The data begin to answer many of the pressing but unresolved questions in academic studies of this particular criminal market, such as whether organized crime is involved in antiquities looting and trafficking (yes), whether the traffic in looted artefacts overlaps with the insertion of fakes into the market (yes) and how many stages there are between looting at source and the placing of objects for public sale in internationally respected venues (surprisingly few).
The Protector’s Choice: An Application of Protection Theory to Somali Piracy
Anja Shortland and Federico Varese
What explains the variation in piracy along the coasts of Somalia? We answer this question by drawing upon Protection Theory and a new data set of piracy incidents. First, we make a distinction between pirates and protectors of piracy (authorities and local clans). We show that authorities offer shelter and protection to pirates in areas remote from trade routes and when they face challenges over political control. Theoretically, the paper identifies the moment when a protector decides to switch from protecting crime to protecting legitimate trading activities; it also highlights a preserve effect of electoral democracy in unstable contexts, namely the strong incentives to rely on organized criminals to fund electoral competition and secessionist aspirations. We conclude by offering comparative remarks on the trajectory of the nation-building project in Somalia and suggest that building infrastructures, fostering regional trade and more generally providing alternative sources of income to local communities is the best way to fight piracy.
What Is Policeness? On Being Police in Somalia
Alice Hills
This article uses the notion of policeness to explore the essence of what police are, what makes for a police and what makes it recognized as such. Western ideas of police are based on a specific understanding of what a police organization is, but this is not necessarily the case in the global South. Based on the experience of Somalia’s police forces, it appears that while there is something universally distinctive about police organizations, police are best understood as a project reflecting political and social processes within unequal fields of power. Ultimately, policeness, which alludes to the symbolic and coercive functions associated with police, is a matter of perception.
The Crime Triangle of Kidnapping for Ransom Incidents in Colombia, South America: A ‘Litmus’ Test for Situational Crime Prevention
Stephen F. Pires, Rob T. Guerette, and Christopher H. Stubbert
Crime science research over the last few decades has shown that crime tends to concentrate, most notably spatially and temporally. These and other concentrations oriented by the crime triangle (victims, offenders and places) offer important implications for the development of effective prevention initiatives. Yet, these findings have mostly been derived from analysis of conventional domestic crimes leaving questions as to whether similar patterning occurs among less studied crime types, such as kidnappings. This study examined 9,696 kidnapping incidents (2002–2011) in Colombia, South America, to see whether kidnappings for ransom exhibit similar concentrations according to the crime triangle framework. Results suggest that kidnappings indeed have spatio-temporal and other concentrations, which could be used to guide policy makers and policing organizations in the formulation of strategic preventive action, rather than relying on reactive efforts after kidnapping incidents have already occurred.
Extra-legal Protection in China: How Guanxi Distorts China’s Legal System and Facilitates the Rise of Unlawful Protectors
Peng Wang
This paper incorporates the concept of guanxi—a Chinese version of personal connections, networks or social capital—into the discussion of police corruption and the rise of extra-legal protectors. Using published materials and fieldwork data collected from two Chinese cities (Chongqing and Qufu), it demonstrates how guanxi distorts China’s legal system by facilitating the buying and selling of public offices and promoting the formation of corrupt networks between locally based criminals and government officials. China’s weak legal framework encourages individuals and entrepreneurs to employ guanxi networks to obtain private protection from alternative suppliers (e.g. corrupt government officials and street gangsters) in order to protect property rights, facilitate transactions and fend off government extortion.
An Ethnographic Study of the Policing of Internal Borders in the Netherlands: Synergies Between Criminology and Anthropology
Paul Mutsaers
Tense contact between the police and migrants in Western societies remains to be an important topic in police scholarship. In sociological studies of the police, this matter is ascribed to the discretionary authority of individual officers that is sanctioned by their departments—not to official policy or direct ethnic or racial orientations. This article (1) discusses the ‘policing of migration’ literature that claims the exact opposite; (2) applies this literature to the Dutch context in order to show that migrants are increasingly and deliberately targeted for control by numerous public, semi-public and private agencies; (3) empirically explores the ramifications of such ‘internal border control’ and (4) argues in favour of a synergy between criminological and anthropological work on this topic.
Similar Punishment?: Comparing Sentencing Outcomes in Domestic and Non-Domestic Violence Cases
Christine E. W. Bond and Samantha Jeffries
Despite shifts in Western liberal democracies towards stronger criminal justice responses to domestic violence, the issue of sentencing disparity between domestic and non-domestic violence offending cases remains largely neglected. Using a population of cases sentenced in the New South Wales (Australia) lower courts between January 2009 and June 2012, we report multivariate analyses of the sentencing of domestic violence and non-domestic violence offences. Results show that when sentenced under statistically similar circumstances, domestic violence offenders are less likely than those convicted of crimes outside of domestic contexts to be sentenced to prison although the substantive impact is small. Further, of those imprisoned, domestic violence offenders receive significantly shorter sentenced terms. Our findings also suggest that, for domestic violence offences, there may be a ‘punishment cost’ to being older, male and Indigenous. The role of outmoded stereotypical assumptions around domestic violence in sentencing decision making is discussed.
Becoming a Desister: Exploring the Role of Agency, Coping and Imagination in the Construction of a New Self
Deirdre Healy
It is thought that agency plays an important role in the transition from the identity of ‘offender’ to ‘ex-offender’. Yet, despite a growing theoretical literature, little is known about how people use agency in their interactions with the social world to achieve valued goals. This article aims to (1) establish whether agentic action is facilitated by the ability to imagine a credible new self and (2) investigate the situational coping mechanisms that desisters use to overcome barriers to change and achieve meaningful lives. It presents the results of an exploratory study which involved in-depth interviews with a sample of adult men who were in the process of desisting from crime. The results suggested that the ability to imagine a credible future self was associated with agency, coping and well-being.
Social Solidarity, Penal Evolution and Probation
Fergus McNeill and Matt Dawson
Compared to the sociology of the prison, the sociology of probation has been much neglected. In Europe and the United States, that neglect is beginning to be addressed by a number of scholars, both empirically and conceptually. Where these scholars have looked to the founding figures in the sociology of punishment, they have tended to examine probation through a Foucauldian or Marxist lens. This paper takes a different direction, re-examining Durkheim’s ideas about social solidarity and penal evolution to try to offer some analytical resources for making sense of probation’s historical development and contemporary struggles. In so doing, we hope to illustrate both the continuing value of Durkheimian analyses of penality and the need to extend such analyses beyond the prison. More broadly, we aim to briefly illustrate and to stimulate new cultural analyses of probation’s historical emergence and contemporary adaptations.
Imagined Communities and the Death Penalty in Britain, 1930–65
Lizzie Seal
Based on research into qualitative responses to capital punishment in mid twentieth-century Britain, this article examines how letter writers to the Home Office constructed imagined communities in relation to capital cases. It uncovers a shift in these responses from creating respectable, local communities in the period 1930–45, when most letter writers had a personal connection to the condemned, to the creation of the imagined national community from the late 1940s onwards, when most correspondents in relation to high profile cases were not connected to the condemned. These post-war letters reveal how meanings of Britishness, particularly in relation to the important symbol of ‘British justice’, were negotiated in relation to capital punishment.
Brooding Over the Dark Figure of Crime: The Home Office and the Cambridge Institute of Criminology in the Run-up to the British Crime Survey
Matthieu de Castelbajac
There was nothing inevitable about the emergence of the British Crime Survey. This article shows how the dark-figure metaphor was popularized in England, and how some of its notable promoters used it as an argument against victim surveys. It then focuses on two strategic sites for criminological research in England during the late 1960s and 1970s, the Cambridge Institute of Criminology and the Home Office. Despite some internal division, both institutions rejected early proposals for victim surveys. The first attempt to replicate victim surveys in England was almost thwarted by censors in the Institute and the ministry. The relevance of this historical process for the present criminological scene is discussed in the final section.
Hate Crime Victimization in Wales: Psychological and Physical Impacts Across Seven Hate Crime Victim Types
Matthew L. Williams and Jasmin Tregidga
This paper presents findings from the All Wales Hate Crime Project. Most hate crime research has focused on discrete victim types in isolation. For the first time, internationally, this paper examines the psychological and physical impacts of hate crime across seven victim types drawing on quantitative and qualitative data. It contributes to the hate crime debate in two significant ways: (1) it provides the first look at the problem in Wales and (2) it provides the first multi-victim-type analysis of hate crime, showing that impacts are not homogenous across victim groups. The paper provides empirical credibility to the impacts felt by hate crime victims on the margins who have routinely struggled to gain support.
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