Crime and reactions to crime in 34 Swedish birth cohorts: from historical descriptions to forecasting the future

This article analyses 34 Swedish birth cohorts with regard to their participation in crime as measured by data from the convictions database maintained by Statistics Sweden. Most existing cohort studies are limited to one or a few cohorts. By contrast, the present study includes 34 cohorts, i.e. all persons born in Sweden between 1958 and 1991. The article discusses methodological problems associated with this type of approach and examines the possibility of making forecasts. The central results are that the number of males with a criminal record has decreased, whereas the number of females has remained fairly stable. Forecasts indicate that the cohorts' participation in crime will continue to decrease. Research and policy implications of the findings are outlined. It is proposed to introduce cohort statistics as a standard branch within regular criminal justice statistics.     

WOMEN'S PARTICIPATION IN CHINESE TRANSNATIONAL HUMAN SMUGGLING: A GENDERED MARKET PERSPECTIVE*

Despite extensive sociological research on gender and organizations, criminologists have paid insufficient attention to how organizational context and market demands may shape the extent and nature of women's participation in illicit enterprises. This study uses an organizational framework to examine the case of Chinese human smuggling to the United States. Drawing from interviews with 129 human smugglers, we propose a gendered market perspective for understanding the place of women in the human smuggling enterprise. We argue that the limited place of violence and turf as organizing features of human smuggling, the importance of interpersonal networks in defining and facilitating smuggling operations, gender ideologies about work and caregiving, and the impact of safety as an overriding concern for clients combine to create a more meaningful niche for women in human smuggling operations than is found in other criminal endeavors. Our research suggests that organizational and market contexts are significant explanations for gender stratification in illicit enterprises.     

Race,ethnicity, and social change: The democratization of middle‐class crime*

Since the mid‐1970s, the percentage of non‐White people convicted of white‐collar type crimes in the federal judicial system has been growing steadily. In 2015, non‐Whites accounted for more than half of all convictions for certain white‐collar type crimes, but the increase in non‐White participation has not occurred evenly across all race and ethnic groups. Asians and Latinos have increased their participation in white‐collar crime more so than Blacks. Using data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the U.S. Census, we investigate whether the differential increase among race and ethnic groups in white‐collar type crimes can be explained by their differential increase in middle‐class occupations. The findings have implications for opportunity, cultural, and race‐centered perspectives on crime, as well as institutional anomie theory, and they suggest that low‐level white‐collar crimes are being democratized along lines of race and ethnicity.     

Crime, Prison, and Female Labor Supply

This paper introduces the vector autoregressive (VAR) methodology into themainstream of applied criminological research as an alternative to theestimation of structural models of crime. The paper presents cointegrationtest statistics for a second-order VAR of crime, prison population, femalelabor force participation, and durable consumption. Our results for theimpact of imprisonment on the crime rate are similar to Levitt's (1996)and substantially larger than previous estimates (e.g., Marvell and Moody,1994). We find that the short-run response of the crime rate to increasedlabor force participation of women is larger than the long-run effect. Theimplication is that major social changes, like the increased labor supply ofwomen, may have surprising impacts and that social institutions may takesome substantial period of time to adjust to such major changes.     

On the relationship between cognitive abilities and life-course-persistent offending among a sample of African Americans: A longitudinal test of Moffitt's hypothesis

Prior criminological research showed that cognitive abilities were related to delinquent and criminal activity, primarily within adolescent samples. Moffitt's developmental taxonomy anticipates that cognitive abilities will relate to criminal activity differently throughout the population of offenders, mattering more for life-course-persistent than adolescence-limited offenders. Unfortunately, prior research had not examined in great detail the long-term influence of cognitive abilities on criminal activity from birth to adulthood nor had research explored this issue within an African American sample. In this study, data from the Philadelphia portion of the National Collaborative Perinatal Project (NCPP) were used to examine the long-term effect of cognitive abilities on criminal activity from birth to adulthood.     

Employment,age, race,and crime: A labor theoretic investigation

The fundamental objective of this paper has been to reinvestigate the relationship between employment and crime, while taking account of deterrence, age and race effects. The data, a sample of Brooklyn arrestees, was collected by the Vera Institute of Justice simply to explore, with individual data, the relationship between employment and crime. In this research, a labor theoretic formulation is used incorporating a model that views the problem as one of rational choice between legitimate work and participation in crime. Factors affecting the diminution of crime participation with age are investigated. Changes at age 18 in economic opportunities and in deterrence effects from moving from juvenile to adult status are found to have a significant impact on crime participation. The results are important because they tend to confirm with official crime report data, results found in earlier studies using self-report data, i.e., (1) when the process is appropriately modeled, previous contacts with police are found to cause some experimenters with crime to become desisters, (2) prior work experience and economic opportunities tend to reinforce this tendency to desist, (3) even though blacks are found to have a greater prevalence of involvement in crime, when the data are standardized for all of the aforementioned factors and educational attainment, there is no significant difference between blacks and whites in their tendency to recidivate.     

Street Youth Crime: A Test of Control Balance Theory

Utilizing a sample of 400 homeless street youths, the paper explores the role control balance plays in the generation of crime. Using vignettes designed to represent violent crime, serious property crime, and minor property crime, the paper tests whether these youths sense of control over their poverty, shelter, hunger and other living conditions influences their participation in crime. Further, it examines how perceptions of risk and thrill, as well as deviant values, self‐control, deviant histories, and peer support impact on crime. Results indicate that both control deficits and control surpluses were related to assault and serious theft but not minor theft. Perceptions of thrill, deviant peers, deviant histories, and deviant values predicted violent and property crime, and perceptions of risk were related to the property offenses. Criminal peers also conditioned the impact of control surpluses and deficits on property offenses. Results are discussed in terms of future research and policy.     

Digital Realism and the Governance of Spam as Cybercrime

Spamming is a major threat to the formation of public trust in the Internet and discourages broader civil participation in the emerging information society. To the individual, spams are usually little more than a nuisance, but collectively they expose Internet users to a panoply of new risks while threatening the communications and commercial infrastructure. Spamming also raises important questions of criminological interest. On the one hand it is an example of a pure cybercrime – a harmful behaviour mediated by the Internet that is the subject of criminal law, while on the other hand, it is a behaviour that has in practice been most effectively contained technologically by the manipulation of ‘code’ – but at what cost? Because there is not an agreed meaning as to what constitutes ‘online order’ that renders it simply and uncritically reducible to a set of formulae and algorithms that can be subsequently imposed (surreptitiously) by technological processes. The imposition of order online, as it is offline, needs to be subject to critical discussion and also checks and balances that have their origins in the authority of law. This article deconstructs and analyses spamming behaviour, before exploring the boundaries between law and code (technology) as governance in order to inform and stimulate the debate over the embedding of cybercrime prevention policy within the code itself.     

犯罪控制与社会参与——构建和谐社会背景下的思考

和谐社会是稳定而有活力的社会,是国家与社会动态平衡的二元结构社会.在构建和谐社会的大背景下,犯罪控制模式应当由传统的"国家本位模式",向"国家·社会"双本位模式转化,应积极推进犯罪控制中的社会力量参与,以适应社会转型时期,公众对犯罪预防和控制的要求.     

CORRELATES OF VIOLENT POLITICAL EXTREMISM IN THE UNITED STATES*

Although research on terrorism has grown rapidly in recent years, few scholars have applied criminological theories to the analysis of individual‐level political extremism. Instead, researchers focused on radicalization have drawn primarily from political science and psychology and have overwhelmingly concentrated on violent extremists, leaving little variation in the dependent variable. With the use of a newly available data set, we test whether variables derived from prominent criminological theories are helpful in distinguishing between nonviolent and violent extremists. The results show that variables related to social control (lack of stable employment), social learning (radical peers), psychological perspectives (history of mental illness), and criminal record all have significant effects on participation in violent political extremism and are robust across multiple techniques for imputing missing data. At the same time, other common indicators of social control (e.g., education and marital status) and social learning perspectives (e.g., radical family members) were not significant in the multivariate models. We argue that terrorism research would benefit from including criminology insights and by considering political radicalization as a dynamic, evolving process, much as life‐course criminology treats more common forms of crime.     

性犯罪被害人权利保护的域外经验

与一般刑事犯罪被害人相比,性犯罪被害人在获得社会同情的时候,往往又容易被一般的社会舆论所中伤,其所受到的身心损害既持久又不易恢复;因此,美国、英国、德国、澳大利亚、日本、韩国等国家以及我国的台湾、香港地区主要从性犯罪被害人的知情权、参与权、免受二次受害权、请求赔偿和补偿权出发制定一系列非常细化、有效的规范,以实现对性犯罪被害人的特殊保护。     

Impacts of Violent Crime and Neighborhood Structure on Trusting Your Neighbors

The current work investigated impacts of local violent crime rates on residents’ willingness to trust neighbors. Crime has been thought to “atomize” community. Many works have considered impacts of crime on local social climate or vice versa. A smaller number of works have linked crime with general judgments about trustworthiness, but there has been little work on crime and trust of neighbors. 2002 survey data of 4,133 Philadelphia residents in 45 neighborhoods were combined with census and reported crime data to address this question. Multilevel, multinomial logit models confirmed that residents’ willingness to trust their neighbors varied significantly across neighborhoods for two response category contrasts: strongly agreeing or agreeing neighbors were trustworthy, each relative to strongly disagreeing. As expected, residents in neighborhoods with higher crime rates judged their neighbors as less dependable, even after controlling for local participation. Neighborhood crime and status impacts both depended on the contrast considered and on how status and crime were disentangled. Results align with some earlier works showing contingent effects of crime on ties, or contingent effects of ties on crime. Results extend earlier works by simultaneously focusing on one critical and central assessment of neighbors, showing important differences across response categories, and simultaneously finding extraneighborhood impacts.     

Self-reported crime rates of women prisoners

This paper presents findings from the first study of female prisoners' self-reports of criminal activity. Using the criminal career paradigm to frame the analysis, self-reported estimates of crime participation and frequency rates were examined for eight felony crimes. Important similarities between women and men were found in overall patterns of crime. Specifically, a small proportion ofboth women and men described committing a large portion of the total crimes reported. These data also suggest that women and men are similar in violent crime participation — a finding that varies from the current literature. Once active in a crime type, women and men committed assault, theft, and forgery at significantly different rates; no gender differences were found in the annualized frequency rates of burglary, robbery, motor vehicle theft, fraud, and drug dealing. However, although statistical differences were not found in the overall frequency of drug dealing, specific patterns of drug dealing reflected considerable gender variation, with a larger proportion of the female sample committing very frequent (daily) drug dealing activity. The findings reflect the value of the criminal career paradigm for the study of gender differences. Future research should include largescale quantitative designs that allow detailed analyses of correlates of the distinct criminal career dimensions.Points of view are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the U.S. Department of Justice.This research was funded in part by the National Institute of Justice, Grant 87-IJ-CX-0048.     

The Triborder–terrorism nexus

The Triborder region of South America, where the borders of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay intersect, comprises a population of approximately 700,000 inhabitants, among them 15,000–20,000 are Arabs, mostly of Lebanese descent. The region has gained a reputation as a hub of illegal activities, ranging from sales of pirated electronic goods and software to trafficking in drugs, weapons and illegal migrants. Also, the Triborder's relatively unregulated financial sector launders tens of billions of dollars of criminal funds and causes flight of capital annually. Reports that the region is a terrorist haven and staging area seem exaggerated; yet Arabs' extensive participation in the Triborder underground economy is believed to generate funds on behalf of Islamic extremists in the Middle East, especially Hezbollah and Hamas. Efforts to crack down on pirate businesses and alleged terrorist financiers have been constrained by government apathy, widespread police and judicial corruption and a lack of effective anti-terrorist legislation. Also, the dependence of many of the Triborder's inhabitants on the underground economy represents an effective constraint on enforcement action.     

试谈商业贿赂与商业贿赂犯罪

当前,商业贿赂在许多领域发展蔓延,已经成为经济生活中的一个突出问题。治理商业贿赂涉及面广、政策性强,需要全社会共同参与,惩防并举,标本兼治。本文在分析商业贿赂的内涵、危害的基础上,阐述了治理商业贿赂在实践中应把握的法律政策界限,并提出了预防商业贿赂犯罪的对策建议。     

A LIFE‐COURSE PERSPECTIVE ON SPIRITUALITY AND DESISTANCE FROM CRIME*

Spirituality is a component of many drug and alcohol treatment strategies, and faith‐based programming is also common within prison settings. Yet research on religiosity—crime linkages has often relied on general youth or adult samples or has included a short time line for gauging positive effects. Life‐course researchers focused on serious delinquents, in turn, have often emphasized other factors associated with long‐term crime patterns, such as marital attachment and job stability, or the criminality of the individual's social ties. This study draws on quantitative and qualitative data derived from a long‐term follow‐up of a sample of serious adolescent male and female offenders to explore the role of spirituality and religious participation as influences on adult patterns of criminal involvement (N= 152). The respondents were first interviewed as adolescents, in 1982, and again as adults in 1995 and 2003. Results of longitudinal analyses that take into account self‐report and incarceration histories at both time periods do not reveal a significant association between these indices of religiosity and the likelihood of evidencing a pattern of sustained desistance. Our analysis of indepth life‐history interviews conducted with most respondents over these two time periods and 41 additional interviews focused specifically on spirituality and religion are used to explore in more detail the promise and challenges associated with relying on religiosity as a catalyst for sustained behavior change.     

A Hero’s Welcome? Exploring the Prevalence and Problems of Military Veterans in the Arrestee Population

The potential for veterans to end up in the criminal justice system as a result of physical and psychological problems that may be combat‐related has generated much interest, illustrated most recently by the development of specialized veterans’ courts. However, little is known about how often veterans are arrested and incarcerated, the nature of their problems, or the extent to which their military service has contributed to their criminality. Using interview data from 2,102 arrestees booked in Maricopa County (AZ) during 2009, this paper examines the problems and prior experiences of arrested military veterans and compares veteran and non‐veteran arrestees along a range of measures. Results indicate that veterans comprise 6.3% of the arrestee population, and that more than 50% of veterans report suffering from at least one combat‐related problem including physical injury, post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), other mental health problems, and substance abuse. Multivariate analysis indicates that veteran arrestees differ from non‐veterans on a number of key measures, most notably more frequent arrests for violent offenses and greater use of crack cocaine and opiates. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for the potential link between military service and criminality as well as for criminal justice policy and practice.     

分权抑或垄断：域外疑罪不起诉模式的动态考察

疑罪不起诉是防止公民被无根据地或非法地提起刑事诉讼的一项重要制度。在分权模式和垄断模式下,疑罪不起诉制度的价值基础具有相当的共性,但在起诉权本质、控制机制、社会反应等方面具有不少特色。完善我国疑罪不起诉制度,可在利益平衡、事后制约、被害人参与、说理机制、起诉指南上积极借鉴域外经验。     

Strategic versus emergent crime groups: the case of Vietnamese cannabis cultivation in the Netherlands

This article addresses the nature and development of the Vietnamese involvement in cannabis cultivation in the Netherlands. The findings are based on empirical data collected from national police registrations, case studies and in-depth interviews with over 30 Dutch and international respondents. The authors describe the background characteristics of Vietnamese cannabis farmers, the structure of the predominantly mono-ethnic Vietnamese criminal groups and the international context. A situational approach to organised crime is applied to illustrate the ‘emergent’ character of the Vietnamese crime groups as opposed to a ‘strategic’ context of organised crime. The Vietnamese supervisors in the Netherlands have legal citizenship and often have ‘careers’ in cannabis-related crimes. It would appear that for a Vietnamese gardener or farmer, the path into cannabis cultivation is linked to financial debt. Besides situational factors, group characteristics, such as the migrant community, seem important in understanding the Vietnamese involvement in the Dutch cannabis market.     

Protective processes: the function of young people's implicit theories of crime in offending behaviour

Abstract

Despite development in high-risk environments, many youths are resilient and do not engage in antisocial behaviour and crime. Research on human traits such as intelligence and morality, suggest that the implicit theories (ITs) people have about the controllability of their behaviour, as either fixed (entity beliefs) or malleable (incremental beliefs) may play a part in successful behavioural outcomes. Using this as a framework, the function of ITs about crime in successful adolescent development was investigated among 422 ‘at-risk’ youths. Incremental ITs of criminality were found to significantly predict less self-reported involvement in youth offending, controlling for academic attainment. Entity ITs, conversely, were associated with an increased rate of participation in deviant behaviour. Further analysis revealed that incremental ITs of criminality moderated the negative effects of associating with delinquent peers on adolescent behaviour. The results demonstrate the direct and indirect protective function of incremental ITs of criminality for youths at risk and highlight the value of investigating further the protective processes that are involved in preventing youth crime.