There's Regulatory Crime, and then there's Landlord Crime: from 'Rachmanites' to 'Partners'

This article considers local authority strategies towards the regulation and prosecution of private landlords who commit the criminal offences of unlawful eviction and harassment. Generally, local authorities operate compliance-based strategies, rarely (if ever) resorting to prosecution. In seeking to explain this approach, the article draws upon the literature concerning regulatory crime, but also distinguishes local authority responses to landlord crime from regulatory crime as more typically conceived. Broadly, it is argued that, while there are clear parallels with other areas of regulatory activity, there is much that is different about landlord crime, particularly as a result of central government strategies towards the private rented sector, the legislative background to landlord crime, and the motivations behind local approaches to regulation.     

Discrepancies Between Crime Reports and Crime Surveys:

The absence of strong zero-order associations between victimization and official crime rates for cities has been a puzzle for social scientists since the data for making such comparisons became available. Using the 26 large central cities for which data on both types of rates are available, we analyze the extent to which discrepancies between the rates can be accounted for by aspects of urban social structure that differ from city to city. After introducing such structural controls, we find a much closer correspondence between the two types of rates for motor vehicle theft, robbery, burglary, and forcible rape, but not for aggravated assault and larceny-theft. These results are explained by citing evidence that we have identified some critical "suppressor" variables for the former crimes (i.e., variables that are positively associated with one type of rate and negatively associated with the other). By contrast, the heterogeneous nature of the phenomena subsumed by the latter two crime categories may preclude identification of a similarly parsimonious list of suppressors. One implication of these conclusions is that cross-sectional analyses of intercity variation in official rates may produce results that are in reasonably close correspondence with what would be obtained with victimization rates for certain index crimes, provided that sufficient structural control variables are utilized.     

投机倒把罪:一个口袋罪的死与生

投机倒把罪属于经济犯罪,而经济犯罪与一个国家的经济体制存在密切的关联性。从1949年到1979年,我国没有制定《刑法》,但在有关政策和规范性文件中,却对投机倒把罪做了规定,成为当时严格的计划经济体制下,惩治破坏计划经济体制的投机倒把行为的主要根据。我国1979年《刑法》规定了投机倒把罪,但对投机倒把行为没有具体规定,主要是通过司法解释进行规定,因而投机倒把罪具有口袋罪的特征。随着从计划经济体制到市场经济体制的发展,投机倒把罪的内涵发生了重大变化。尤其是1997年《刑法》废除了投机倒把罪,代之以非法经营罪。非法经营罪仍然保留了口袋罪的特征,利用《刑法》第225条第4款关于其他非法经营行为的兜底规定,我国立法机关和司法机关不断扩张非法经营罪的范围。从投机倒把罪到非法经营罪的罪名演变,可以视为是我国《刑法》70年历史变迁的一个缩影。     

The Moral Mirror Image of Crime: A Comparison of Recorded Crime and Crime Recorded in Fiction

Moral and ethical aspects of crime are often ignored in most criminological research. In order to probe these two dimensions, crime recorded in fiction was compared with statistically recorded crime. Two hypotheses were tested: the first suggested that crime fiction portrayed the “reality” of actual statistics, while the second suggested that crime fiction was totally unrelated to crime statistics. Comparing data obtained from a North American literary journal and crime statistics obtained from a Canadian province, the results of the study supported the second hypothesis and indicated that crime fiction was totally unrelated to recorded statistics. Crime fiction seemed to represent a moral pacemaker of the perceived fears of the public, while crime statistics seem to represent the criminal pulse of society.

The negative correlation between fiction and recorded statistics is a significant find in that it indicates the reading public's preoccupation and fascination with a very small segment of criminal activity in society—an unrealistic fear of serious injury or death due to violent crime, far out of proportion with reality especially when impending doom is much more probable on the highways in automobile accidents.     

国际犯罪与涉外犯罪、跨国犯罪关系辨析——以基础概念解析为进路

国际犯罪与涉外犯罪、跨国犯罪之间虽然在起源上具有不可磨灭的历史渊源,但它们在内容上并不具有同一或者包容关系,而是一种即相互交叉又彼此保持一定独立性的关系。只有当涉外犯罪、跨国犯罪具有"国际性"时,即它们的危害性达到国际刑法所要求的严重程度时,才能上升为国际犯罪。而在国际犯罪中,除了具有国际性的涉外犯罪和跨国犯罪外,还包括具有国际性的既不属于涉外犯罪又不属于跨国犯罪的单纯的国内犯罪。     

Managing Equality in Social Dilemmas: Emotional and Retributive Implications

The equality rule is an important coordination rule in symmetric public good dilemmas. Although prior research emphasized that people use the equality rule out of efficiency concerns (as it helps to obtain the public good in the most efficient manner among group members), it may also reflect a true preference for fairness. More precisely, research examining emotional and retributive reactions as a result of a violation of the equality rule by a fellow group member showed that equality indeed is related to people’s personal values and what they consider to be fair. The present paper suggests that a violation of the equality rule results in emotional reactions, and these emotional experiences encourage further retributive actions. The different reactions following an equality violation are described as a function of three features: (1) the motives to use equality, (2) attributions for explaining the violation, and (3) the honesty of the given explanation. The write-up of this paper was partly supported by GOA/05/04 from the Research Fund of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. The research and write-up was supported by a fellowship of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO, Grant No. 016.005.019), awarded to the second author.     

Beyond Anomie: Alienation and Crime

This paper argues that anomie theories are aspects of the more comprehensive, but neglected theory of alienation. The dominant dimension of anomie theories (particularly Durkheim’s version) is normlessness, which is only one of five dimensions of alienation theory. A practical implication of this insight is that anomie theory relies heavily on a Durkheimian focus on the role of normlessness in guiding criminal justice policy, while the other dimensions of alienation theory-powerlessness, meaninglessness, isolation and self-estrangement—have been deemphasized or ignored. By including all dimensions of the alienation concept, an integrated theory of crime and more effective crime control strategies can be formulated.     

Tripartism: Regulatory Capture and Empowerment

The features of regulatory encounters that foster the evolution of cooperation often also encourage the evolution of capture and corruption. Solutions to the problems of capture and corruption—limiting discretion, multiple-industry rather than single-industry agency jurisdiction, and rotating personnel—inhibit the evolution of cooperation. Tripartism—empowering public interest groups—is advanced as a way to solve this policy dilemma. A game-theoretic analysis of capture and tripartism is juxtaposed against an empowerment theory of republican tripartism. Surprisingly, both formulations lead to the conclusion that some forms of capture are desirable. The strengths from converging the weaknesses of these two formulations show how certain forms of tripartism might prevent harmful capture, identify and encourage efficient capture, enhance the attainment of regulatory goals, and strengthen democracy. While the case we make for tripartism is purely theoretical and general in its application to all domains of business regulation, our conclusion is a call for praxis to fish out the contexts in which the theory is true or false.     

Crime and Crime Control in an Age of Globalization: A Theoretical Dissection

This article examines theimpact of globalization on both crime and crimecontrol at the national and global levels. Tomake conceptual sense out of the transformingnature of these activities at the turn of the21st century, a threefold analysis ispresented: (1) an overview of the threetraditional developmental models of crime andcrime control – modernization, world system,and opportunity; (2) a characterization ofcrime and crime control in relationship to themore recently emerging models of globalization;and (3) a discussion of the implications of thedialectical relations between the models ofdevelopment and the models of globalization.Assessments of the models and other provisionalconclusions are drawn based on a survey of bothcrime and crime control in 15 developed,developing, and post-traditional nation-states.