British Journal of Criminology 55(5)

British Journal of Criminology, September 2015: Volume 55, Issue 5

Featured: Greening Justice: Examining the Interfaces of Criminal, Social and Ecological Justice

Rob White and Hannah Graham

This article examines the growth of ecological awareness, alongside the emergence of environmental sustainability initiatives, within criminal justice institutions around the world. To date, such developments have received little empirical analysis from criminology scholars. Internationally, this article is among the first to critically analyse the ‘greening’ of policing, courts, prisons, offender supervision and community reintegration. Available literature and examples are reviewed, alongside original research findings. The motivations and ideologies underpinning this nascent green evolution raise deeper questions of ‘why?’ and ‘for whom?’ Innovative examples of sustainable justice architecture and catalysts for penal reform are differentiated from those which claim humanistic intentions and green credentials but, arguably, are based on instrumental fiscal motives that do little to challenge repressive carceral regimes.

Urban Policy, City Control and Social Catharsis: The Attack on Social Frailty as Therapy
Rowland Atkinson

Urban policies have increasingly been ‘criminalised’ as regeneration, public housing management and homelessness programmes have been aligned with the aims of criminal justice and anti-social behaviour measures. In this article, policies that tackle problem places, people and behaviours are interpreted as expressions of social anger and fear that are made tangible via periodic attacks on social marginality. Case examples are offered in which urban policies appear as a kind of social catharsis or exorcizing of fear/anxiety. Such urban policies appear to construct social vulnerability as a threat that thereby helps to trigger interventions that might help realize goals of urban renewal and release from worries about criminality and urban social decline. This model of control and policymaking is developed by drawing on the emotional energies at the heart of cultural criminology and critical perspectives taken from contemporary urban studies.

Why Restorative Justice Will Not Reduce Incarceration

William R. Wood

Restorative justice goals are frequently articulated on micro, meso and macro levels. One macro-level goal frequently made by advocates is that restorative justice may serve as a viable means of reducing incarceration. Focusing on Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, this article argues that while these countries have seen some of the largest increases in incarceration within western industrialized countries, as well as the most widespread use of restorative justice, there is little evidence that restorative justice has reduced prison populations. It also argues that as currently practiced there is little reason to assume that restorative justice will have a significant impact on incarceration in the near future. Attention is given to the problem of the ‘transformation assumption’ inherent in restorative justice that micro-level changes in offender behaviours or restorative outcomes can significantly affect the larger social structures of punishment and incarceration.

A Case Study Approach to Procedural Justice: Parents’ Views in Two Juvenile Delinquency Courts in the United States
Liana Pennington

The juvenile delinquency court aims to modify children’s behaviour, but little is known about how parents’ experiences in juvenile delinquency courts may be affecting the court’s efforts. Whether parents believe the court system is fair and effective could have important implications for the juvenile justice system. This research uses two case studies of parents in two different courts in the Northeast United States to examine how parents’ views are created and reinforced through experiences in the juvenile court process. Integrating concepts from the sociolegal framework of legal consciousness, this research challenges some of the core concepts of procedural justice and brings to the surface new ideas about negative views of the law and disengagement from the justice system.

Street Codes, Routine Activities, Neighbourhood Context and Victimization

Susan McNeeley and Pamela Wilcox

This study seeks to address the inconsistency in the literature regarding the relationship between the code of the street and victimization by drawing upon overlooked ideas embedded in Anderson’s work that are consistent with lifestyle-routine activities theory. Using Poisson-based multilevel regression models, we found that the effect of the street code on victimization was moderated by public activities: code-related values only contributed to greater risk of victimization for those with more public lifestyles. This interaction between the street code and routine activities was more influential in culturally disorganized neighbourhoods.

The Risks and Rewards of Organized Crime Investments in Real Estate

Marco Dugato, Serena Favarin, and Luca Giommoni

Despite growing interest in organized crime’s infiltration of the legal economy, research to date has paid little attention to the investments of criminal organizations in real estate. Using data on confiscated assets in 8,092 Italian municipalities between 2000 and 2012, this paper aims to remedy this lack of knowledge. Applying a risk–reward approach, based on the rational choice perspective, the analysis highlights what drives Italian mafia groups’ investments in the real estate sector. The results obtained support the validity of the rational choice perspective by showing how criminal organizations weigh risks and rewards in their decisions to invest in real estate.

Taking the Conservative Protestant Thesis Across the Atlantic. A Comparative Analysis of the Relationships Between Violence, Religion and Stimulants Use in Rural Netherlands
Don Weenink

Building upon the Southern culture of violence research tradition, this article inquires the association between rural violence and Conservative Protestantism in the Dutch context. Based on data of 8,106 individuals, it was found that young rural Conservative Protestants living in villages were more likely to report that they had committed violence, as compared to their fellow believers living in urbanized areas. Furthermore, it turned out that the association between alcohol consumption and violence is stronger among this category of religious rural youth. Finally, this study demonstrates that, contrary to the prevailing notion of the idyllic rural, the violence rates between young Dutch rural dwellers and their peers living in the rest of the country are virtually similar.

Shopping for Free? Looting, Consumerism and the 2011 Riots

Tim Newburn, Kerris Cooper, Rachel Deacon, and Rebekah Diski

A number of commentators have suggested that the riots in England in August 2011 were distinctive because of the character and extent of the looting that took place. In doing so, they have argued that the nature of modern consumer capitalism should be placed front and centre of any explanation of the disorder. While concurring with elements of such arguments, we depart from such analyses in three ways. First, we argue that it is important not to overstate the extent to which the 2011 riots were a departure from previous outbreaks of civil disorder—violent consumerism having a quite lengthy history. Second, using testimony from those involved, we argue that a focus on looting risks ignoring both the political character and the violence involved in the riots. Finally, and relatedly, we suggest that the focus on consumption potentially simplifies the nature of the looting itself by underestimating its political and expressive characteristics.

Collating Longitudinal Data on Crime, Victimization and Social Attitudes in England and Wales: A New Resource for Exploring Long-term Trends in Crime

Will Jennings, Emily Gray, Colin Hay, and Stephen Farrall

Exploring long-term trends in crime and criminal justice is a multifaceted exercise. This article introduces the construction and methodological benefits of a series of new data sets that amalgamate approximately 30 years of public data on crime, victimization, fear of crime, social and political attitudes with national socio-economic indicators in England and Wales. The data operate at both an aggregate and individual level and will be available for public use (and modification) from autumn 2015. Here, we outline the contours and contents of the data set and highlight the importance of using longitudinal data in exploring theoretical and empirical questions about crime, victimization and social attitudes.

British Journal of Criminology 55(4)

British Journal of Criminology, July 2015: Volume 55, Issue 4

Let Sleeping Lawyers Lie: Organized Crime, Lawyers and the Regulation of Legal Services
David Middleton and Michael Levi

The study examines the range of crimes in which solicitors become involved as primary offenders (mainly fraud) or on behalf of others (criminal planning and money laundering) and critically reviews the factors in their personal and working environment that may promote or inhibit such crimes and the ways that criminologists and socio-legal scholars have accounted for deviance and the regulation of the profession. It ends by discussing trends in contemporary lawyering and its regulation—ethics, discipline, ownership and surveillance—that could plausibly affect rates of crime by solicitors, focusing on England and Wales but also giving some comparative context with the United States.

‘Police Culture’ at Work: Making Sense of Police Oversight

Holly Campeau

Within police studies, ‘police culture’ is often depicted according to a series of values (e.g. conservatism, solidarity, suspicion, etc.). This article argues in favour of an alternative conceptualization of police ‘culture’, which draws on concepts from the sociology of culture. Police culture is viewed as a resource, which actors deploy within particular institutional constraints. Drawing on 100 interviews and participant observation in a police department, the analysis examines how officers negotiate meaning in an unsettled occupational environment prompted by heightened levels of police oversight. Two culture indicators are examined: solidarity and mission. This article represents an explicit attempt to theorize police culture sociologically and invoke an adaptive framework for uncovering how actors use culture within a definable set of structuring conditions.

The Pluralization of High Policing: Convergence and Divergence at the Public–Private Interface
Conor O’Reilly

High policing has long been associated with the preservation and augmentation of state interests by the intelligence community. However, this paradigm can neither be examined, nor theorized, within an exclusively ‘public’ framework; a host of ‘private’ actors must now be acknowledged on this conceptual terrain. Moving beyond well-acknowledged patterns of outsourcing intelligence, this paper brings sharper research attention to transnational security consultancies as well as the more shadowy realms of boutique intelligence firms, private detectives and freelance covert operatives. By examining these new private categories of high policing, this paper considers the complex patterns of convergence and divergence that characterize the public–private interface. Specific attention is devoted to resources of symbolic power and how these impact the capacity for coercive action.

Police Innovations, ‘Secret Squirrels’ and Accountability: Empirically Studying Intelligence-led Policing in Canada

Carrie B. Sanders, Crystal Weston, and Nicole Schott

In an environment of fiscal constraint and growing fear of catastrophic events, police services are turning to intelligence and analytic technologies to conduct aggressive information gathering and risk analysis. The present study uses 86 in-depth interviews and participant observation to explore the integration and utilization of intelligence-led policing (ILP) in a Canadian context. From this analysis, we identify how police cultures, organizational context and situational pace of policing constrain an intelligence-led framework. Further, we illustrate how police services have rhetorically adopted ILP and translated it to mean accountability in a time of austerity. By translating ILP, Canadian police services have been able to redefine success within their services without necessarily attending to the outcomes of their practices.

Simmel, the Police Form and the Limits of Democratic Policing

Diarmaid Harkin

I argue that the social theory of Georg Simmel can be used to illustrate certain limitations to the potential of democratic policing. Simmel makes a number of claims about trust, secrecy and accountability that are shown to have immediate relevance to my empirical case study of police–public consultation forums in Edinburgh, Scotland. Two particular aspects of the ‘form’ of the police–public relationship—the police’s command of non-negotiable force and inequality in the reciprocity of information—play a key role in limiting some of the principal aspirations of democratic policing theory. There are permanent barriers to improving the democratic credentials of the police I argue, yet positive and progressive change is still achievable.

Cultural and Institutional Adaptation and Change in Europe: A Test of Institutional Anomie Theory Using Time Series Modelling of Homicide Data
Diana S. Dolliver

This study examined whether geographic differences in intentional homicide rates in Europe were a function of societies that exhibit Anomic cultural tendencies and an institutional imbalance, as guided by Institutional Anomie Theory. This research is temporally sensitive, taking into account these differences over a 15-year time period. Additionally, separate operations of the theory within developed and transitioning countries were tested, and various cultural–institutional configurations were uncovered that led to increases or decreases in homicide rates. While still restricted by a lack of guidance from Messner and Rosenfeld and inconsistency in past research on how to operationalize key concepts of Institutional Anomie Theory, this study significantly contributes to the literature by assessing core theoretical questions of the theory while employing appropriate measurement strategies.

First Nations Peoples and Judicial Sentencing: Main Effects and the Impact of Contextual Variability
Krystal Lockwood, Timothy C. Hart, and Anna Stewart

Over-representation of First Nations peoples throughout criminal justice systems is an ongoing critical public policy issue. Judicial sentencing is a pivotal process, which has complex relationships with legal and extra-legal factors. In this study, we use data of serious offences from Queensland’s lower and higher courts from 2009 to 2010. First, logistic regression is used to consider the main effect of Indigenous status on the decision to imprison. Second, conjunctive analyses are used to determine whether contextual variability can illustrate when sentencing disparities occur. Results show the main effect of Indigenous status remained statistically significant in both court levels after controlling for variables. However, contextual variability influenced both the magnitude and direction of the effect of Indigenous status on sentencing.

Feeling Unsafe in a Multicultural Neighbourhood: Indigenous Inhabitants’ Perspectives
Thaddeus Müller and Tamar Fischer

Feeling unsafe in a multicultural neighbourhood has been related—especially in the case of indigenous inhabitants—to the presence of groups of young immigrant men in public space. However, indigenous inhabitants differ in their response to the presence of immigrant men. Our goal is to examine (in a qualitative and quantitative way) whether interethnic social involvement has added value when it comes to explaining the experience of fear of crime, as compared to general social involvement. We conclude that our thesis regarding the relevance of interethnic social involvement for explaining the experience of safety is sustained by our material. Therefore, we advise that interethnic social involvement should be integrated in future studies on the fear of crime.

Narratives and Counternarratives: Somali-Canadians on Recruitment as Foreign Fighters to Al-Shabaab

Paul Joosse, Sandra M. Bucerius, and Sara K. Thompson

Recently, the Somali diaspora has found itself at the centre of heightened security concerns surrounding the proliferation of international terrorist networks and their recruitment strategies. These concerns have reached new levels since the absorption of al-Shabaab into al-Qaeda in 2012. Based on a qualitative analysis of interviews with 118 members of Canada’s largest Somali community, this article draws upon narrative criminology to reverse the ‘why they joined’ question that serves as the predicate for much recent radicalization scholarship, and instead explores, ‘why they would never join’. We encounter Somali-Canadians equipping themselves with sophisticated counternarratives that vitiate the enticements of al-Shabaab. Particularly, notions of ‘coolness’, ‘trickery’ and ‘religious perversion’ mediate participants’ perceptions of al-Shabaab and enable a self-empowering rejection of its recruitment narratives. In particular, we find resonances between the narratives of non-recruits and ‘bogeyman’ narratives that exist commonly in many cultures. The efficacy of these narratives for resilience is three-fold, positioning the recruiters as odious agents, recruits as weak-minded dupes and our participants as knowledgeable storytellers who can forewarn others against recruitment to al-Shabaab.

British Journal of Criminology 55(3)

British Journal of Criminology, March 2015: Volume 55, Issue 3

Understanding Complainant Credibility in Rape Appeals: A Case Study of High Court Judgments and Judges’ Perspectives in India
Ravinder Barn and Ved Kumari

Despite the growing number of reported cases of rape and sexual assault against women in India, there is an insufficient understanding of the perspectives and responses of the Indian Criminal Justice System in general and the judiciary in particular. By employing a framework of ‘complainant credibility’, this paper examines High Court judgments and judges’ perspectives in rape appeals. In placing a robust and systematic focus on one aspect of the Indian jurisdiction, this paper sheds light on how competing realities are understood by the judiciary to inform decision making about complainant credibility and suspect’s guilt in affirming or overturning trial court decisions.

Gender, Pressure, Coercion and Pleasure: Untangling Motivations for Sexting Between Young People
Murray Lee and Thomas Crofts

What has been problematically termed ‘sexting’ has attracted considerable legal, political, public, media and academic attention. Concern has focused on sexting between young people who may experience emotional and reputational damage and are at risk of being charged with child abuse or pornography offences in many jurisdictions. Recent research has rightly highlighted sexting’s gendered dynamics. Accordingly, a discourse has developed that imagines the common sexting scenario involves girls feeling pressured into sending boys sexual images. This article develops an analytic framework of pressure and critically reviews research into sexting. It suggests that while such scenarios occur, they do not reflect the experiences expressed by the majority of girls who actually engage in sexting, who are more likely to express motivations associated with pleasure or desire.

State-directed Sterilizations in North Carolina: Victim-centredness and Reparations
Sarah Brightman, Emily Lenning, and Karen McElrath

Thirty-three states in the United States implemented eugenic sterilization laws during the 20th century, and an estimated 65,000 US residents underwent coerced sterilization via state policies. In North Carolina, 7,528 individuals were targeted for state-led sterilization between 1929 and 1974. The majority of these individuals were women, impoverished and officially classified as ‘feeble-minded’. We argue that the sterilizations constituted serious violations of human rights largely due to state exploitation of already marginalized people, lack of consent and limited due process that accompanied sterilization orders. In this article, we analyze textual data from state proceedings that focused on reparations, and find considerable power differentials that placed sterilization victims at the margins rather than at the centre of the reparation process.

Disjointed Service: An English Case Study of Multi-agency Provision in Tackling Child Trafficking
Jackie H. Harvey, Rob A. Hornsby, and Zeibeda Sattar

This article examines the issue of child trafficking in the United Kingdom and of multi-agency responses in tackling it. The United Kingdom, as a signatory to the recent trafficking protocols, is required to implement measures to identify and support potential victims of trafficking—via the National Referral Mechanism. Effective support for child victims is reliant on cooperation between agencies. Our regional case study contends that fragmented agency understandings of protocols and disjointed partnership approaches in service delivery means the trafficking of vulnerable children continues across the region. This article asserts that child trafficking in the United Kingdom, previously viewed as an isolated localized phenomenon, maybe far more widespread, revealing deficiencies in child protection services for vulnerable children.

Capote’s Ghosts: Violence, Media and the Spectre of Suspicion
Travis Linnemann

In 1959, on the Kansas high plains, two ex-convict drifters fell upon a defenseless farm family, slaying them ‘in cold blood’. As the subject of a book widely regarded as the first of the modern true crime genre—Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood— the murdered and murderers live on in the spectral, haunting the minds of the public as the horrors of random crimes and senseless violence. Paying close attention to the cultural production of both the present and absent, this paper considers how violence haunts commonplace geographies and the imaginations of everyday actors, through the lens of banal crime reporting and celebrated true crime novels. Doing so, it offers unique context and insight into the production of suspect identities and the social insecurities that underpin everyday life.

Earning a Score: An Exploration of the Nature and Roles of Heroin and Crack Cocaine ‘User-dealers’
Leah Moyle and Ross Coomber

Research consistently shows a strong correlation between heroin/crack cocaine use, acquisitive crime and income generation, through activities such as sex work and theft. Less is known however about alternative choices of income generation such as small-scale drug supply. Drawing on data from interviews with 30 heroin and crack cocaine user-dealers in a city in South West England, this article explores the motivations, practices and roles undertaken by small-scale addicted suppliers who distribute drugs to other addicted users for the purpose of reproducing their own supply. Findings suggest that addicted user-dealers’ motivations are commonly different to those of commercially motivated suppliers, while their activities are perceived as a less harmful and a more convenient way of funding their drug dependency than other acquisitive crimes.

Social Structure and Bonhomie: Emotions in the Youth Street Gang
Kevin Moran

Scholars have overlooked the significance of emotion in motivating participation in deviant subcultures. Youth subcultures, particularly those of lower or working class provenance, emerge as an ongoing attempt to manage and mitigate structurally produced feelings of shame, by converting this sense of devaluation into pride. Using the youth street gang as a case study, this article gives greater precision to this emotional conversionary process, arguing that gangs transpose ambient parent culture of solidarity into subcultural emphasis on self and group affirming loyalty. Thus, espirit de corps, a central and vivifying value within youth street gangs, is magnified and maintained via group symbolic praxis and expressive violence. Moreover, youth street gang culture protects this emotional conversionary process from iatrogenic threats, i.e. injury, prison, the death of others, by subsuming potentially negative consequences within this subcultural system.

From Cybercrime to Cyborg Crime: Botnets as Hybrid Criminal Actor-Networks
Wytske van der Wagen and Wolter Pieters

Botnets, networks of infected computers controlled by a commander, increasingly play a role in a broad range of cybercrimes. Although often studied from technological perspectives, a criminological perspective could elucidate the organizational structure of botnets and how to counteract them. Botnets, however, pose new challenges for the rather anthropocentric theoretical repertoire of criminology, as they are neither fully human nor completely machine driven. We use Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to provide a symmetrical perspective on human and non-human agency in hybrid cybercriminal networks and analyze a botnet case from this perspective. We conclude that an ANT lens is particularly suitable for shedding light on the hybrid and intertwined offending, victimization and defending processes, leading to the new concept of ‘cyborg crime’.

A Crime Script Analysis of the Online Stolen Data Market
Alice Hutchings and Thomas J. Holt

The purpose of this study is to better understand the online black market economy, specifically relating to stolen data, using crime script analysis. Content analysis of 13 English- and Russian-speaking stolen data forums found that the different products and services offered enabled the commodification of stolen data. The marketplace offers a range of complementary products, from the supply of hardware and software to steal data, the sale of the stolen data itself, to the provision of services to turn data into money, such as drops, cashiers and money laundering. The crime script analysis provides some insight into how the actors in these forums interact, and the actions they perform, from setting up software to finalizing transactions and exiting the marketplace.

On the Relevance of Spatial and Temporal Dimensions in Assessing Computer Susceptibility to System Trespassing Incidents
David Maimon, Theodore Wilson, Wuling Ren, and Tamar Berenblum

We employ knowledge regarding the early phases of system trespassing events and develop a context-related, theoretically driven study that explores computer networks’ social vulnerabilities to remote system trespassing events. Drawing on the routine activities perspective, we raise hypotheses regarding the role of victim client computers in determining the geographical origins and temporal trends of (1) successful password cracking attempts and (2) system trespassing incidents. We test our hypotheses by analyzing data collected from large sets of target computers, built for the sole purpose of being attacked, that were deployed in two independent research sites (China and Israel). Our findings have significant implications for cyber-criminological theory and research.

The British Journal of Criminology 55(2)

The British Journal of Criminology, March 2015: Volume 55, Issue 2

Editor's choice: Enlisting the Public in the Policing of Immigration
Ana Aliverti

As border policing is no longer circumscribed to external borders and increasingly performed inland, in Britain migration work relies on the assistance of a range of unorthodox partners, including the public. The unearthing of the ‘community’ as a crucial partner to police a myriad of public safety issues, including migration, begs the question of what are the implications of mobilizing citizenship for law enforcement? This paper argues that enlisting the public in migration law enforcement yields important civic by-products: it ‘creates’ citizens and citizenship. It imparts civic training by instilling a sense of civic responsibility in law and order maintenance, and in doing so it intends to recreate social cohesion across a deeply fragmented society.

Foucault’s Punitive Society: Visual Tactics of Marking as a History of the Present
Phil Carney

Applying a form of genealogical method rooted in Nietzsche’s use of history, this article seeks an understanding of ‘marking’ punishments in our own mass-mediated culture. First, Foucault’s analysis of the punitive tactic of marking in his 1973 course, The Punitive Society, will be considered. Second, his concept of ‘virtual marking’ will be extended and applied to the case of the pitture infamanti in the early renaissance. Third, I will use these insights in a genealogical spirit in order to examine the rise of virtual marking in modernity. We will discover that Foucault was mistaken to tether marking punishments so closely to sovereign power. Instead, with certain antecedents in ancient Rome, virtual marking emerged in a largely ‘bourgeois’ society during the early renaissance and re-emerges in our own society of mass, photographic spectacle.

An Examination of the Local Life Circumstances of Female Offenders: Mothering, Illegal Earnings and Drug Use
Carolyn Yule, Paul-Philippe Paré, and Rosemary Gartner

Most women convicted of crime are mothers, yet we know little about whether the daily activity of mothering affects women’s criminal behaviour. If mothering reduces opportunities to engage in crime, strengthens informal controls and increases the costs of crime, it should discourage offending. On the other hand, if children create an imperative for resources that women cannot accommodate legally or exacerbate psychological and emotional strains, women may resort to criminal behaviour. Using data from interviews with 259 incarcerated women in Ontario, Canada, we estimate multi-level models focussing on month-to-month changes in women’s responsibilities for children and their offending. We find that mothering is an important ‘local life circumstance’ for reducing women’s involvement in criminal activities.

Gender, Aging and Drug Use: A Post-structural Approach to the Life Course
Ingrid Lander

This article focuses on the ageing process among drug-using women, proceeded on the basis of a critical post-structural approach to the life course (Holstein and Gubrium 2000; Halberstam 2005; Ahmed 2006; Mattsson 2014). The objective is to provide an alternative perspective on the life course to that which dominates current criminology. This perspective challenges prevailing norms and conceptions regarding the other, and in doing so focuses the analysis on the social mechanisms that lie behind social exclusion, crime and drug use. By means of the retrospective narratives of 4 women, who describe a rambling journey along crooked paths on the margins of the welfare state, the article reveals the nature of prevailing norms and conceptions regarding ageing, gender and drug use.

Neutralization Without Drift: Criminal Commitment Among Persistent Offenders
Bruce A. Jacobs and Heith Copes

Prior research suggests that serious predatory offenders are sufficiently committed to illicit conduct that they must neutralize good behaviour, rather than bad behaviour. Drawing from a sample of offenders who commit carjacking, we question that assumption. Specifically, our data reveal the manner in which such offenders neutralize bad conduct without meaningfully drifting. The notion of ‘neutralization without drift’ represents a theoretical refinement of neutralization theory and an extension of core conceptualization in the interpretation of criminal commitment. Through this concept, we attempt to make sense of how persistent predatory offenders who commit carjacking are able to embrace aggression, explain that it’s not ‘really them’, neutralize bad rather than good conduct, yet retain their status as committed criminals.

Officers and Drug Counsellors: New Occupational Identities in Nordic Prisons
Torsten Kolind, Vibeke A. Frank, Odd Lindberg, and Jouni Tourunen

Increasingly, prison drug treatment is introduced in European prisons. This increase may begin to change the prison as officers and drug counsellors are given new occupational responsibilities. Based on six month of observational studies and qualitative interviews with 104 prison employees in Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway in 12 prisons, this article investigates the practices and values of drug counsellors and officers. This shows that increasingly, counsellors integrate the control and disciplinary sanctions of the prison environment into their treatment approach. Simultaneously, officers working in drug treatment wings highlight the importance of the treatment ethos in their control work, adjusting the social representations of their professional identities accordingly. We discuss whether the concepts of treatment and control should be rethought.

Expanding the Community: An Exploratory Analysis of an American Parole Office’s Location and Its Impact on Parolees
Rita Shah

Numerous scholars study the effect of former prisoners’ neighbourhood on reintegration; few discuss how the geographic aspects of a community can impact the relationships within that community. This lack of discussion is particularly interesting for understanding the American parole system, as there seems to be no discussion of how the neighbourhood context of a parole office’s location impacts the relationships within. In this article, I argue the look, feel and location of a parole office may affect the parolee/parole agent relationship, which may in turn affect parole’s role in the reintegration process, and that we need to continue expanding criminological understandings of community and geography beyond where one lives and of how geographic and relational communities are connected.

Transforming ‘Summary Justice’ Through Police-led Prosecution and ‘Virtual Courts’: Is ‘Procedural Due Process’ Being Undermined?
Jenni Ward

The administration of ‘summary’ justice in the lower criminal courts in England and Wales is undergoing significant transformation. Broadly, this sits within the desire to create a modernized and more streamlined system. But, criminal justice scholars state ‘swift justice’ is not necessarily fair justice, and ‘procedural due process’ might be challenged by objectives of economics and speed. This paper centres on two areas of change—the expanded role of the police in prosecutorial decision making and the introduction of ‘virtual courts’ where accused defendants appear via video link from police stations to the criminal courts. It is argued these two alterations call into question fundamental principles of procedural due process.

‘Such Misconducts Don’t Make a Good Ranger’: Examining Law Enforcement Ranger Wrongdoing in Uganda
William D. Moreto, Rod K. Brunson, and Anthony A. Braga

Wildlife crime has been recognized to be an important topic of study by criminologists in recent years. Prior research has highlighted the detrimental impact of corruption on conservation-related issues. Law enforcement rangers are often the primary protectors of protected areas and wildlife. Yet, like other law enforcement agents, they are not immune to misconduct and corruption. The present study offers an in-depth examination of rangers’ experiences with and perceptions of wrongdoing in a specific Ugandan protected area. Findings indicate that ranger wrongdoing is driven by a myriad of factors and manifests in various ways. These findings have implications for the understanding and prevention of ranger misconduct.

On the Correlates of Reporting Assault to the Police in Malawi
Aiden Sidebottom

It is well known that many victims of crime do not notify the police. Research suggests that factors related to the victim, crime event and wider community are all implicated in the decision to report victimization. Few studies have investigated the correlates of victim reporting in developing countries, mainly owing to a lack of relevant data. It is therefore unclear whether the determinants of victim reporting in Western industrialized countries are generalizable to low-income developing settings. This paper explores the factors associated with victims reporting assault to the police in the African context of Malawi, using data from a nationally representative household survey. Results of a multilevel logistic regression indicate some similarities with the Western criminological literature, such as age of the victim and crime seriousness positively correlating with crime reporting. Other results seem to reflect the distinctive characteristics of Malawi, with victims more likely to report being assaulted if they are male, have access to a working phone or live in urban areas. The results illustrate the importance of studying criminological phenomena across a diverse range of settings. Implications of the findings for future research and crime prevention are discussed.

What Makes Long Crime Trips Worth Undertaking? Balancing Costs and Benefits in Burglars’ Journey to Crime
Christophe Vandeviver, Stijn Van Daele, and Tom Vander Beken

This study taps into rational choice theory and scrutinizes the assumption that profit maximization and effort minimization govern decisions related to burglary behaviour and the journey to crime. It treats distance as one of the major costs in the burglary target selection process and uses community characteristics to gain insight into how the anticipation of particular benefits favours the incremental costs of long crime trips. Two thousand three hundred and eighty-seven burglary trips were extracted from police records and analyzed using negative binomial regression analysis. The journey-to-crime distance was found to increase when burglaries were committed in communities containing motorways, dense road networks, and being ethnically heterogeneous. The journey-to-crime distance was found to decrease when densely populated areas and communities with high clearance rates are targeted.

British Journal of Criminology 55(1)

British Journal of Criminology, January 2015: Volume 55, Issue 1

Editor's Choice: Policing Humanitarian Borderlands: Frontex, Human Rights and the Precariousness of Life
Katja Franko Aas and Helene O. I. Gundhus

The article critically examines the peculiar co-existence of the securitization of the border and the growing presence and prominence of human rights and humanitarian ideals in border policing practices. Concretely, it focuses on Frontex, the agency tasked with management of EU’s external borders. Based on interviews with Frontex officials and border guard officers, and on the analysis of relevant policy documents and official reports, the article explores what may come across as a discrepancy between the organization’s activities and its public self-presentation. The objective is to provide an insight into the complex and volatile relationship between policing and human rights, which marks contemporary migration control as well as mundane forms of professional and personal self-understanding.

Half a Story? Missing Perspectives in the Criminological Accounts of British Muslim Communities, Crime and the Criminal Justice System
Julian Hargreaves

An examination of recent scholarly criminological literature concerning British Muslim reveals dominant discursive themes of victimization, discrimination and demonization and a highly politicized discourse, often rhetorical in nature and seldom supported by empirical evidence. Where such evidence is adduced, criminologists rely predominantly on limited qualitative research designs and small non-representative sample sizes. This article presents analysis of British Crime Survey/Crime Survey of England and Wales data and argues that quantitative findings highlight the need for a more nuanced criminological picture of British Muslim communities. It is argued that criminologists should place renewed focus on household crime, the effects of socio-economic factors, crimes involving non-physical forms of violence and Muslim respondents who report positive attitudes towards the police.

The 2011 England Riots in Recent Historical Perspective
Tim Newburn

The riots of 2011 arguably represent the most significant civil disorder on the British mainland in at least a generation. Over four days, there were five deaths, injuries to dozens of police officers and civilians and damage to property running into the tens of millions of pounds. Commentators writing in the aftermath of the riots have pointed both to what are taken to be unusual aspects of the 2011 disorders—the role of gangs, the nature and extent of looting and use of social media among others—as well as some of the parallels with previous riots. In placing the 2011 riots in their recent historical context, this article outlines a model for structuring comparative analysis of disorder and then moves on to consider some of the similarities between 2011 and riots in the post-war period, concluding by identifying four significant points of departure.

The 2011 English ‘Riots’: Prosecutorial Zeal and Judicial Abandon
Carly Lightowlers and Hannah Quirk

Much attention has focussed on the severity of the sentences imposed following the 2011 ‘summer rioting’ in England. The Court of Appeal confirmed that participation in a collective outbreak of disorder takes offending outside the sentencing guidelines. The position for sentencing riot-related offending in future is unclear, however, as the Court gave no indication of how to calibrate this departure, and the Sentencing Council has made offending during public disorder an aggravating factor only in its burglary guideline. This article explores new empirical evidence regarding the sentences imposed in Manchester, together with national Ministry of Justice data, to demonstrate for the first time how this ‘uplift’ effect was a feature throughout the criminal process, from arrest to sentence.

An Australian Indigenous-focussed Justice Response to Intimate Partner Violence: Offenders’ Perceptions of the Sentencing Process
Elena Marchetti

This article draws on research conducted over the past four years on the use of Indigenous sentencing courts in Australia for sentencing Indigenous offenders of intimate partner violence (IPV). It presents interview findings of offenders’ perceptions of justice of a sentencing process that involves the participation of Elders and Community Representatives, as moral and cultural guides. This study concludes that the vast majority of interview participants found an Indigenous sentencing court process is fairer than a mainstream sentencing court process despite the fact that it is more challenging and confronting facing Elders and Community Representatives when being sentenced for an IPV offence. Their respect for Elders and Community Representatives, and the respect afforded to Elders and Community Representatives by the mainstream criminal justice system created a forum that both ‘shamed’ and supported the offenders in ways that reflected cultural values and norms.

‘So Now I’m the Man’: Intimate Partner Femicide and Its Interconnections With Expressions of Masculinities in South Africa
Shanaaz Mathews, Rachel Jewkes, and Naeemah Abrahams

Intimate femicide, the killing of a woman by an intimate partner, is the leading cause of female murder in South Africa. Research on men who kill in South Africa has highlighted the psychological damage caused by exposure to severe adversity in childhood, but this alone does not explain the gendered context of these murders. This article presents analyses from in-depth interviews with 20 incarcerated men who killed their partners and explores their views on and relationships with women. We show that the men sought to perform exaggerated versions of predominant ideals of masculinity, emphasizing an extreme control of and dominance over women. We show killing as an ultimate means of taking back control in a context where gendered relationships legitimize men’s use of violence to assert power and control. Interventions to prevent intimate femicide need to be highly cognisant of the gendered context.

Craft(y)ness: An Ethnographic Study of Hacking
Kevin F. Steinmetz

The idea of the ‘hacker’ is a contested concept both inside and outside the hacker community, including academia. Addressing such contestation the current study uses ethnographic field research and content analysis to create a grounded understanding of ‘the hacker’. In doing so, hacking is revealed to parallel features found in craftwork, often sharing (1) a particular mentality, (2) an emphasis on skill, (3) a sense of ownership over tools and objects of labour, (4) guild-like social and learning structures, (5) a deep sense of commitment, (6) an emphasis on process over result, (7) a common phenomenological experience, and (8) tendencies towards transgression. The final result is that hacking is identified as a kind of transgressive craft or craft(y).

The Cultural Idiosyncrasy of Penal Populism: The Case of Contemporary China
Enshen Li

This article explores the socio-cultural divergences of penal populism in a Chinese context. It examines whether penal populism has become an influence on shaping China’s punishment after the Maoist era. By tracing the trends in criminal justice and penal policy over the last three decades, it argues that China has developed a relatively weak version of penal populism compared to a commonly understood form of this conception in some western democracies. Although China’s social and cultural conditions seem to be conducive to the rise of penal populism, this penal force can be easily submerged by political will and blocked by bureaucratic power. Penal populism has a limited impact on penal development in contemporary China.

Social Mobility and Crime: Evidence From a Total Birth Cohort
Jukka Savolainen, Mikko Aaltonen, Marko Merikukka, Reija Paananen, and Mika Gissler

This research examined intergenerational educational mobility as an antecedent of criminal offending. Anomie theory and the general theory of crime assume an inverse association between intergenerational mobility and criminal behaviour. In addition, Moffitt’s taxonomic theory and general strain theory expect intergenerational continuity in low educational attainment to be especially criminogenic. We examined the hypothesized associations with total birth cohort data from Finland. The results suggest that neither downward nor upward mobility is an important correlate of crime. For most individuals, the educational background of the family of origin was unrelated to offending net of personal attainment. As an important exception, parents’ educational attainment buffered the strong positive association between offspring educational marginalization and crime. Among those who did not pursue education beyond comprehensive school, having a parent with minimal educational credentials doubled the risk of serious offending compared with those with university-educated parents. Evidence from multivariate analysis suggests that this interaction effect is related to family adversity and psychological risk characteristics.

The Mis-synchronization of Juvenile Reform: Competing Constructions of Temporality and Risk Among Rehabilitation Programs and Young Offenders
Valli Rajah, Ronald Kramer, and Hung-En Sung

In the United States, juvenile rehabilitation programs have moved towards ‘risk-needs’ models, which not only assess risks of recidivism, but also address young peoples’ needs. While laudable for their responsiveness, we argue ‘risk-needs’ models are based on a series of beliefs concerning time and/or temporality that are inconsistent with the social locations and life experiences of young offenders. Based on observations and interview data collected from young male prisoners participating in a cognitive-treatment program, we argue that the temporal lessons that imprisoned youth learn, which are often inapplicable to their post-release lives, may limit the effectiveness of efforts to rehabilitate juvenile offenders. Study implications are discussed.

The British Journal of Criminology 54(6)

The British Journal of Criminology, November 2014: Volume 54, Issue 6

Editor's Choice: We Need to Talk About Mohammad: Criminology, Theistic Violence and the Murder of Theo Van Gogh
Simon Cottee

On 2 November 2004, Mohammad Bouyeri murdered the Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh. At his trial, Bouyeri proclaimed that he acted out of a religious duty. Van Gogh’s killing provoked fierce debate in the Netherlands over its meaning and significance and once again the question of violent religious fundamentalism came to dominate public discourse across Europe and beyond, just as it had in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Criminologists, however, have largely neglected the issue of jihadi violence and the broader question it raises of the relationship between religion and violent activism. This article critiques this neglect. It also offers an account of Van Gogh’s murder, using Jock Young’s later work as a starting point for an interdisciplinary analysis of its possible meanings and motivations.

Post-crisis Policing and Public–Private Partnerships: The Case of Lincolnshire Police and G4S
Adam White

The post-financial crisis ‘politics of austerity’ have prompted many police forces to explore a range of radical new budget-reducing policies, including outsourcing key service areas to the private sector on an unprecedented scale. This article analyses the largest outsourcing contract to date: the £229 million Lincolnshire Police–G4S strategic partnership. It addresses the question: to what extent has the outsourcing process engendered a shift from the logic of the public good to the logic of the market in the delivery of those frontline operations covered in the contract? In arguing that these operations are characterized more by a complex blurring of logics than a straightforward unidirectional shift, the article contributes towards both explanatory and normative dimensions of the ‘transformation of policing’ debate.

Self-legitimacy, Police Culture and Support for Democratic Policing in an English Constabulary
Ben Bradford and Paul Quinton

When do police officers feel confident in their own authority? What factors influence their sense of their own legitimacy? What is the effect of such ‘self-legitimacy’ on the way they think about policing? This article addresses these questions using a survey of police officers working in an English Constabulary. We find that the most powerful predictor of officers’ confidence in their own authority is identification with their organization, itself something strongly associated with perceptions of the procedural justice of senior management. A greater sense of self-legitimacy is in turn linked to greater commitment to democratic modes of policing. Finally, we find that this sense of legitimacy is embedded in a matrix of identities and cultural adaptations within the police organization.

A Shared Narrative?: A Case Study of the Contested Legacy of Policing in the North of Ireland
Kevin Hearty

This article critically examines the difficulty with creating a shared narrative in post-conflict Northern Ireland. Using the legacy of policing as a case study for drawing more general conclusions about creating a shared narrative, the article interrogates how disagreement over where to start and end the discussion and exclusivist approaches to victimhood are obstructing attainment of a shared narrative. The article analyses competing policing narratives as constructed from the lived reality of opposing ethno-nationalist collectives with different experiences in a heated ‘memory politics’ domain. Concluding with the argument that the prerequisite to successfully building a shared narrative is departure from competing ‘memory politics’ understandings of the past, the article suggests a new understanding of victimhood and perpetratorship in Northern Ireland.

Corruption and Police Legitimacy in Lahore, Pakistan
Jonathan Jackson, Muhammad Asif, Ben Bradford, and Muhammad Zakria Zakar

Police legitimacy is an important topic of criminological research, yet it has received only sporadic study in societies where there is widespread police corruption, where the position of the police is less secure, and where social order is more tenuous. Analysing data from a probability sample survey of adults in Lahore, Pakistan, we examine the empirical links between people’s experience of police corruption, their perceptions of the fairness and effectiveness of the police, and their beliefs about the legitimacy of the police. Our findings suggest that in a context in which minimal effectiveness and integrity is yet to be established, police legitimacy may rest not just on the procedural fairness of officers, but also on their demonstrated ability to control crime and avoid corruption.

‘My Life Is Separated’: An Examination Of The Challenges And Barriers To Parenting For Indigenous Fathers In Prison
Susan Dennison, Holly Smallbone, Anna Stewart, Kate Freiberg, and Rosie Teague

Paternal imprisonment creates a significant risk for the intergenerational transmission of offending. However, there is little research on the mechanisms underpinning this risk, including how paternal imprisonment interrupts parenting and father–child relationships. Culturally relevant research is also essential in the context of high imprisonment rates of Indigenous Australian men. We conducted interviews with 41 Indigenous Australian fathers from two prisons in North Queensland to examine their identities as fathers in prison and the barriers associated with maintaining relationships with their children. Findings are discussed in relation to contact and distance; intergenerational absence of fathers; paternal involvement through play, care and culture; and diminished opportunities for men’s parental and cultural generativity. We consider the implications of the findings for children’s well-being.

Civilised Communities: Reconsidering the ‘Gloomy Tale’ of Immigration and Social Order in a Changing Town
Clare E. Griffiths

Immigration and its effects on crime, social disorder and community tensions remains a pervasive feature of public, government and academic discourse. This discourse often considers immigration, and immigrants themselves, as a threat to the community’s existing moral and social order. This article presents the findings of a case study that used quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the experiences of social order following a recent wave of Polish migration in a small working class town in the North West of England. The key findings show that the assumed association of migration with a disruption to social order receives little support. Rather, the social order in the studied locale is predominantly managed and maintained through ‘civilised relationships’ between migrants and established residents, thus failing to culminate into conflict between the two groups. This situation of ‘civility’ provides an alternative to the preponderance of previous research telling a ‘gloomy tale’ of immigration and its impact on local communities.

Are All Cases Treated Equal?: Using Goffman’s Frame Analysis to Understand How Homicide Detectives Orient to Their Work
Shila R. Hawk and Dean A. Dabney

Drawing upon ethnographic data from one US metropolitan police department’s homicide unit, this study employs Goffman’s frame analysis to explore two questions: (1) What types of cases are prioritized in homicide investigations? and (2) How are those prioritizations operationalized and justified? Themes within the data suggest that although detectives struggle to ‘work every case the same’, their approach and effort on cases is nonetheless influenced largely by unit culture and perceptions of victim deservedness. Furthermore, we demonstrate that framing techniques enable investigators to compartmentalize and manage the emotional strain of deprioritizing some homicides while rigorously investigating other cases. These findings add to our understanding of the administration of homicide work, theorize the moral complexities of said work and point to frame analysis as a potentially useful framework for crime researchers.

Criminologizing Wrongful Convictions
Michael Naughton

This article considers the apparent lack of serious engagement with issues pertaining to wrongful convictions by criminology at present. It seeks to address this by criminologizing wrongful convictions in two senses: firstly, by highlighting a variety of forms of intentional law or rule breaking by police officers and prosecutors in the causation of wrongful convictions that in other circumstances would likely be treated as crime and dealt with as such; and, secondly, to reveal the extent to which such powerful criminal justice system agents can cause profound and wide-ranging forms of harm to victims of wrongful convictions, their families and society as a whole with almost total impunity. In so doing, the relevance of the study of the intentional forms of crime and deviance committed by criminal justice system agents in the manufacture of wrongful convictions to both arms of the criminological divide is emphasized: mainstream and critical criminology. The overall aim is to show that the study of wrongful convictions can further extend and enrich existing criminological epistemology in vital and important ways and can even contribute to the prevention and possible elimination of those that are caused deliberately.

Is the ‘Shadow of Sexual Assault’ Responsible for Women’s Higher Fear of Burglary?
Helmut Hirtenlehner and Stephen Farrall

This article examines the ‘shadow of sexual assault hypothesis’ which posits that women’s higher fear of crime, compared to males, can be attributed to their elevated fear of sexual victimization. We argue that the previous, overwhelmingly supportive, research on this issue is incomplete in three ways: (1) the thesis has not yet been extensively tested outside of North America, (2) competing, possibly overlaying, shadow effects of physical violence have widely been ignored and (3) perceptually contemporaneous offences have always been measured in an indirect manner. Drawing on the example of fear of burglary, this work tackles the afore-mentioned deficiencies. Results from a crime survey conducted in the United Kingdom indicate that, when relying on a rather traditional test strategy, the ‘shadow of sexual assault hypothesis’ is supported. However, the findings are highly contingent on the employed methodology. When utilizing direct measures of perceptually contemporaneous offences, only physical, not sexual, assault turns out to cast a shadow over fear of burglary. The impact of fear of rape would appear to be reduced considerably once fear of broader physical harm is taken into account. We conclude that much of the existing evidence for the shadow thesis can be challenged on the grounds of failing to control for the effects of non-sexual physical assault and drawing on an inadequate operationalization of perceptually contemporaneous offences.

Internet Adoption and Online Behaviour Among American Street Gangs: Integrating Gangs and Organizational Theory
Richard K. Moule, Jr, David C. Pyrooz, and Scott H. Decker

The globalization of street gangs has drawn attention to the mechanisms associated with the diffusion of gang culture. One mechanism, the Internet, is of growing interest to gang researchers. Yet, research on the online behaviours of street gangs remains descriptive, failing to elaborate on the factors that distinguish gangs that adopt, or do not adopt, technology and engage in online behaviours. The present study integrates insights from organizational theory to examine whether and to what extent gang organization influences the online presence and behaviour of gangs. Using data collected from gang members in five US cities, the results from a series of logistic and Poisson regression models indicate that higher levels of gang organization increase the likelihood that gangs have a website, post videos and recruit members online. Results support integrating research on gang behaviour with organizational theory. Directions for future research on the relationship between gang organization and offending are discussed.

The Dynamic Risk of Heavy Episodic Drinking on Interpersonal Assault in Young Adolescence and Early Adulthood
Carly Lightowlers, Mark Elliot, and Mark Tranmer

This study examines the extent to which variation in violent behaviour can be explained by variation in drinking patterns in late adolescence and early adulthood using panel data of regular drinkers aged between 16 and 29 in England and Wales. Multilevel models explore individuals’ propensity to commit assault controlling for their drinking behaviour. Results suggest that males and younger people are more likely to commit assault offences and that around 60 per cent of the variation in assault is between people, the remainder being within people between occasions. Heavy episodic drinking is a significant predictor of assault in all models. Collectively, the findings point to a periodic association between drinking patterns and violent outcomes, supporting evidence of other forms of contemporaneous association.

The British Journal of Criminology 54(5)

The British Journal of Criminology, September 2014: Volume 54, Issue 5

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.

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.

British Journal of Criminology 54(3)

British Journal of Criminology, May 2014: Volume 54, Issue 3

Recognizing the 2011 United Kingdom Riots as Political Protest: A Theoretical Framework Based on Agency, Habitus and the Preconscious
Sadiya Akram

Drawing on the 2011 United Kingdom riots, this article explores contestation over the meaning of riots. Is rioting criminality and looting, or are there political aspects to the act? For those advocating a political element, there is difficulty in reconciling how an apparently spontaneous act can have political motivations. This article argues that rioting is a distinctly political action, and in order to understand it we must theorize the characteristics of agency that underpin the act. Drawing on Bourdieu’s habitus, but developing it to include a preconscious component, the article develops a novel theoretical framework for understanding the rioter. Habitus is presented as a mechanism that can help better understand how experiences in the past affect the rioter’s present, thereby leading to a coming to the surface of underlying political grievances.

The Life Course of Young Male and Female Offenders: Stability or Change between Different Birth Cohorts?
Olof Bäckman, Felipe Estrada, Anders Nilsson, and David Shannon

Individuals’ life chances are shaped by the times and events that they experience. This emphasizes the need for studies that focus on staggered birth cohorts. The article presents a new longitudinal data set that includes three complete Swedish birth cohorts, born in 1965, 1975 and 1985. Comparisons between the different birth cohorts show how offending distributions among young offenders, as well as their socio-demographic backgrounds and life chances, have developed over time. The analyses of stability and change presented in the study may serve as a point of departure for more informed discussions of the significance of societal changes for the criminality and life chances of male and female offenders.

Crime and the Transition to Marriage: The Role of the Spouse’s Criminal Involvement
Torbjørn Skardhamar, Christian W. Monsbakken, and Torkild H. Lyngstad

Influential perspectives in life course criminology maintain that marriage leads to desistance from crime, and the mechanisms are largely related to spousal social control. Whether and to what degree marriage represents a break from a criminal past might depend on the spouse’s criminal attitude. We study how changes in offending are related to marriage, and how the patterns vary by the wife’s criminal record. We use data from Norwegian administrative registers that cover the total population of all persons who married in Norway between 1997 and 2001 (N = 80,064). We use information on these persons’ criminal records in two five-year periods before and after marriage as well as information on their wives’ criminal records in the same period, to estimate the probability of offending across an 11-year period around the time of marriage. We do so in a way that takes premarital changes in criminal behaviour into account. We find that the desistance process tend to start up to several years before marriage, and that the decline is greater for those who marry a wife with a criminal record.

Exposing ‘Sex’ Offenders: Precarity, Abjection and Violence in the Canadian Federal Prison System
Rosemary Ricciardelli and Dale Spencer

Imprisoned sex offenders face abjection because of their criminality and are the most victimized group of adult male prisoners. Drawing on Judith Butler’s work on gender, abjection and precarity, and scholarship focused on prison masculinities, we examine the experiences of sex offenders while incarcerated and the role of various agents in exposing their convictions to other prisoners and, ultimately, to victimization. Given each prisoner’s convictions are not immediately known when they enter the penitentiary and recognizing that prison is unsafe for sex offenders, we sought to understand how sex offenders attempt to pass among the general prisoner population and the methods through which their convictions become known. Utilizing interviews with 59 formerly incarcerated men, we analyse the modalities that sex offenders employ to ‘pass’ as non-sex offenders and the anxieties associated with awaiting their inevitable exposure. Former prisoners reveal the methods used by staff and prisoners to expose those with sex-related convictions.

Self-efficacy Beliefs and Preferred Gender Role in Policing: An Examination of Policewomen’s Perceptions in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates
Doris C. Chu and Mohammed Murad Abdulla

In Dubai, one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, women are encouraged to pursue higher education and careers in different spheres. Since the first group of 17 women joined the Dubai police force in 1977, the number of women choosing the police profession has risen. Today, more than 1,400 female officers work in Dubai. Using data from surveys conducted with 278 female police officers in Dubai, this study assesses female officers’ attitudes towards women in policing and their preferred gender role at police work. In general, female officers believed that they are effective as patrol officers on the street, and a majority of the sampled policewomen believed that women can be as good as male officers in doing police work. The findings reveal that professional role confidence is significantly associated with positive self-appraisal. In addition, policewomen who are confident about their work and those with longer tenure in the police force are more likely to favour the same assignment as policemen. Female officers with higher education attainment are less likely to endorse gender-restrictive assignments. Suggestions for future research are addressed.

Police Understanding of the Foundations of Their Legitimacy in the Eyes of the Public: The Case of Commanding Officers in the Israel National Police
Tal Jonathan-Zamir and Amikam Harpaz

The dialogic approach to legitimacy postulates that a complete picture of police legitimacy requires considering not only citizens’ views, but also police understanding of their legitimacy and the interaction between the two. This article addresses a particular aspect of police perceptions of their legitimacy in the eyes of the public: the foundations of their external legitimacy. The analysis reveals that, in contrast to the priorities of citizens as reflected in community surveys, Israeli commanding police officers associate their external legitimacy more with their accomplishments in fighting crime than with procedural justice. We consider the implications of these findings for Israeli policing, as well as in relation to the ‘legitimacy as a dialogue’ approach and legitimacy research more generally.