The First Shot was the Last Straw: The Sinking of the T.S.S. Athenia in September 1939 and British Naval Policy in the Second World War

On 3 September 1939 the passenger liner Athenia, sailing from Liverpool to Montreal, was sunk by the German submarine U-30 with a loss of 112 lives. This action, while not intended by the German government, was in violation of Germany's commitments under the London Naval Treaty and it complicated its desire to keep hostilities confined to Poland. The British government and Admiralty, confronted with an attack on an unarmed passenger liner within nine hours of the declaration of war, and several freighters shortly thereafter, concluded that the German Navy intended to wage unrestricted submarine warfare. This article shows that as a result of the sinking of the Athenia, the government and the Admiralty implemented convoys within the first week of the war, sooner and more completely than had been intended. Naval ship building priorities were also subsequently adjusted to quickly provide escort vessels for the newly organized convoys.     

A Longitudinal Study of Escalation in Crime Seriousness

Escalation in crime seriousness over the criminal lifecourse continues to be an important issue to study in criminal careers. Quantitative research in this area has not yet been well developed owing to the difficulty of measuring crime seriousness and the complexity of escalation trajectories. In this paper we suggest that there are two types of escalation process—escalation associated with experience of the criminal justice process, and escalation associated with age and maturation. Using the 1953 birth cohort from the England and Wales Offenders Index followed up to 1999, and a recently developed seriousness scale of offenses, we constructed the individual sequences of seriousness scores from conviction to conviction. These individual sequences were then analyzed using a variety of longitudinal mixed models, with age, number of conviction occasions, sex and number of offenses used as covariates. The results suggest that ageing is associated with de-escalation whereas the number of conviction occasions are associated with escalation, with the two processes pulling in different directions. This conceptual framework helps to disentangle previously contradictory results in the escalation literature.     

Global forces and local effects in youth justice: The case of Moroccan youngsters in Netherlands

Muncie recently argued for the emergence of ‘something of a global youth juvenile justice’ to explain considerable homogenisation of youth justice in many countries. Global forces upon youth justice are particularly discernable in the Netherlands, either via policy transfer or policy diffusion but also and perhaps mainly through a process of ‘otherisation’ of ethnic minority youngsters of Moroccan descent that are highly overrepresented in police contacts and detention rates. This paper argues that an analysis of youth crime and youth justice needs to consider the dialectic processes of globalisation. It needs to be sensitive to its local effects, as well as to the ways in which ethnic minority youngsters engage in offending behaviour that may well be framed as rebellious transnational identity work.     

Effect of Organizational Support on Police Effectiveness and Behavior: a Cross-cultural Comparison

Organizational support has received considerable attention in the academic literature. However, in policing, this area of research has received limited attention. The present study surveyed police officers from two countries to investigate how officers’ perception of organizational support influence their sense of effectiveness and behavior. Findings revealed significant cultural differences in the perception of organizational support and its impact on perceived effectiveness and behavior in the two countries. Policy implications of the findings are discussed.     

Sanctioning corporate crime: How do business executives and the public compare?

Previous literature on attitudes toward the punishment or seriousness of criminal behavior has largely neglected to focus systematically upon five issues: (1) public perceptions of corporate illegality rather than perceptions of street crime or other forms of white-collar lawlessness; (2) how evaluations are conditioned by the degree of culpability and harm an offense involves; (3) the circumstances under which citizens will support the use of legal sanctions against an individual executive as opposed to a corporate entity; (4) the public's willingness to support criminal as opposed to civil intervention into various kinds of illegal corporate activities; and (5) how business executives' attitudes toward corporate legal sanctioning compare to those held by the general public. Through a survey of residents and business executives in a midwestern metropolitan area, an attempt was made to shed light on these issues. The analysis revealed a pervasive willingness among the sample to embrace the use of civil sanctions against corporations regardless of the circumstances surrounding the conduct being rated. By contrast, advocacy of civil remedies against executives and criminal penalties against either the corporation or its executives was found to vary considerably according to the culpability and harm manifested by a given illegal act. Also, public support for sanctioning corporate behavior was consistently higher than the support evidenced by executives, especially where the sanctions were directed at individual corporate managers.