British Journal of Criminology 52(5)

British Journal of Criminology, September 2012: Volume 52, Issue 5

Effects of Employment and Unemployment on Serious Offending in a High-Risk Sample of Men and Women from Ages 18 to 32 in the Netherlands
Janna Verbruggen, Arjan A. J. Blokland, and Victor R. van der Geest

Using longitudinal data on the criminal careers of a group of high-risk men and women (N = 540) who were institutionalized in a Dutch juvenile justice institution in the nineties, this article addresses the effects of (un)employment on crime. Results show that, for both men and women, employment rates are below average and stability in employment is low. Nevertheless, random effects models consistently show employment to reduce the estimated number of convictions for both men and women. Employment duration has an additional effect on crime, but only for men. Unemployment duration increases the estimated number of convictions for women, while slightly decreasing them for men.

Intoxication and Homicide: A Context-Specific Approach
Caroline Miles

This article presents a context-specific analysis of intoxication and homicide. Substantial proportions of homicides involve alcohol and/or drug intoxication, yet this remains an under-researched phenomenon in the United Kingdom. The article draws upon ESRC-funded research incorporating three sources of data: Homicide Index data for 1995–2005; police homicide files; and interviews with convicted homicide offenders. This dataset provides a unique insight into this complex phenomenon and demonstrates the value of integrating multiple sources of data. The findings highlight under-reporting of intoxication-related homicide in official statistics and indicate that intoxication in isolation is insufficient in explaining the co-occurrence of alcohol, drugs and homicide. Intoxication appears to interact with the immediate and background context of events to produce a lethal outcome.

Probation in Romania: Archaeology of a Partnership
Ioan Durnescu and Kevin Haines

The intention of this paper is to contribute to the international debate on penal policy transfer by describing the development of a probation service in Romania following the policy transfer schema developed by Dolowitz and Marsh (1996). Both authors of this article played a role in the establishment of probation in Romania and this article provides an ‘inside story’. Our conclusion is that both the debate and practices of policy transfer have been too simplistic to capture the dynamic and complex nature of international policy transfer and, indeed, that the notion of policy transfer itself is ill conceived. We demonstrate how partnership, when applied to international penal policy and practice developments, provides a potentially useful model.

Financial Channels of Money Laundering in Spain
Armando Fernández Steinko

This is the first instalment of the results from an empirical research project on money laundering in Spain. The research is based on the analysis of the court documents referring to 367 cases judged between 1995 and 2011. The numerous data obtained are contrasted with the quantitative and qualitative hypotheses published in the official papers of international institutions dedicated to fight money laundering. These hypotheses have been the basis for the development of the legal principles for the implementation of anti-laundering laws worldwide. The main conclusions of the research shed some light on the economic, financial and business-related movements of illegal money and amply refute those hypotheses. At the same time, these conclusions should invite the international community to reflect on the position presently held by the empirical knowledge about criminal realities in the process of working out legal initiatives to fight them.

Dangerous Instruments?: Constructing Risk and Culpable Drivers through the Criminalization of Negligence
Andrei Poama

Qualifying the automobile as a dangerous instrument is linked to the ‘responsibilization’ and the criminalization of individual negligent drivers in the United States. One case—State v. Fitzgerald (1978)—is selected to illustrate this particular process. The use of the dangerous instrument argument lowers the threshold of criminal liability from gross to ordinary negligence and offers judicial ground to increase the degree of culpability for negligent homicide. My argument is twofold. First, I claim that the criminalization of negligent driving points to a process whereby the motor vehicle and the negligent driver co-constitute one another. Second, I contend that criminalizing negligent driving is related to the emergence of a specific class of risks: circumstantial risks. I conclude by pushing for a Tardian turn in criminology.

Ambiguities in Criminalizing Cartels: A Political Economy
Fiona Haines and Caron Beaton-Wells

Criminalizing the harms of the powerful has considerable appeal for those who desire a more tractable, ethical and sustainable business sector. Yet, attempts to both establish criminal offences and to enforce them once they are enacted often face perennial challenges. These challenges are a product of the ambiguities—economic, moral and legal—associated with the conduct sought to be criminalized, in this case cartels, and with the character of the criminal law itself. Following Aubert, we argue that exploring these ambiguities reveals critical social and economic shifts in society. Further, these shifts pose significant challenges to the legitimacy of incumbent governments. The paper makes these arguments drawing on the recent reform criminalizing cartel conduct in Australia, teasing apart the multiple ambiguities involved and, in particular, how they map the shift in the Australian Labor Party’s policies away from welfare providing security to citizens to an embrace of market competition.

Economic Rationalities of Governance and Ambiguity in the Criminalization of Cartels
Christine Parker

In July 2009, Australia introduced criminal offences and jail for collusive conduct (price fixing, output restriction, market allocation and bid rigging) in markets. The substance of the justification for criminalization of cartel conduct is ‘blindly’ economic. It does not spring from a sense of moral or political outrage at collusion in the market. Rather, it is justified on the basis of effective regulatory technique, the need to deter economically harmful behaviour. This paper examines the rationality of anti-cartel law from the point of view of the ‘legal consciousness’ of 25 business people who have faced enforcement action for cartel conduct. Their justifications for their own behaviour in light of the law tell us about how they believe the law can be legitimated. This is compared with policy and scholarly rationales for criminal anti-cartel law. The paper finds that, among business people who have been made subject to the anti-cartel law, there are similar differences and ambiguities about the rationale for criminal anti-cartel law, and the very meaning of acting economically, as there are among scholars and policy elites. This pinpoints one place of instability in the legitimacy of economic rationalities of regulation and governance in action.

Communication and Social Regulation: The Criminalization of Work-Related Death
Paul Almond and Sarah Colover

This paper addresses the movement towards criminalization as a tool for the regulation of work-related deaths in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the last 20 years. This can be seen as reflecting dissatisfaction with the relevant law, although it is best understood in symbolic terms as a response to a disjunction between the instrumental nature and communicative aspirations of regulatory law. This paper uses empirical data gathered from interviews with members of the public to explore the role that such an offence might play. The findings demonstrate that the failures of regulatory law give rise to a desire for criminalization as a means of framing work-related safety events in normative terms.