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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Crime & criminology
Environmental devastation. Local militancy. Smuggling. Violence. All of these describe the Niger Delta, the crude-oil extraction center of Nigeria. Philip Aghoghovwia offers a unique interpretation of the region's petroviolence, examining the cultural aspects of the extraction industry in the societies within which it operates. As he considers the charged and often clashing contexts of the industry vs. the ecologies of directly affected peoples/places, Aghoghovwia essentially reframes the environmental challenges that carbon-based civilization poses to local landscapes.
A Chicago journalist reveals how pervasive police misconduct, brutality, and corruption are changing the perspective of the criminal justice system and eroding the morals of the American people. In this shocking yet fascinating volume, an award-winning Chicago journalist goes behind the headlines to provide a far-reaching analysis of brutality, vice, and corruption among men and women who have sworn to serve and protect. This timely book draws on actual cases to examine the widespread phenomenon of corruption inside law enforcement agencies. It looks at the effort of criminal elements and gangs to infiltrate police departments and the criminal justice system, and it discusses how vigilante justice is encouraged by claims of police misconduct. Of particular importance to readers, the book also exposes the trickle-down effect of police corruption as it affects American values and society as a whole. But the news is not all bad. Police departments across the nation are fighting back against abuse of power, and the author sheds light on the escalating battle they are waging against rogue police officers involved in criminal activity. Through Stanford's investigative work and firsthand interviews with leading law enforcement professionals, readers will be privy to the backstory of the struggle of police commands to insulate their departments against the criminality and corruption so prevalent today. Exposes ever-increasing police corruption and the lures that influence police officers to participate in illicit activities Educates readers about the struggle to rid law enforcement agencies of corrupt officers Examines the ways technology increases the probability of police officers becoming involved in illegal activities, as well as how advances in technology can prevent a crossing of the threshold Features interviews with leading law enforcement professionals who discuss the challenges of police corruption Points out steps that should be taken by law enforcement to curb police corruption, including stricter screening standards and more careful psychological monitoring of law enforcement personnel
Crime and gentrification are hot button issues that easily polarize racially diverse neighborhoods. How do residents, activists, and politicians navigate the thorny politics of race as they fight crime or resist gentrification? And do conflicts over competing visions of neighborhood change necessarily divide activists into racially homogeneous camps, or can they produce more complex alliances and divisions? In Us versus Them, Jan Doering answers these questions through an in-depth study of two Chicago neighborhoods. Drawing on three and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork, Doering examines how activists and community leaders clashed and collaborated as they launched new initiatives, built coalitions, appeased critics, and discredited opponents. At the heart of these political maneuvers, he uncovers a ceaseless battle over racial meanings that unfolded as residents strove to make local initiatives and urban change appear racially benign or malignant. A thoughtful and clear-eyed contribution to the field, Us versus Them reveals the deep impact that competing racial meanings have on the fabric of community and the direction of neighborhood change.
Criminology is a dynamic and evolving field of study. In the recent decades, the study of the causes, development, prevention, and treatment of juvenile delinquency and adult crime has produced many important discoveries. This volume address two questions about crucial topics facing criminology - from causation to prevention to public policy: Where are we now? What does the future hold? Rolf Loeber and Brandon C. Welsh lead a team of more than forty top scholars from across the world to present the future of research, policy, and practice in the discipline. "Criminology has entered into a new era in which standard ideas are being revised or replaced by fresh theoretical and empirical investigations. In The Future of Criminology, Rolf Loeber and Brandon Welsh capture the field's dynamic nature by pulling together, under one cover, diverse ideas of where criminology should head. Written by leading scholars, the volume's contributions provide lucid and compelling assessments of how best to think about crime and its control. Every scholar should keep this book close at hand and consult it regularly."-Francis T. Cullen, Distinguished Research Professor, University of Cincinnati "Inspired by David Farrington, one of the world's foremost scholars of criminology, The Future of Criminology is designed to be a 'state of the art' collection of essays delineating criminology's contribution to our understanding of crime prevention and its control. It succeeds admirably as a diverse group of leading scholars summarize, integrate, and extend previous work on child delinquency, criminal careers, psychopathology, high-risk families and communities, and experimental criminology. Researchers, policymakers, and students will benefit greatly from a close study of its chapters." - Joan Petersilia, Adelbert H. Sweet Professor of Law, Stanford Law School "This set of contributions, by forty world-renowned criminologists, constitutes a cutting-edge volume for future generations of scholars to take the baton from David Farrington."-Gerben Bruinsma, Director of Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, Amsterdam
For many Europeans, the persistence of America's death penalty is a stark reminder of American otherness. The practice of state killing is an archaic relic, a hollow symbol that accomplishes nothing but reflects a puritanical, punitive culture - bloodthirsty in its pursuit of retribution. In debating capital punishment, the usual rhetoric points to America's deviance from the western norm: civilized abolition and barbaric retention; 'us' and 'them'. This remarkable new study by a leading social thinker sweeps aside the familiar story and offers a compelling interpretation of the culture of American punishment. It shows that the same forces that led to the death penalty's abolition in Europe once made America a pioneer of reform. That democracy and civilization are not the enemies of capital punishment, though liberalism and humanitarianism are. Making sense of today's differences requires a better understanding of American society and its punishments than the standard rhetoric allows. Taking us deep inside the world of capital punishment, the book offers a detailed picture of a peculiar institution - its cultural meaning and symbolic force for supporters and abolitionists, its place in the landscape of American politics and attitudes to crime, its constitutional status and the legal struggles that define it. Understanding the death penalty requires that we understand how American society is put together - the legacy of racial violence, the structures of social power, and the commitment to radical, local majority rule. Shattering current stereotypes, the book forces us to rethink our understanding of the politics of death and of punishment in America and beyond.
How did the United States, a nation known for protecting the "right
to remain silent" become notorious for condoning and using
controversial tactics like water boarding and extraordinary
rendition to extract information? What forces determine the laws
that define acceptable interrogation techniques and how do they
shift so quickly from one extreme to another?
The third book in the Criminalization series examines the constitutionalization of criminal law. It considers how the criminal law is constituted through the political processes of the state; how the agents of the criminal law can be answerable to it themselves; and finally, how the criminal law can be constituted as part of the international order. Addressing the ways in which and the grounds on which types of conduct can be justifiably criminalized, the first four chapters of this volume focus on the questions that arise from a consideration of the political constitution of the criminal law. The contributors then turn their attention to the role of the state, its institutions and officials, and their role not only as creators, enactors, interpreters, and enforcers of the criminal law, but also as subjects of it. How can the agents of the criminal law also be answerable to it? Finally discussion turns to how the criminal law can be constituted as part of an international order. Examining the relationships between domestic laws of different nation-states, and between domestic criminal law and international or transnational law, the chapters also look at the authority and jurisdiction of international criminal law itself, and its relationship to other dimensions of the international order. A vital examination of one of the most important topics in modern criminal legal theory, this volume raises new questions central to the study of the criminal law and offers new suggestions for addressing them.
The explosive rise in the U.S. incarceration rate in the second half of the twentieth century, and the racial transformation of the prison population from mostly white at mid-century to sixty-five percent black and Latino in the present day, is a trend that cannot easily be ignored. Many believe that this shift began with the "tough on crime" policies advocated by Republicans and southern Democrats beginning in the late 1960s, which sought longer prison sentences, more frequent use of the death penalty, and the explicit or implicit targeting of politically marginalized people. In The First Civil Right, Naomi Murakawa inverts the conventional wisdom by arguing that the expansion of the federal carceral state-a system that disproportionately imprisons blacks and Latinos-was, in fact, rooted in the civil-rights liberalism of the 1940s and early 1960s, not in the period after. Murakawa traces the development of the modern American prison system through several presidencies, both Republication and Democrat. Responding to calls to end the lawlessness and violence against blacks at the state and local levels, the Truman administration expanded the scope of what was previously a weak federal system. Later administrations from Johnson to Clinton expanded the federal presence even more. Ironically, these steps laid the groundwork for the creation of the vast penal archipelago that now exists in the United States. What began as a liberal initiative to curb the mob violence and police brutality that had deprived racial minorities of their 'first civil right-physical safety-eventually evolved into the federal correctional system that now deprives them, in unjustly large numbers, of another important right: freedom. The First Civil Right is a groundbreaking analysis of root of the conflicts that lie at the intersection of race and the legal system in America
While the use of imprisonment continues to rise in developed
nations, we have little sociological knowledge of the prison's
inner world. Based on extensive fieldwork in a medium-security
prison in the UK, HMP Wellingborough, The Prisoner Society: Power,
Adaptation and Social Life in an EnglishPrison provides an in-depth
analysis of the prison's social anatomy. It explains how power is
exercised by the institution, individualizing the prisoner
community and demanding particular forms of compliance and
engagement. Drawing on prisoners' life stories, it shows how
different prisoners experience and respond to the new range of
penal practices and frustrations. It then explains how the prisoner
society - its norms, hierarchy and social relationships - is shaped
both by these conditions of confinement and by the different
backgrounds, values and identities that prisoners bring into the
prison environment.
Why would a gun-wielding, tattoo-bearing "homie" trade in la vida loca for a Bible and the buttoned-down lifestyle of an evangelical hermano (brother in Christ)? To answer this question, Robert Brenneman interviewed sixty-three former gang members from the "Northern Triangle" of Central America--Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras--most of whom left their gang for evangelicalism. Unlike in the United States, membership in a Central American gang is hasta la morgue. But the most common exception to the "morgue rule" is that of conversion or regular participation in an evangelical church. Do gang members who weary of their dangerous lifestyle simply make a rational choice to opt for evangelical religion? Brenneman finds this is only partly the case, for many others report emotional conversions that came unexpectedly, when they found themselves overwhelmed by a sermon, a conversation, or a prayer service. An extensively researched and gritty account, Homies and Hermanos sheds light on the nature of youth violence, of religious conversion, and of evangelical churches in Central America.
The fifth edition of this highly praised study charts and explains the progress that continues to be made towards the goal of worldwide abolition of the death penalty. The majority of nations have now abolished the death penalty and the number of executions has dropped in almost all countries where abolition has not yet taken place. Emphasising the impact of international human rights principles and evidence of abuse, the authors examine how this has fuelled challenges to the death penalty and they analyse and appraise the likely obstacles, political and cultural, to further abolition. They discuss the cruel realities of the death penalty and the failure of international standards always to ensure fair trials and to avoid arbitrariness, discrimination and conviction of the innocent: all violations of the right to life. They provide further evidence of the lack of a general deterrent effect; shed new light on the influence and limits of public opinion; and argue that substituting for the death penalty life imprisonment without parole raises many similar human rights concerns. This edition provides a strong intellectual and evidential basis for regarding capital punishment as undeniably cruel, inhuman and degrading. Widely relied upon and fully updated to reflect the current state of affairs worldwide, this is an invaluable resource for all those who study the death penalty and work towards its removal as an international goal.
Studente sal hierdie boek van groot waarde vind by hulle studie van die Strafprosesreg. Dit maak lesers vertroud met die fundamentele beginsels en waardes onderliggend aan hierdie gebied van die reg en lei hulle stelselmatig deur die proses wat op strafsake van toepassing is. Professor J P Swanepoel (voormalige staatsadvokaat met beduidende praktiese ondervinding in die strafhowe) en Professor J J Joubert is beide afgetrede lede van die Departement Straf- en Prosesreg van die Universiteit van Suid-Afrika. Professor S S Terblanche (voorheen ’n landdros) is ’n lid van die Departement Straf- en Prosesreg van die Universiteit van Suid-Afrika en het al ruim bygedra tot die literatuur met betrekking tot vonnisoplegging. Professor S E van der Merwe was professor in Publiekreg aan die Universiteit Stellenbosch en is steeds ’n produktiewe skrywer oor hierdie vakgebied. Professor G P Kemp is ’n lid van die Departement Publiekreg van die Universiteit Stellenbosch en sy publikasies oor die strafregspleging verwys gereeld na sy spesialiseringsgebied, die internasionale strafreg. Professor D Ally is Hoof van die Departement Regte van die Tshwane University of Technology en het ’n aantal artikels geskryf met die strafproses as onderwerp, en met besondere verwysing na die impak van die Grondwet op die strafproses. Dr M T Mokoena is Hoof van die Departement Straf- en Prosesreg van die Universiteit van Suid-Afrika en lewer publikasies oor die strafprosesreg, insonderheid borgtog.
Exploring the principles and values that should guide and limit the state's use of preventive techniques that involve coercion against the individual, this volume arises from a three-year study of Preventive Justice. The contributions examine whether and when preventive measures are justified, whether within or outwith the criminal law, and whether they signal a larger change in the architecture of security. Preventive measures include controversial crime control approaches such as pre-inchoate offences, pre-trial detention, restraining orders, and prevention detention of the dangerous. There are good reasons to justify state use of coercion to protect the public from harm, but while the rationales and justifications for state punishment have been extensively explored, the scope, limits, and principles of preventive justice have not received the same attention. This volume, written by world renowned scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds and jurisdictions, redresses the balance, assessing the foundations for the range of coercive measures that states now take in the name of prevention and public protection.
For many years, Antony Duff has been one of the world's foremost
philosophers of criminal law. This volume collects essays by
leading criminal law theorists to explore the principal themes in
his work. In a response to the essays, Duff clarifies and develops
his position on central problems in criminal law theory.
Criminology is a booming discipline, but at the same time it is
also deeply divided. This rich and diverse collection of essays
addresses the key questions at the heart of the debate.
The Criminalization series arose from an interdisciplinary investigation into criminalization, focussing on the principles that might guide decisions about what kinds of conduct should be criminalized, and the forms that criminalization should take. Developing a normative theory of criminalization, the series tackles the key questions at the heart of the issue: what principles and goals should guide legislators in deciding what to criminalize? How should criminal wrongs be classified and differentiated? How should law enforcement officials apply the law's specifications of offences? This, the fifth book in the series, offers a historical and conceptual account of the development of the modern criminal law in England and as it has spread to common law jurisdictions around the world. The book offers a historical perspective on the development of theories of criminalization. It shows how the emergence of theories of criminalization is inextricably linked to modern understandings of the criminal law as a conceptually distinct body of rules, and how this in turn has been shaped by the changing functions of criminal law as an instrument of government in the modern state. The book is structured in two main parts. The first traces the development of the modern law as a distinct, and conceptually distinct body of rules, looking in particular at ideas of jurisdiction, codification and responsibility. The second part then engages in detailed analysis of specific areas of criminal law, focusing on patterns of criminalization in relation to property, the person, and sexual conduct.
'Grooming' and the Sexual Abuse of Children: Institutional, Internet and Familial Dimensions critically examines the official and popular discourses on grooming, predominantly framed within the context of online sexual exploitation and abuse committed by strangers, and institutional child abuse committed by those in positions of trust. Set against the broader theoretical framework of risk, security and governance, this book argues that due to the difficulties of drawing clear boundaries between innocuous and harmful motivations towards children, pre-emptive risk-based criminal law and policy are inherently limited in preventing, targeting and criminalising 'grooming' behaviour prior to the manifestation of actual harm. Through examination of grooming against the complexities of the onset of sexual offending against children and its actual role in this process, the author broadens existing discourses by providing a fuller, more nuanced conceptualisation of grooming, including its role in intra-familial and extra-familial contexts. There is also timely discussion of new and emerging forms of grooming, such as 'street' or 'localised' grooming, as typified by recent cases in Rochdale and Oldham, and 'peer-to-peer' grooming. The first inter-disciplinary, thematic, and empirical investigation of grooming in a multi-jurisdictional context, 'Grooming' and the Sexual Abuse of Children draws on extensive empirical research in the form of over fifty interviews with professionals, working in the fields of sex offender risk assessment, management or treatment, as well as child protection or victim support in the four jurisdictions of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Impeccably presented and meticulously considered, this book will be of interest to criminologists and those working and studying in the field of policing and criminal justice studies, as well as policy makers and practitioners in the areas of child protection and sex offender management.
Design and Analysis of Time Series Experiments presents the elements of statistical time series analysis while also addressing recent developments in research design and causal modeling. A distinguishing feature of the book is its integration of design and analysis of time series experiments. Drawing examples from criminology, economics, education, pharmacology, public policy, program evaluation, public health, and psychology, Design and Analysis of Time Series Experiments is addressed to researchers and graduate students in a wide range of behavioral, biomedical and social sciences. Readers learn not only how-to skills but, also the underlying rationales for the design features and the analytical methods. ARIMA algebra, Box-Jenkins-Tiao models and model-building strategies, forecasting, and Box-Tiao impact models are developed in separate chapters. The presentation of the models and model-building assumes only exposure to an introductory statistics course, with more difficult mathematical material relegated to appendices. Separate chapters cover threats to statistical conclusion validity, internal validity, construct validity, and external validity with an emphasis on how these threats arise in time series experiments. Design structures for controlling the threats are presented and illustrated through examples. The chapters on statistical conclusion validity and internal validity introduce Bayesian methods, counterfactual causality and synthetic control group designs. Building on the earlier of the authors, Design and Analysis of Time Series Experiments includes more recent developments in modeling, and considers design issues in greater detail than any existing work. Additionally, the book appeals to those who want to conduct or interpret time series experiments, as well as to those interested in research designs for causal inference.
As the youth gang phenomenon becomes an important and sensitive public issue, communities from Los Angeles to Rio, Cape Town to London are facing the reality of what such violent groups mean for their children and young people. Complex dangers and instabilities, as well as high levels of public fear and anger, fuel an amplification of anxious public and political rhetoric in relation to gangs, in which the stereotype of the American street-gang - a ruthless, hierarchical, street-based criminal organisation capable of corrupting youth and fracturing communities - looms large. Set against this backdrop, Urban Legends: Gang Identity in the Post-Industrial City tells a unique and powerful story of young people, gang identity, and social change in post-industrial Glasgow, challenging the perceptions of gangs as a novel, universal, or pathological phenomenon. Though territorial gangs have been reported in Glasgow for over a century, with striking continuities over this time, there are similarities with street-based groups elsewhere. Using this similarity as the foundation, the book goes on to argue that Glaswegian gangs have a specific historical trajectory that is particular to the city. Drawing on four years of varied ethnographic fieldwork in Langview, a deindustrialised working-class community, the book spotlights the everyday experiences and understandings of gangs for young people growing up in the area, reasoning that - for some - gang identification represents a root of identity and a route to masculinity, in a post-industrial city that has little space for them.
Arising from Soviet prison camps in the 1930s, career criminals known as 'thieves-in-law' exist in one form or another throughout post-Soviet countries and have evolved into major transnational organized criminal networks since the dissolution of the USSR. Intriguingly, this criminal fraternity established a particular stronghold in the republic of Georgia where, by the 1990s, they had formed a mafia network of criminal associations that attempted to monopolize protection in both legal and illegal sectors of the economy. This saturation was to such an extent that thieves-in-law appeared to offer an alternative, and just as powerful, system of governance to the state. Following peaceful regime change with 2003's Rose Revolution, Georgia prioritised reform of the criminal justice system generally, and an attack on the thieves-in-law specifically, using anti-organized crime policies that emulated approaches in Italy and America. Criminalization of association with thieves-in-law, radical reforms of the police and prisons, educational change, and controversial, draconian and extra-legal measures, amounted to arguably the most sustained anti-mafia policy implemented in any post-Soviet country - a policy the government believed would pull Georgia out of the Soviet past, declaring it a resounding success. Utilising unique access to primary sources of data, including police files, court cases, archives and expert interviews, Reorganizing Crime: Mafia and Anti-Mafia in Post-Soviet Georgia charts both the longevity and decline of the thieves-in-law, exploring the changes in the levels of resilience of members carrying this elite criminal status, and how this resilience has faded since 2005. Through an innovative and engaging analysis of this often misunderstood cohort of organized crime, this book engages with contemporary debates on the resilience of so-called dark networks, such as organized crime groups and terrorist cells, and tests theories of how and why success in challenging such organizations can occur.
Positioning itself within significant developments in genocide studies arising from misgivings about two noteworthy observers, Arendt and Milgram, this book asks what lies 'beyond the banality of evil'? And suggests the answer lies within criminology. Offering the author's reflections about how to interpret genocide as a crime, Beyond the Banality of Evil: Criminology and Genocide endeavours to understand how the theories of criminal motivation might shed light on these stunning events and make them comprehensible. While a great deal has been written about the shortcomings of the obedience paradigm and 'desk murderers' when discussing the Holocaust, little has been said of what results when investigations are taken beyond these limitations. Through examination and analysis of the literature surrounding genocide studies, Brannigan frames the events within a general theoretical approach to crime before applying his own revised model, specifically to Rwanda and drawn from field-work in 2004 and 2005. This provides a new and compelling account of the dynamics of the 1994 genocide and its distinctive attributes of speed, popularity, totality and emotional indifference. With a focus on the disarticulation of personal culpability among ordinary perpetrators, Beyond the Banality of Evil questions the effectiveness of individual-level guilt imputation in these politically based, collectively orchestrated crimes, and raises doubts about the utility of criminal indictments that have evolved in the context of models of individual misconduct.
Policing the Caribbean explores the emergence of law enforcement
and security practices that extend beyond the boundaries of the
nation state. Perceptions of public safety and national sovereignty
are shifting in the face of domestic, regional and global
insecurity, and with the emergence of transnational policing
practices responding to drug trafficking and organised crime. This
book examines how security threats are prioritised and the
strategies that are put in place to respond to them, based on a
detailed empirical case study of police and security sector
organizations in the Caribbean.
Curing systemic inequalities in the criminal justice system is the unfinished business of the Civil Rights movement. No part of that system highlights this truth more than the current implementation of the death penalty. At the Cross tells a story of the relationship between the death penalty and race in American politics that complicates the common belief that individual African Americans, especially poor African Americans, are more subject to the death penalty in criminal cases. The current death penalty regime operates quite differently than it did in the past. The findings of this research demonstrate the the racial inequity in the meting out of death sentences has legal and political externalities that move beyond individual defendants to larger numbers of African Americans. At the Cross looks at the meaning of the death penalty to and for African Americans by using various sites of analysis. Using various sites of analysis, Price shows the connection between criminal justice policies like the death penalty and the political and legal rights of African Americans who are tangentially connected to the criminal justice system through familial and social networks. Drawing on black politics, legal and political theory and narrative analysis, Price utilizes a mixed-method approach that incorporates analysis of media reports, capital jury selection and survey data, as well as original focus group data. As the rates of incarceration trend upward, Black politics scholars have focused on the impact of incarceration on the voting strength of the black community. Local, and even regional, narratives of African American politics and the death penalty expose the fractures in American democracy that foment perceptions of exclusion among blacks.
Serious Offenders: A Historical Study of Habitual Criminals
examines the persistent offending careers of men and women
operating in northwest England between the 1840s and 1940s. The
book focuses on a group of serious and persistent offenders who as
well as offending in the region, had lengthy offending careers
spanning several decades in various other locations. These were
highly mobile persistent serious offenders who appear not to have
been so closely bound in to the processes and structures which
aided desistence from offending for the vast majority of the petty
offenders.
The politics of criminal sentencing has recently crystallised around the issue of whether and how a system of structured sentencing should inform judicial approaches to punishing criminals. Increasingly, structured sentencing guidelines are being introduce to frame judicial discretion. This volume is the first to examine the experience in England and Wales in the light of international developments. This collection of essays begins with a clear and concise history of the guidelines as well as a description of how they function. Topics addressed include the effect of guidelines on judicial practice, the role of public opinion in developing sentencing guidelines, the role of the crime victim in sentencing guidelines, and the use of guidelines by practicing barristers. In addition, the international dimension offers a comparative perspective: the English guidelines are explored by leading academics from the United States and New Zealand. Although there is a vast literature on sentencing guidelines across the United States, the English guidelines have attracted almost no attention from scholars. As other jurisdictions look to introduce more structure to sentencing, the English scheme offers a real alternative to current US schemes. Contributors include practicing lawyers, legal and socio-legal academics, and also scholars from several other countries including New Zealand and the United States, providing a multidisciplinary and cross-jurisdictional approach to sentencing. This book will be of interest to academics from law, sociology and criminology, legal practitioners, and indeed anyone else with an interest in sentencing, around the world. |
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