<Emphasis Type="Italic">Random Activities Theory</Emphasis>: The Case for ‘Black Swan’ Criminology

In the United States, infamous crimes against innocent victims—especially children—have repeatedly been regarded as justice system “failures” and resulted in reactionary legislation enacted without regard to prospective negative consequences. This pattern in part results when ‘memorial crime control’ advocates implicitly but inappropriately apply the tenets of routine activities theory, wherein crime prevention is presumed to be achievable by hardening likely targets, increasing the costs associated with crime commission, and removing criminal opportunity. In response, the authors argue that academic and public policy discourse will benefit from the inclusion of a new criminological perspective called random activities theory, in which tragic crimes are framed as rare but statistically inevitable ‘Black Swans’ instead of justice system failures. Potential objections and implications for public policy are discussed at length.     

A General<Emphasis Type="Italic"> Theories</Emphasis> of Hate Crime? Strain,Doing Difference and Self Control

This article attempts to put forward a more holistic vision of hate crime causation by exploring the intersections which exist between three separate criminological theories. Within the extant literature both Robert Merton’s strain theory and Barbara Perry’s structured action theory of ‘doing difference’ have been widely used to explain why prejudice motivated crimes continue to pervade most communities. Together the theories help to illuminate the sociological factors which act to create immense fear of, and hatred towards, various minority identity groups. However, neither of these theories adequately explain why some individuals commit hate crimes while others, equally affected by socio-economic strains and social constructions of ‘difference’, do not. This article therefore moves beyond such macro explanations of hate crime by drawing upon Gottfredson and Hirschi’s A General Theory of Crime (1990). Using typology research carried out by various academics, the article attempts to illustrate how socio-economic strains and general fears of ‘difference’ become mutually reinforcing determinants, promulgating a culture of prejudice against certain ‘others', which in turn ultimately triggers the hate motivated behaviours of individuals with low self control.     

Missing pieces: Notes on crime,poverty, and social policy

A long and impressive criminological tradition links crime to what social scientists call ‘persistent poverty’-and, in particular, to the corrosive effects of inadequate labor markets on a variety of social institutions. But few anticrime policies have seriously confronted those conditions, even at the height of the Great Society of the 1960s. With only scattered exceptions, those policies have sought to enhance the individual capacities of children and youth without substantially altering the surrounding economic institutions. An anticrime strategy for the next century that is both more effective and consistent with what we know about the roots of crime must involve measures that more directly address the labor market itself. Among other things, these measures include direct public job creation, systematic efforts to up grade wages, and greater support for labor organization. This essay is a revised version of a background paper presented at The Social Science Research Council Policy Conference on ‘Persistent Poverty’ in Washington D.C., November, 1993.     

New right,new left,new challenges: understanding and responding to neoconservatism in contemporary criminology

This essay examines the rise of neoconservative thought within criminological discourse from the enlightenment ‘quarrel’ with ancient philosophy and church supported scholasticism in the 1700s to the present day. From the perspective of criminology, it is argued that there is little new about the ‘new right’ with the exception that it has managed to galvanize itself as a popular retributionist alternative among the working class in the United States, Canada, and England. The current organization of social institutions in a modern ‘risk society’ facilitates the easy re-definition of the crises of late-modern capitalism into issues of social control. It is not surprising we find the right reinvigorated and prominent under these conditions. New left realism and crime control through social development are offered as competitive platforms from which to advance critique of barbaric right-wing crime-control policies. Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in cage (Smashing Pumpkins 1996)     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Cultural Criminology: An Invitation</Emphasis>… to What?

Since the mid 1990s, a strand of criminology emerged that is concerned with the co-constitution of crime and culture under the general rubric of ‘cultural criminology’. In the titles Cultural Criminology Unleashed and Cultural Criminology: An Invitation, criminologists spearheading this brand of criminology make claims for its originality and its status as a subversive alternative to conventional criminological approaches to studies of crime and deviance. The basis for the ‘new’ cultural criminology is its ostensible ability to account for the culture and subcultures of crime, the criminalization of cultural and subcultural activities, and the politics of criminalization. This paper offers a comparison of cultural criminology to 1960s and 1970s labeling theory to assess whether or not cultural criminology has developed a grammar of critique capable of resolving fundamental contradictions that haunt critical criminology and contesting contemporary administrative criminology. Points of comparison are made through ontological categories of power and criminal identity and a consideration of the epistemological categories of the respective bodies of literature.     

Is it Important to Examine Crime Trends at a Local “Micro” Level?: A Longitudinal Analysis of Street to Street Variability in Crime Trajectories

Over the last 40 years, the question of how crime varies across places has gotten greater attention. At the same time, as data and computing power have increased, the definition of a ‘place’ has shifted farther down the geographic cone of resolution. This has led many researchers to consider places as small as single addresses, group of addresses, face blocks or street blocks. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of the spatial distribution of crime have consistently found crime is strongly concentrated at a small group of ‘micro’ places. Recent longitudinal studies have also revealed crime concentration across micro places is relatively stable over time. A major question that has not been answered in prior research is the degree of block to block variability at this local ‘micro’ level for all crime. To answer this question, we examine both temporal and spatial variation in crime across street blocks in the city of Seattle Washington. This is accomplished by applying trajectory analysis to establish groups of places that follow similar crime trajectories over 16 years. Then, using quantitative spatial statistics, we establish whether streets having the same temporal trajectory are collocated spatially or whether there is street to street variation in the temporal patterns of crime. In a surprising number of cases we find that individual street segments have trajectories which are unrelated to their immediately adjacent streets. This finding of heterogeneity suggests it may be particularly important to examine crime trends at very local geographic levels. At a policy level, our research reinforces the importance of initiatives like ‘hot spots policing’ which address specific streets within relatively small areas.     

Women's criminality,criminal women,criminalized women? Questions in and for a feminist perspective

Although the notion of taking gender into account in social analyses has been around for some time, for the large partit has not been taken seriously by criminologists. In this article, Laberge shows how the neglect of women's criminality has been to the detriment of criminological inquiry. Through an examination of the questions usually asked about women in contact with the penal system, the author takes us beyond an ‘additive’ approach to explaining crime. Reorganizing these questions, she outlines a number of analytical distinctions that will transform our understanding of criminalized women, specifically, and criminological inquiry, generally.     

Talking Heads and Bleeding Hearts: Newsmaking, Emotion and Public Criminology in the Wake of a Sexual Assault

Using our own experiences in attempting to ‘do’ public criminology in the wake of a violent sexual assault on our campus, we offer a critique of the emerging public criminology framework. Focusing specifically on tensions between fact and emotion and representations of expertise in the news media, we argue for a greater respect for emotional responses to crime in moving the public criminology agenda forward. We suggest that if public criminology sets as its goal educating the public about crime with an eye towards injecting a counter/critical discourse into ‘get tough’ crime control policies, then public criminologists need to recognize and take seriously the public’s emotions rather than negate them. Drawing on the work of Ahmed (The cultural politics of emotion. Routledge, London, 2004), we suggest that the role of the expert is not to simply inform citizens of the ‘facts’ about crime, but to establish—through emotions—the relationship between themselves and the imagined criminal Other (Young in Imagining crime: Textual outlaws and criminal conversations. Sage Publications, London, 1996). Thus, alongside trying to convince the public to be more ‘rational’ when it comes to crime, critical criminologists must start to accept people’s fear and anger as legitimate reactions and try to redirect these emotions toward more productive ends.     

Underused potentials for criminology: Applying the sociology of knowledge to terrorism

Knowledge has for a long time been a central category in criminological thought, the etiological and reaction sides alike. On the etiological side, rational choice, neutralization techniques, the learning and unlearning of motivations, practices and codes, and, lately, efforts toward a cognitive criminology exemplify approaches that refer implicitly or explicitly to ‘knowledge’. Yet, with the exception of George Herbert Mead’s work, the sociology of knowledge has barely been explicitly used. This paper argues that the conscious consideration of the sociology of knowledge, including neo-Durkheimian, neo-Marxist, and neo-Weberian traditions, promises great benefit to criminological thought. Such consideration sheds light on the distribution across time and space of cognitive and normative tools that contribute to patterns of norm breaking behavior. A brief overview of the implicit use of ‘knowledge’ in criminological theory is followed by an elaboration of the potential benefits for criminology from incorporating leading traditions in the sociology of knowledge. The article concludes with an illustration for the case of terrorism as it rises simultaneously, but seeks distinct targets, across regions of the world.     

The crime control industry and the management of the surplus population

This essay examines what we are calling the ‘crime control industry’ and how the growth of such an industry relates to growing inequality and the need to ‘manage’ or ‘contain’ the ‘surplus population.’ Profits are a major moving force in this process, rather than the goal of reducing crime and suffering. An important component of this industry is the ‘prison industrial complex,’ one of the fastest growing industries in the U.S. Also included is a rapidly growing private security industry that includes private police and security guards, along with a growing supply of technology to aid in the ‘war on crime.’ Other components include drug testing companies, gated communities, and a booming gun industry. We conclude by outlining possible explanations for the growth of this industry.     

Wildlife Crime: The Problems of Enforcement

Environmental and wildlife crime appear recently to be benefitting from an increasing profile amongst those agencies tasked with their control, as well as receiving growing criminological attention. Despite this, those with responsibilities in this area report that it remains marginalised, receiving limited resources and suffering from a lack of political impetus to push such problems higher up the agenda. This is particularly so for those agencies, such as the police, that may be seen to have many more pressing objectives. This discussion paper considers the problems of relying on an enforcement approach to controlling such offences, taking, as an example, those activities that may be termed ‘wildlife crime’, focusing on the situation in England and Wales. Firstly, the legislative framework that criminalises harm or exploitation of wildlife is presented, alongside the main enforcement methods used. Next, the problems facing an enforcement approach are critically considered, the key issues being: under-resourcing and marginalisation, the large ‘dark-figure’ of wildlife crime, the possibility of corruption, the lack of seriousness with which such crimes are viewed, and the lack of deterrent effect. Finally, responses to the problems of enforcement are presented, categorised as either methods to improve enforcement or, as the author advocates, methods which are alternatives to enforcement (such as adopting a crime prevention approach). The paper concludes with suggestions for future research in this field.     

Risk calculation and precautionary uncertainty: two configurations within crime assessment

This paper explores two configurations of thinking about crime amongst law enforcement agencies and private sector security managers: ‘risk calculation’ (concerned with everyday, calculable probabilities and impacts and their management) and ‘precautionary uncertainty’ (concerned with events that might be incapacitating, yet are not calculable by probability assessments). The paper explores their respective constituent concepts and fields of application in crime assessment, drawing upon qualitative research-in-progress in Belgium. Risk calculation, as applied to crime, starts with past data on routines that link perpetrators with targets that lack capable guardians. Precautionary uncertainty focuses on potential impacts that are highly disabling and potentially wide-spreading (contagion, knock-on effects), asking how such impacts can be contained and recovered from. Risk and uncertainty are shown to be related to ‘rational-instrumental’ and ‘deliberative-constitutive’ approaches as developed by Fisher’s work in the field of law, which offers a meta-narrative in relation to which they can be positioned. Finally, the paper asks if these two crime assessment methods should be seen as distinct or as merging. On the basis of criteria of conceptual sharpness, openness to public debate and justiciability, the authors champion the maintenance of a clear distinction between risk and uncertainty.     

In search of criminological tradition: the development of criminology in Taiwan

There has been a growing interest in the historical development of criminology(ies) throughout the world. This paper examines the development of criminology in Taiwan (Republic of China) using both questionnaire and interview data. Textbooks, institutional development, and research activity are taken as proxy measures of a criminological tradition. Beginning with criminology in Republican China (1929–1949), the article explores the key features of change in criminology against the background of Taiwan's own particular adoption of social, political and economic ‘modernisation’. Foreign influence and the contemporary meaning of ‘indigenous’ are considered. The article ends with a research agenda for a grounded historical sociology of criminology on Taiwan; key identified research questions relate to sponsorship, research priorities and the production of criminological knowledge; the reception of research by policy communities and practitioners; the relationship between criminological knowledge and politics; and the processes of selective appropriation.     

The Value of Quantitative Analysis for a Critical Understanding of Crime and Society

The value of quantitative analysis for a critical understanding of crime and society has often been questioned. This paper joins the debate by reviewing quantitative evidence on key criminological topics: the causes of crime, public opinion on crime, and the operation and impact of the criminal justice system. This evidence highlights the importance of economic deprivation and racial prejudice and discrimination for understanding U.S. crime and justice and points to the ineffectiveness of the nation’s “get tough” approach to crime control. In these ways, quantitative analysis has already bolstered central propositions in critical criminology and promises to continue to do so.     

Toward “Safer” and “Better” Communities?: Canada’s Youth Criminal Justice Act,Aboriginal Youth and the Processes of Exclusion

After a decade of high incarceration rates, the Canadian Department of Justice has revised its approach to juvenile justice. Enshrined in the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA), the renewed youth justice system stresses the importance and responsibility of community for crime control. While on the surface the state’s appeals to such programmes as restorative justice seem laudable, caution should be exercised in fully endorsing this approach. While community initiatives have been criticized for “widening the net of social control” and intruding state control deeper into social life, their exclusionary potential is perhaps more troubling. Following Derrida’s metaphysics of presence, I suggest that ‘community’ perpetually finds meaning in opposition to the other. In this environment, Aboriginal youth, who are among the most marginalized in Canadian society, will likely be the most unfavourably effected. This paper does not, however, entirely reject the Act’s appeal to community. Nevertheless, I argue that for meaningful challenges to contemporary constructions of community and youth justice to occur the discursive limits forced upon ‘community’ must be fractured and fashioned in ways that renounce homogeneity. We strongly believe the solution to youth crime is in the community. Give the community the ability to deal with it and they will (Canada 1997).     

Criminalizing Ecological Harm: Crimes Against Carrying Capacity and the Criminalization of Eco-Sinners

This article examines how a broader class of environmentally harmful behavior can be examined from a criminological frame of reference. By using examples of soil degradation and anthropogenic climate change, it is argued that environmentally damaging behavior is similar to many other types of crime. Particularly when taken from the standpoint that environmentally harmful behavior is ultimately detrimental to human social organizations by undermining ‘carrying capacity’, outright criminalization might strike many as a valid option. Nonetheless, there are also some fundamental differences that will ultimately prevent a strict legalistic perspective from being successful in minimizing ecological harm. Instead, this article argues that criminologists need to emphasize the importance of shaming and status rewards in pursuing a greener future.     

Left Realism,community and state-building

Left Realism, as it emerged in the mid 1980s in the UK was a policy-oriented intervention focusing on the reality of crime for the working class victim and the need to elaborate a socialist alternative to conservative emphases on ‘law and order’. It saw the renewal of high crime, deprived communities as involving democratic police accountability to those communities. During the subsequent period developments have moved very much against the orientations of Left Realism. This paper compares two different contexts of renewal—the deprived urban community in the UK and the war-torn ‘failed state’ in Bosnia—and identifies certain common policy orientations which are then criticised from a Left Realist perspective.     

Re-imagining crime prevention: controlling corporate crime?

While the discourses and practices of crime prevention are of increasing salience, few criminologists have sought the inclusion of corporate illegalities on such agendas. Relatedly, within criminology, there has been a diminished tendency to think in idealistic, utopian and emancipatory terms. This paper is one small attempt to think in precisely such terms.¹ But it is not an exercise in pure imagination. In particular, the paper makes extended reference to Finland, where recent experience suggests that corporate crime prevention may be feasible, under certain conditions, albeit subject to certain limitations. Thus we consider both the desirability and the feasibility of corporate crime prevention intruding upon the generally narrowly constructed terrain of ‘crime prevention’. We begin with a critique of some of the key aspects of crime prevention discourses – at both theoretical and practical levels – with a particular emphasis upon the extent to which these are both more appropriately and usefully applied to corporate crime prevention, before going on to discuss corporate crime prevention ‘in action’, through a focus upon recent developments in Finland. In a concluding section, we consider various aspects of both the desirability and feasibility of corporate crime prevention.     

A Criticism of the International Harm Principle

According to the received view crimes like torture, rape, enslavement or enforced prostitution are domestic crimes if they are committed as isolated or sporadic events, but become crimes against humanity when they are committed as part of a ‘widespread or systematic attack’ against a civilian population. Only in the latter case can these crimes be prosecuted by the international community. One of the most influential accounts of this idea is Larry May’s International Harm Principle, which states that crimes against humanity are those that somehow ‘harm humanity.’ I argue that this principle is unable to provide an adequate account of crimes against humanity. Moreover, I argue that the principle fails to account for the idea that crimes against humanity are necessarily group based. I conclude by suggesting that the problem with May’s account is that it relies on a harm-based conception of crime which is very popular, but ultimately mistaken. I submit that in order to develop an adequate theory of crimes against humanity we need to abandon the harm-based model and replace it with an alternative conception of crime and criminal law, one based on the notion of accountability.     

Evidence on women trafficked for sexual exploitation: A rights based analysis

The aim of this paper is to investigate which factors influence the pattern of enforcement (violation) of basic rights among women trafficked for sexual exploitation. A conceptual framework is adopted where the degree of agency and the possibility to influence the terms of sex-based transactions are seen as conditional on the enforcement of some basic rights. Using data collected by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) on women assisted by the organization after having been trafficked for sexual exploitation, we investigate the enforcement (violation) of five uncompromisable rights, namely the right to physical integrity, to move freely, to have access to medical care, to use condoms, and to exercise choice over sexual services. By combining classification tree analysis and ordered probit estimation we find that working location and country of work are the main determinants of rights enforcement, while individual and family characteristics play a marginal role. Specifically, we find that (1) in lower market segments working on the street is comparatively less ‘at risk’ of rights violation; (2) there is no consistently ‘good’ or ‘bad’ country of work, but public awareness on trafficking within the country is important; (3) the strength of organised crime in the country of work matters only in conjunction with other local factors, and (4) being trafficked within one’s country, as opposed to being trafficked internationally, is associated with higher risk of rights violation.