Crime Generators in Context: Examining ‘Place in Neighborhood’ Propositions

Journal of Quantitative Criminology - The present study tests hypotheses regarding the moderating influence of neighborhood-level criminal opportunity on the relationship between crime generators...     

Compensating Irish Female Revolutionaries, 1916–1923

The newly released Irish Military Service Pensions Collection offers the most comprehensive opportunity to examine the role of women in the Irish revolution (1916–23) or in any comparable nationalist revolution. It is also an extremely useful source of evidence for an emerging historiographical trend of tracing the post-revolutionary lives of female veterans by examining the award of service pensions to them by that state. This article will examine the role played by gender in the award of such pensions, the economic and financial significance of them in a state that had underdeveloped welfare provision and the importance of them as a symbolic recognition of women's roles in helping to achieve Irish independence. It also compares the post-conflict experience of Irish female revolutionary veterans with women who were involved in comparable international military conflicts.     

Marginal lands: the role of remote sensing in constructing landscapes for agrofuel development

With the growth of the biofuel complex, the concept of ‘marginal land’ has emerged as a term commonly associated with the promotion of agrofuels. Remote sensing and other data are used to globally characterize land as marginal based on predominantly biophysical features that render it ‘non-competitive’ for the purpose of commercial food agriculture. This paper explores the limitations of current geospatial technologies in determining whether marginal land is appropriate for bioenergy crops given that (i) people often have intentions behind land use that are not reflected in most routinely collected remote sensing data and (ii) a remote (and spatio-temporally static) characterization of marginality is unable to capture the shifting character of what constitutes marginality in an economic sense and is therefore a non-sequitur for guiding land use decisions on the ground. This paper also explores the latent values embedded in the ontology of a macro-scale ‘marginal land’ land cover class and advances the notion that ‘marginal land’ as an artificial spatial construct serves to re-frame land in a way that neglects socio-ecological processes in order to re-frame it in support of principles based in resource productivism.     

Cruelty to Animals and Violence to People

The topic of animal cruelty has been largely neglected by criminological researchers. However, studies suggest that children who are cruel to animals disproportionally tend to be violent to people later in life. Case histories of serial killers and mass murderers suggest that many were cruel to animals in their childhood. Furthermore, it is argued that cruelty to animals in a family tends to be associated with domestic violence, child abuse, and elder abuse. Unfortunately, much of the previous research was based on small, unrepresentative samples, with poor or no control samples and retrospective information. Prospective longitudinal surveys of large representative samples are needed. Family based prevention programs might be effective in reducing cruelty to animals, but experimental evaluations of such programs are required. The time is ripe for a major research program to advance knowledge about the causes and prevention of animal cruelty and its implications for criminology.