Economic Crime and Casinos: China’s Wager on Macau

Notwithstanding the results of some empirical studies, casinos and gambling are widely considered to be breeding grounds for a range of deviant behavior and criminal offenses. As one writer expressed it, “the world of gambling offers a portfolio of anonymous expenditure” which allows for money laundering and other illegal activities associated with the legal operation of casinos. This paper examines economic and white-collar criminal activities and case histories of offenses related to Macau’s growing casino industry, now the highest revenue generating in the world. A Portuguese colony from 1557 until 1999 when it was returned to China, Macau is a Special Administrative Region (SAR) with its own governing officials operating under the PRC maxim of “one country, two systems.” The dramatic recent growth of the casino industry in Macau offers a unique opportunity to examine issues of economic crime and law enforcement within the context of the People’s Republic of China’s recently acquired political and economic stewardship in this SAR. The paper documents white-collar and organized crimes that present new challenges and risks to China now that Macau has become an international marquee.     

Food Fraud and the Partnership for a ‘Healthier’ America: A Case Study in State-Corporate Crime

At a moment of heightened public concern over food-related health issues, major corporations in the food industry have found their products and practices under scrutiny. Needing to be understood as socially responsible, these corporations have established partnerships with the state to construct a positive, proactive, and cooperative public image. One major public–private partnership that evolved from former First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move initiative—the Partnership for a Healthier America—serves as a case study in this paper, which analyzes the consequences and social harms perpetuated by a public health campaign bound by the imperative to maximize profit. By using trusted state actors to deliver accurate but deceptive claims about food companies’ commitment to public health, this public–private partnership actively misleads the public and potentially exacerbates public health challenges, warranting a skeptical revision of how we understand corporate social responsibility and neoliberal governance on issues of health and nutrition. As a form of fraud, these attempts to mislead the public go beyond the actions of public sector individuals or members of corporate boards, but are structurally incentivized by the legal rights, regulatory privileges, and profit-related incentives central to the modern corporate form. While conventional criminological research tends to underemphasize state and corporate harms, we make use of a critical criminological perspective to analyze state-corporate partnerships in the space between food industry practices and public health policy.     

Suburbia’s “Crime Experts”: The Neo-Conservatism of Control Theory and the Ethos of Crime

This essay tackles the relationship between morality and crime by way of the debate surrounding Travis Hirschi’s double contribution to so-called “control theory,” first as “social bonding theory,” and subsequently as a “general theory” of crime. The assessment conducted herein construes the first version of “control” as an expression of patriotism, and its late formulation, on account of its emphasis on varying individual levels of self-mastery, as an implicit reaffirmation of the inevitability of class division. Over the years, the fixation with “self-control” has become a rubric for the suburban anxieties of an upper-middle class surrounded by expanding (ghetto) poverty and plagued by familial dysfunction and the alienation of its own offspring. In the final analysis, these reflections form the basis for a general reformulation, inspired by the sociology of Thorstein Veblen, of the relationship between class and crime and condign punishment by leveraging the notion of ethos (a common mindset peculiar to each class), and proving thereby that crime is systematically determined by this very mindset, which is the spiritual complement to class formation, rather than by the conventionally classless categories of rational self-interest or idiosyncratic proneness to violence.     

Lay Victims’ Conceptions of Environmental Crime and Environmental Injustice: The Case of the Chem-Dyne Superfund Site

Social Justice Research - This project explores lay victims’ conceptions of environmental crime and environmental injustice through in-depth interviews with a snowball sample of people...     

Economic man and diffused sovereignty: a critique of Australia’s asylum regime

Governing asylum, especially in Western migration zones, is correctly understood as an expression of centralized state power, or sovereignty. Still, there is much to learn about asylum regimes by turning critical attention to how sovereignty is de-centralized. This critique focuses on Australia where sovereign power is diffused into privatized detention, outsourced decision-making, and offshore processing. The reliance on diffused sovereignty, the article contends, is a maneuver by the state as it attempts to evade legal obligations enshrined in refugee law and human rights. As discussed throughout, economic mentalities figure prominently in the Australian asylum system. In particular, the notion of economic man continues to shape the government’s perception of asylum seekers as being highly rational and responsible, thus manageable by way of deterrence and prolonged detention. Special attention is given to recent disputes between the High Court and the then Gillard government with respect to the processing of refugees.     

Judging a Judge: A Reappraisal of Lord Mansfield and Somerset’s Case

This article presents an occasion on which moral judgement can, and should, take place. When the chief justice of the court of king’s bench – William Murray, first earl of Mansfield – was presented with the case of Somerset v Stewart in 1772, he was presented with choices that unveiled aspects of his character. By first establishing the ambiguity of the legal context and the multifarious political pressures that preceded Somerset’s case, this article identifies the extent of Lord Mansfield’s ‘room for manoeuvre’ with respect to three elements of his conduct: the delay and reluctance in making a decision, the choices regarding the substantive decision and the manner of expressing that decision. To what extent did Mansfield have freedom of action, and how did he exercise it? Are those free actions worthy of praise or condemnation? Through an essential questioning of previous historians’ assumptions and omissions, this article sharpens the strokes through which a complex portrait of Mansfield may be rendered.     

Spatio-Temporal Change of Crime at Provincial Scale in China—Since the Economic Reform

China has undergone tremendous social changes during the transition since the Economic Reform, and this paper did a comparative study on crime change patterns among provinces both spatially and temporally. The results indicated that (1) regional differences on crime levels and temporal change trends were largely influenced, or even been shaped, by the outcomes brought by economic reform, such as priority developmental policies, geographical location, transportation facilities, etc. For example, spatially, more developed areas with more governmental policy supports not only saw dramatic development during the economic reform but also showed higher criminal rates and greater criminal rate variation. (2) The relationships between criminal rates and corresponding contextual conditions vary by temporal scales (long-run and short-run), regions, target areas’ features and their different development policy priorities; (3) experiences from Western theories and empirical studies cannot be applied directly into the Chinese society, without taking into consideration of the spatial-temporal scales and target’s specialities; it is also suggestive to local policy-makers and governmental agencies that crime reduction and prevention measures should not be identical to other places and need to be made according to local characteristics.     

China’s stolen children: internal child trafficking in the People’s Republic of China

Trafficking in children has attracted worldwide attention in the last two decades primarily due to its links with global migratory movements and the role ‘transnational organised crime’ is perceived to play in these. Internal trafficking is largely ignored primarily because of a preoccupation with cross-border, transnational migratory movements. Arguably, the growth of the relevant literature has given rise to certain widespread perceptions about the uniformity in the trade characteristics and actors under the common rubric of ‘trafficking in human beings’. By capitalising on direct linguistic access to a wide range of Chinese open sources, the purpose of the article is to offer an account of the various dimensions of the issue as they present themselves in the particular Chinese context. Our main concern has been to perform a systematic presentation of this material in light of the extant wider literature. In the Chinese case the combination of socioeconomic, political and cultural factors set a complex picture that highlights the shortcomings of dominant ways of thinking about the phenomenon. This complex picture serves usefully to cast doubts with regard to how the criminal activity itself is being conceptualised as well as to perceptions of victimisation embodied in current discourses on human trafficking.     

Is Enforced Self-regulation a Form of Risk Taking?: The Case of Railway Health and Safety

Enforced self-regulation exemplifies a number of regulatory trends, in particular the co-existence of public and private forms of regulation, state moves to harness other sources of regulation and the growing attempt of the state to penetrate deep into corporate life. This paper explores the limits of enforced self-regulation through discussion of corporate responses to occupational health and safety regulation in Britain. It takes the example of the railway industry where a particularly extreme version of enforced-self regulation eventually led to tragic consequences.     

From Safety to Danger: Constructions of Crime in a Women’s Magazine

This study examines how the print media constructs signifiers of safety and danger for women. We analyze 155 news articles regarding crime and criminal justice from 1970 to 1990 in Chatelaine magazine, a Canadian women’s periodical. Both content and textual analyses are deployed to evaluate the media representations of crime and their role in facilitating images of fear and safety. We show that the meanings associated with women’s danger and safety in news narratives are socially constructed through claims, sources, content and culture. We find that news reporting did not initially incorporate signifiers of fear. However, crime messages increasingly included images of fear in the later reporting period. We argue that the transformations surrounding these images and texts are influenced by the rise in neoliberal thought in the 1980s. Our results indicate that ideological struggles external to the media are crucial to the representation of crime, which ultimately influence signifiers of danger and safety for women.     

Deliberative Law-Making: A Case Study of the Process of Enacting of a ‘Constitution of the Third Sector’ in the Polish Sejm

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique - The main objective of the paper is to present a model of the good practices of deliberative...     

What Kind of Joblessness Affects Crime? A National Case–Control Study of Serious Property Crime

Objective

To assess whether joblessness affects the commission of serious property crime.

Methods

We studied serious property crime, applying a case–control design to nationally representative samples of (a) known serious property crime offenders and (b) nonoffenders. This was done by comparing a national sample of prison inmates convicted of robbery or burglary (the “cases”) with a general sample of the U.S. adult population (the “controls”). In contrast to prior individual-level research, the study sample included substantial numbers of serious offenders, and provided a formal basis for generalizing the findings to the U.S. adult population. We differentiated five labor force statuses: (1) unemployed (according to the official government definition), (2) underemployed, (3) out of the labor force for widely socially accepted reasons (OLFL), (4) out of the labor force for reasons not widely accepted (OLFN), and (5) fully employed.

Results

We found that when these distinctions are made, people are not more likely to engage in burglary or robbery when they are either completely unemployed or underemployed according to the official definitions. Instead, it is being out of the labor force for reasons not widely accepted as legitimate that is significantly and positively related to serious property offending.

Conclusions

The results suggest that offending among jobless persons may reflect preexisting differences in criminal propensity among those who stay out of the labor force, rather than effects of joblessness per se. Part-time work is associated with significantly less property crime, perhaps because the willingness to accept even part-time jobs serves as an indicator of commitment to pro-social attitudes.

     

A Hunter’s Moon: the Effect of Moon Illumination on Outdoor Crime

We use National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) data and an AutoRegressive Integrative Moving Average (ARIMA) study design to investigate the effect of moon illumination on reported crime occurring outdoors between the hours of 10 pm to 2 am in 13 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. Prior research analyzed a confounded dependent variable that amalgamated indoor and outdoor crimes. This situation is problematic in that there is little reason to speculate a relationship between moon illumination and indoor crime because artificial illumination is used within dwellings. Findings show that while moon illumination has little influence on total crime and indoor crime, the intensity of moonlight does have a substantive positive effect on outdoor criminal activity. As moon illumination intensifies, outdoor crime increases markedly. Plausible explanations for this relationship are discussed.     

Racist Offenders and the Politics of ‘Hate Crime’

In the UK and USA ‘Hate crime’ has become a topic of public controversy and social mobilization around issues of violence and harassment. This has largely but not exclusively addressed racism, homophobia and gender based violence. This article has three objectives. First, to situate hate crime legislation within a broad theory of modernity;secondly to examine the politics of its emergence as a public issue; thirdly to use data from the authors' recent research in Greater Manchester to illuminate the complexity of the concept of ‘hate crime’. The centrality of ‘hate crime’ to current debates derives from the importance of rights-based regulation of complex societies and the juridical management of emotional life. Hatred and violence have become problematic behaviour thrown into relief by a long term civilizing process. Hate crimes have thus acquired powerful rhetorical focus for mobilization of victim and identity politics. With reference to racist violence in Oldham and elsewhere in Greater Manchester, we argue that in its application and construction, however, ‘hate crime’ is a complex phenomenon that might dramatize rather than regulate the problems it seeks to address. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Racial Context and Crime Reporting: A Test of Black’s Stratification Hypothesis

Contextual factors that contribute to race differences in reporting crime to the police are an important element in Donald Black??s theory of the behavior of the law, yet few studies have investigated whether these differences vary depending on social context. The present study investigates whether the relationships between victim and offender race and the reporting of crime are moderated by the level of racial stratification in a given place as Black??s stratification hypothesis would predict. Using victim survey data from 40 metropolitan areas, as well as data from other sources, we find results that are consistent with Black??s stratification hypothesis, namely, that victim and offender race are more strongly associated with the reporting of crime in those metropolitan areas where the gap in economic status between blacks and whites is larger and the groups are more residentially segregated. The theory, however, is unable to account for the high rates of reporting of black-on-black assaults found across the 40 metropolitan areas. The question of how the needs of black victims may outweigh their reluctance to call the police is an important issue for future research.     

What's the Use of a Hashtag? A Case Study

Although there are now sophisticated techniques for the analysis of social media, socio‐legal studies has yet to draw on them fully. In this article, we demonstrate how Twitter can produce insights about protest, law, and legality, through a case study of protests against the ‘bedroom tax’. The first involved challenging a policy in the courts using a test case or cases. We discuss the litigation strategies and the mess they created and counterpose those strategies with those of four prolific ‘tweeps’ who participated in our study. We argue that, despite the small number of participants, these people have, in their own way, been enormously influential and made things happen. Our position is not evaluative of the different strategies – but, rather, one that recognizes that legality is mobilized in different ways.     

A System��s Approach to Crime Prevention: The Case of Macao

Macao has the world’s largest casino industry and represents a unique political, social, and cultural system that differs significantly from Western societies. The overall crime rate in Macao is relatively low. Scholarly knowledge about crime and crime prevention in Macao, however, is very limited. This paper first reviews crime prevention theories, typologies, and various strategies in Western societies, followed by an introduction and discussion of crime prevention practices in Macao. Crime prevention strategies in Macao may be characterized as a tripod structure with three major supporting legs: traditional criminal justice practices, social prevention beyond the criminal justice system, and situational crime prevention measures. The paper then discusses the factors that may contribute to the low level of crime in Macao and points out the direction for future research in Macao.     

Corruption in China’s economic reform: a review of recent observations and explanations

Corruption is a universal phenomenon of public institutions. It is markedly more pervasive in developing and transitional societies. China, with rapid economic growth for two decades, has been deeply troubled by the problem of official corruption at all levels in the public sector. The paper reviews the literature in the last 15 years which examines Chinese corruption from either a theoretical or empirical approach, by qualitative or quantitative methods in observation. Based on more than 30 studies with a focus on the related topic, the review covers issues of Chinese corruption data and statistics, theoretical explanations and China’s strategies of fighting corruption as well as critique.

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College Students’ Attitudes Toward Intimate Partner Violence: a Comparative Study of China and the U.S.

Although attitudes toward intimate partner violence (IPV) have been the subject of many studies, little research has been conducted to comparatively assess public definitions of IPV in Western and non-Western countries. Drawing upon survey data collected from approximately 500 Chinese and American college students, this study compared and contrasted Chinese and American college students in their beliefs about what constitute IPV. Chinese students were found to be less likely to define abusive acts as IPV than their U.S. counterparts. Gender-role attitudes, such as beliefs of male dominance and IPV as crime, were among the most prominent predictors of students’ definitions of IPV. Chinese and American college students’ attitudes differed not only in what was defined as IPV, but also in what were the factors that shaped such attitudes. Directions for future research and policy were discussed.