Teaching Criminological Theory: The Power of Film and Music

Interest in utilizing pop culture as a means of teaching and enhancing students’ understanding of complex or abstract ideas in the classroom has increased over the course of the past decade. This includes the use of film, television, fiction books, the internet, and music. The fields of criminology and criminal justice have also increasingly noted the value of using such means to teach about atrocities such as state crime, transnational crime and corporate crimes as well as issues of inequality, racism, and classism. Film, music and television can also be great tools to enhance the understanding of and ability to apply criminological theory. Most articles that have focused on incorporating the use of a ‘popular criminology’ within the classroom, however, have concentrated on one form or another of ‘pop culture’ (i.e., film). This article seeks to add to the existing literature by providing an example of how the use of film combined with music can not only enhance undergraduate criminology and criminal justice students’ ability to grasp criminological theory and apply it in their everyday lives, but also can be utilized as tools for exams.     

“Scholarly influence” and white-collar crime scholarship

This article explores many of the factors that play a role in the relative lack of scholarly influence of criminology and criminal justice professionals who focus on studying white-collar and corporate crime. The latest studies of “scholarly influence” in criminology and criminal justice journals and textbooks based on citation analyses confirm the absence of scholars who study white-collar and corporate crime. The sparse inclusion of white-collar and corporate crime topics in criminology and criminal justice curriculum in academic programs also indicate that the area is considered by many as a subfield rather than a mainstream component of academic criminology. Whether or not this status will change remains to be seen, but, on a positive note, there are a few encouraging signs that scholarly influence in the field will include more white-collar criminologists in the future.     

CRIME AS HAZARD: PERCEPTIONS OF RISK AND SERIOUSNESS*

The study of crime suffers from an inattention to the social consequences of criminal acts. Conceiving crimes within the larger context of “hazard,” data are reported on the relative seriousness of conventional and white-collar crimes, as well as other hazards, using a sample of Washington state respondents. The results indicate that there is an inverse relationship between the perceived likelihood of a hazard and its seriousness. Generally, the more immediate the threat of a hazard, such as white-collar crimes, the more serious it is perceived to be. There are also implications from these consequences for perceptions of institutional effectiveness and interpersonal relationships. This suggests that future studies of the consequences of criminality, especially white-collar and corporate violations, might be directed toward the notions of risk and, eventually, social trust.     

Crime and Security in Asia: Diversity and Development

The Asian Journal of Criminology aims to advance the study of criminology and criminal justice in Asia, to promote evidence-based public policy in crime prevention and to promote comparative studies about crime and criminal justice. Asia’s cultural and legal diversity are discussed in the light of the variations in rates of crime, imprisonment and victimisation. Fostering a criminological community in Asia will contribute to improvements in the provision of mutual legal assistance that is now required to combat trans-national crime.     

Meeting the enemy: American exceptionalism and international law

Howard Zinn has been classified in a number of ways for his many social contributions. However, despite the breadth of his work, he has never been considered a criminologist. It is likely that this is the result of the inaccurate perceptions many Americans have about crime being a predominantly street‐level social problem. Zinn maintains that the social harms caused by those in positions of political and economic power are in fact crimes against humanity that are far more destructive and violent than the actions our legal system has historically deemed criminal. He also points to the ways our criminal justice system is unjust and ineffective, and has demonstrated how social inequality ensures that the disadvantaged will be further subordinated by the criminal justice system. Zinn’s critical contributions about the most significant sources of social harm, the unjust nature of the American justice system, and the influence of social inequality offer an unorthodox criminological perspective that deserves special consideration. His unconventional criminology calls for increasing social justice by means of political dissent, social resistance, and civil disobedience.     

Simple Rhetoric and Complex Punitiveness: Federal Criminal Justice Responses to White-Collar Criminality

Abstract

Though criminological literature shows that the manifestation of punitiveness in the criminal justice system is complex, it rarely differentiates between responses to different kinds of crimes. This constitutes a significant gap in knowledge, as it is widely believed that white-collar crimes are treated leniently. In light of the “heating up” of political rhetoric, the expansion of federal criminal law, and the increased maximum punishments on conviction, the article aims to explore whether prosecutorial and judicial responses to white-collar crimes have become more punitive, employing rarely used datasets from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) between 1996 and 2014. It is demonstrated that these responses are more complex and less consistently punitive than the rhetoric and policies advanced by politicians. It endeavors to capture the complexity of punitiveness in practice by measuring numerous variables and multiple points in the criminal justice process, studying punitiveness from multiple angles, using prosecution and sentencing data.     

Black Mist and White Collars: Economic Crime in the United States and Japan

Comparative studies of crime have persistently challenged and daunted criminology scholars. For criminologists studying Japan, interest has traditionally been focused on the country’s much-heralded low crime rate. The current study examines white-collar lawbreaking in both the United States and Japan, focusing on similarities and differences in culture, law, criminal justice system response, corporate governance, and regulation. The study concludes that if Japan’s low crime rate is an enigma to criminologists, then its ample amounts of white-collar and corporate crime appear that much more puzzling. Given that the depth of the problem of white-collar crime goes far beyond adjudicated cases, Japan’s remarkably low rate of common crime is likely eclipsed by its rate of white-collar and corporate crime. The study concludes that the different legal and cultural contexts of the “law in inaction” go far in explaining the official nonrecognition of white-collar and corporate crime in both the United States and Japan.

White-collar and organized crimes: Questions of seriousness and policy

The line between organized crime and white-collar crime is often vague, compounding the separate social problems represented by these two types of criminality. This blurring is complicated further by the general assumption that organized criminals pose a more serious threat, thus requiring a stronger sanction than white-collar criminals. The controversy surrounding certain recent crime-control statutes centers around different assessments of the seriousness of both types of criminality. Prior studies of crime seriousness have focused primarily on crimes in general, with some attention to white-collar crime in contrast to ordinary crime. To date, however, no one has examined the differences in perceptions of seriousness between white-collar and organized crime. This paper investigates how occupation and attitudes toward the seriousness of white-collar and organized crime influence attitudes toward policy distinctions between the two, as well as toward the usefulness of various definitions of organized crime.     

What methods are most frequently used in research in criminology and criminal justice?

Articles published in seven leading criminology and criminal justice journals were coded with regard to the research methods used, focusing on the general research designs, data-gathering methods, and statistical analysis techniques employed. The results indicated that survey research was by far the dominant mode of acquiring criminological information, that cross-sectional nonexperimental designs still predominated, and that multivariate statistical methods were the norm. The findings could aid criminology and criminal justice faculty in devising graduate methods curricula that reflected the state-of-the-art as currently practiced by criminological researchers.     

Violent Street Crime Versus Harmful White-Collar Crime: A Comparison of Perceived Seriousness and Punitiveness

Recent studies have challenged traditional wisdom regarding public apathy about white-collar crime by revealing equal or greater perceived seriousness of these offenses among respondents relative to traditional crime. Nevertheless, subjects in those studies were generally asked to contrast white-collar crime scenarios with a non-violent street crime baseline vignette. Perhaps a violent street crime would have invited lower perceived seriousness for the white-collar offenses. Participants in the present study were asked to (1) read vignettes describing violent street crimes and physically harmful white-collar crimes, (2) compare their seriousness, and (3) determine appropriate sanctions. Subjects perceived the violent crime scenarios presented to them to be more serious than the harmful white-collar crime vignettes. Further, they were less punitive toward white-collar offenders compared with street criminals. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

宽严相济刑事司法政策的反思——以犯罪学为视角的考量

犯罪学理论是宽严相济刑事司法政策的制定依据，也是对它进行有效性与科学性论证的理论来源，但国内以此为视角对其进行的研究却很少。若以犯罪学为视角对宽严相济刑事司法政策进行考量，其具有在制定和执行过程中对参与力量缺少充分的关注、在政策设计中对权力的分配失衡等不足，这种不足可以通过对犯罪学理论的不断深入研究加以解决。     

Criminology and animality: stupidity and the anthropological machine

Although a relatively small, yet growing group of scholars have been lamenting the exclusion of nonhuman animals from the scope of criminology for over thirty years now, animals have been historically present in criminological theorizing, legal practices, and research. However, this presence has not been of the form advocated for by scholars who variously identify themselves as non-speciesist criminologists, green criminologists, or ecological criminologists, who have been arguing largely for recognition of harms perpetrated against animals, or ‘zoological crime’. Instead, the longer history of animals in criminology is as offenders or as prototypes of criminality. In this article, we are concerned with the production – vis-à-vis the anthropological machine – of the ‘stupid’ animal and subhuman within criminology and criminal justice. Guided by the political philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, we trace the animal through criminological thought from the premodern period to Lombroso to contemporary criminological scholarship illustrating how the animal has been (ab)used to shore up the classifications between humans, between humans and animals, and the intelligent and the stupid. We also examine how historically through criminal trials of animals and the feebleminded, criminal justice has played an active role in buttressing these classifications and acting on these classifications to produce bare life, that is, life without form or value.     

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.     

Newsmaking criminology: Reflections of the media,intellectuals, and crime

Although academicians in criminology and criminal justice have come to appreciate the importance of the media in constructing ideological images of crime and punishment, apparently they have not considered how to use mass communications for the purposes of informing, interpreting, and altering those images to reflect more realistically the social, political, and economic conditions of crime and social control. Beginning with an analysis of the relationships among the developing political economy of the mass media, intellectuals, and conceptions of crime and justice, this essay introduces a criminological practice that can take advantage of the available opportunities in the production of crime news. I call this practice “newsmaking criminology.” It refers to the conscious efforts of criminologists and others to participate in the presentation of “newsworthy” items about crime and justice.     

单位犯罪存在范围的批判性反思

市场经济的进一步发展催生出了更多的单位犯罪,我国1997年《刑法》正式将单位确定为犯罪主体,这对于打击单位犯罪具有里程碑式的意义。但是,由于立法层面上没有兼顾单位犯罪与自然人犯罪之间的逻辑平衡,加之刑法理论界相关研究的匮乏,导致在司法层面上对单位犯罪的认定各行其是,以致使得刑事司法难以应对诸多的新型单位犯罪。因此,针对单位犯罪研究与司法操作的混乱局面,深入探究单位犯罪与自然人犯罪的关系,进而全面思索刑事立法对于单位犯罪加以干预范围的明确化和视角转换问题,对于完善单位犯罪刑法规制体系具有立法和理论研究的必要性和前瞻性。     

Scaling Criminal Offending

Objective:

This paper reviews a century of research on creating theoretically meaningful and empirically useful scales of criminal offending and illustrates their strengths and weaknesses.

Methods:

The history of scaling criminal offending is traced in a detailed literature review focusing on the issues of seriousness, unidimensionality, frequency, and additivity of offending. Modern practice in scaling criminal offending is measured using a survey of 130 articles published in five leading criminology journals over a two-year period that included a scale of individual offending as either an independent or dependent variable. Six scaling methods commonly used in contemporary criminological research are demonstrated and assessed using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979: dichotomous, frequency, weighted frequency, variety, summed category, and item response theory ??theta??.

Results:

The discipline of criminology has seen numerous scaling techniques introduced and forgotten. While no clearly superior method dominates the field today, the most commonly used scaling techniques are dichotomous and frequency scales, both of which are fraught with methodological pitfalls including sensitivity to the least serious offenses.

Conclusions:

Variety scales are the preferred criminal offending scale because they are relatively easy to construct, possess high reliability and validity, and are not compromised by high frequency non-serious crime types.     

Perception of Seriousness and Concern about White-Collar Crime: Some Results of an Opinion Survey Among Swiss Banks

Scientifically, little is known about white-collar crime in Switzerland or concern about white-collar crime and even less about how concerned bank employees are about this criminality. This article is based on a small opinion survey of Swiss bank employees and tries to explore perceptions of seriousness and concern about white-collar crime among people who, in their position, might have to face this issue regularly. Past assumptions on the public’s indifference towards white-collar crime seem not to be confirmed in this study as the results obtained demonstrate a greater sensitivity with respect to white-collar crime and especially towards crimes perpetrated by corporations. Even though Swiss bank employees do qualify white-collar offences as very serious acts, they are still more punitive with regard to ordinary crimes.     

Swedish quantitative criminology in the 1990s: A brief overview

Quantitative criminology research published in Sweden in the 1990s is reviewed and put in the context of major Swedish traditions in quantitative criminological research. Sweden has a strong tradition in sophisticated longitudinal and ecological research which continues into the 1990s. Other traditionally prominent areas of Swedish quantitative research include studies of crime trends, violence, and youth criminality. Traditionally Swedish quantitative criminology has been dominated by studies using official statistics and criminal records as data. In the 1990s there has been a significant upswing in survey studies, motivated partly by an increased interest in questions of etiology and crime prevention. More fundamental research on the causes of crime, including new longitudinal studies, and more evaluations of crime prevention initiatives are needed.     

犯罪学与刑事法制改革:以英国为例

过去30年英国的犯罪学发展具有两个明显特征:一个是"犯罪学"在多个维度的"膨胀";另一个是犯罪学"自治性"的增强。犯罪学在向自治学科转变的过程中既具有许多有益的方面,也存在诸多风险。它可能会丧失与其他学科之间的联系,也越来越容易受到外部环境的影响与制约,因而有必要对其存在的问题及其潜在的后果保持警觉。犯罪学知识的用途,在于为决策的制定提供科学依据。对犯罪学进行准确定位有两个核心要求:一是要承诺把犯罪学变成一个内涵广阔的学术概念,即将犯罪学的多元主义看作一个优势;二是要让犯罪学研究与实践保持长久的、基本的联系,将犯罪学知识渗入公众关注的犯罪和法制事件中,对"制度性环境"作出一个比现在更令人信服的解释。     

Private Military Contractors,Crime, and the Terrain of Unaccountability

Criminological research has traditionally attempted to explain the etiological factors of crime and then suggest appropriate controls. More often than not, the foci of this kind of work have remained on “street crime.” Since the 1990s, however, some scholars have turned their attention to the causal factors of corporate crime, state crime, crimes of globalization, supranational crimes, and their various permutations and interconnections. Clearly missing from this literature is the growing phenomenon of private military contractors (PMCs) and the crimogenic culture of and atmosphere within which they operate. Specifically, while the use of PMCs is rapidly growing, the increasing propensity for PMC's crimogenic culture and the unregulated nature of what has become a global industry is rarely studied by social scientists. Further, few criminologists have examined this area of research by applying criminological theory to explain the growth and emergence of PMCs. Our goal is to help fill this gap. Through the process of theory building and refinement we identify factors that facilitate the criminogenic environment within which PMCs operate. Additionally, without attempting to expand explanatory and causal mechanisms, policies aimed at reducing PMC criminality and social justice for their victims cannot be developed. As such, we draw from theoretical developments in state and state‐corporate crime, social disorganization, and anomie literature to shed light on key factors associated with PMCs, namely, the crimogenic atmosphere within which they operate.