This book assesses the implications of how children and young people are represented in print media in Northern Ireland - a post-conflict transitioning society. Gordon analyses how children and young people's perceived involvement in anti-social and criminal behaviour is constructed and amplified in media, as well as in popular and political discourses. Drawing on deviancy amplification, folk devils and moral panics, this original study specifically addresses the labelling perspective and confirms that young people are convenient scapegoats - where their negative reputation diverts attention from the structural and institutional issues that are inevitable in a post-conflict society. Alongside content analysis from six months of print media and a case study on the representation of youth involvement in 'sectarian' rioting, this book also analyses interviews with editors, journalists, politicians, policy makers and a spokesperson for the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Noting the importance of prioritising the experiences of children, young people and their advocates, this timely and engaging research will be of specific interest to scholars and students of criminal justice, criminology, socio-legal studies, sociology, social policy, media studies, politics and law, as well as media professionals and policy makers.

This book puts in one place and in accessible form Richard Berk's most recent work on forecasts of re-offending by individuals already in criminal justice custody. Using machine learning statistical procedures trained on very large datasets, an explicit introduction of the relative costs of forecasting errors as the forecasts are constructed, and an emphasis on maximizing forecasting accuracy, the author shows how his decades of research on the topic improves forecasts of risk. Criminal justice risk forecasts anticipate the future behavior of specified individuals, rather than "predictive policing" for locations in time and space, which is a very different enterprise that uses different data different data analysis tools. The audience for this book includes graduate students and researchers in the social sciences, and data analysts in criminal justice agencies. Formal mathematics is used only as necessary or in concert with more intuitive explanations.

"Relying on recent work by a virtual who's who in the study of gender and crime, this book does exactly what is needed to significantly advance our thinking about the structure of the gender-crime nexus."
--Valerie Jenness, coauthor of Making Hate a Crime: From Social Movement to Law Enforcement

"Gender and Crime is an exceptionally strong collection that focuses on the deep intersection of criminological theory and gendered violence. Through multiple lenses of sociological inquiry, this volume gifts us with a wealth of new perspectives on gendered violence."
--Jeffrey Fagan, co-editor of "The Changing Borders of Juvenile Justice: Transfer of Adolescents to the Criminal Court "

While rates of violent victimization have declined, women are still much more likely than men to be attacked by an intimate partner. Simultaneously, women's involvement in the criminal justice system, as arrestees and sentenced offenders, is increasing. Criminologists are struggling to understand these patterns of offending and victimization and how they can be prevented. Composed of original contributions by many of the top scholars in criminology, these essays will help to transform our understanding of women's relation to crime.

Composed of original contributions by many of the top scholars in criminology, these essays will help to transform our understanding of women's relation to crime.

Contributors: Jennifer L. Castro, Stephen A. Cernkovich, Sarah Curtis-Fawley, Kathleen Daly, Laura Dugan, Jill A. Dienes, Rosemary Gartner, Carole Gibbs, Peggy C. Giordano, Karen Heimer, Gwen Hunnicutt, Candace Kruttschnitt, Gary LaFree, Janet L. Lauritsen, Ross Macmillan, Bill McCarthy, Jody Miller, Christopher W. Mullins, Callie Marie Rennison, Nancy Rodriguez, Sally S. Simpson, Hilary Smith, Stacy Wittrock, Halime Anal, and Marjorie S. Zatz.

Scholarship in criminology over the last few decades has often left little room for research and theory on how female offenders are perceived and handled in the criminal justice system. In truth, one out of every four juveniles arrested is female and the population of women in prison has tripled in the past decade. Co-authored by Meda Chesney-Lind, one of the pioneers in the development of the feminist theoretical perspective in criminology, the subject matter of The Female Offender: Girls, Women and Crime, Second Edition redresses the balance by providing critical insight into these issues.

In an engaging style, authors Meda Chesney-Lind and Lisa Pasko explore gender and cultural factors in women?s lives that often precede criminal behavior and address the question of whether female offenders are more violent today than in the past. The authors provide a revealing look at how public discomfort with the idea of women as criminals significantly impacts the treatment received by this offender population.

• Covers not only adult female offenders, but also how the interaction of sexism, racism, and social class inequalities results in girls becoming criminal offenders
• Focuses on consequences of the imprisonment binge that has resulted in an increasing number of girls and women being incarcerated
• Updated throughout with recent research and theories, new or expanded federal and state programs, and statistical data for such things as violence against girls and women, girls? gang membership, incarceration rates, and crimes perpetrated by girls and women

Bringing much-needed attention to the state of these often "invisible" wrongdoers, The Female Offender enlightens and intrigues readers including academics, researchers, and students in the areas of criminology, criminal justice, sociology, and women?s studies. Likewise, anyone seeking cutting-edge information about a growing offender population will want to read this book.

Young people, crime and delinquency are words that are commonly linked in public perception and young people are often blamed for social ills. Their deviancy and threat to social control has been held to be a social fact from Plato to today. This book subjects that 'fact' to critical examination through consideration of youth justice systems in six different countries, drawing on sociological and criminological analysis as well as expert practitioner opinion. This book's comparative, cultural approach allows for consideration of the impact of new and emergent systems of communication and discourse and considers how these may impact future constructions of delinquency at a local and global level. Understanding changing constructions of delinquency, the systems and responses we already have and their strengths and weaknesses enables critique about what we do and what we know, and allows us to imagine how it might be otherwise.

Drawing on extensive life-history interviews with serious violent offenders, this book offers a unique socio-historical analysis of gang membership and gang evolution in Glasgow, Scotland's largest city. The book chronicles the lives of young men in and around Glasgow from early childhood to present day and examines the lived experience of family, friendship, community, and crime. It demonstrates how street reputations are won and lost and how gang membership is not a single event but an experiential process of offending, victimisation, consensus, and conflict. The book follows the young men's descent into knife crime and street violence and the impact of imprisonment on their life chances. Detailed narratives capture how they individually and collectively transitioned from street violence to profit-driven organised crime, before eventually disengaging from gangs and desisting from offending. The book concludes with an in-depth discussion of the evolution of gangs and organised crime in the 21st century and in the inner-workings of Scotland's marketplace for illegal goods and services, with implications for police, practitioners, and policymakers. A page-turner from start to finish, Scotlands' Gang Members is a truly unique contribution to knowledge about gangs and crime, written to high academic standards but readable and accessible to all.

Every human society has a lineup of base, wicked, unethical characters-real and fictional-that are regarded as villainous. This book explores how western societies have used those they label villains to delineate insiders from outsiders; political, social, economic, and cultural behaviors deemed a threat to the order, harmony, and well-being of society itself; and normal as opposed to abnormal psychological behavior. Part One addresses how nature and those identified as ""barbarians"" were villainized as sinister ""others"" bent on destroying humanity and western civilization. Part Two considers how certain villainous types-tyrants, traitors, and tramps (aka ""femme fatales"")-challenged and reinforced western thinking with regard to legitimate governance, loyalty to one's people, and proper male/female roles and relationships. Part Three looks at how sociopathic gangsters and grifters and psychopathic murderers have served as models of evil and/or unprincipled behavior, and, in so doing, highlighted what we regard as moral and rightful conduct. In tandem with these villainous types, this study also considers two distinct though related phenomena, the dramatic shrinking of what is now considered villainous in the West, and the proliferation of all manner of odd and over-the-top villains in western pop culture and mass media.

This book offers the first ethnographic account of prison managers in England. It explores how globalised changes, in particular managerialism, have intersected with local occupational cultures, positioning managers as micro-agents in the relationship between the global and local that characterises late modernity. The Working Lives of Prison Managers addresses key aspects of prison management, including how individuals become prison managers, their engagement with elements of traditional occupational culture, and the impact of the 'age of austerity'. It offers a particular focus on performance monitoring mechanisms such as indicators, audits and inspections, and how these intersect with local culture and individual identity. The book also examines important aspects of individual agency, including values, discretion, resistance and the use of power. It also reveals the 'hidden injuries' of contemporary prison managerialism, especially the distinctive effects experienced by women and members of minority ethnic groups.

This book, the first in a series of collected works, traces the evolution of Problem Behavior Theory from its inception to its current status as a widely used framework for understanding and addressing risky behavior in youth and young adults. The theory is explored from its beginnings as a study of deviant behavior and alcohol abuse in a tri-ethnic community through its expansion to include psychosocial aspects of development, risk and protective factors, and health behavior in the larger societal context of youth behavior. In its current form, Problem Behavior Theory constitutes an interdisciplinary approach to research personal and societal factors that are involved in both normative and problematic behavior. Chapters highlight the many contributions of the theory to social science and its potential for informing evidence-based intervention and prevention programs for youth and young adults. Topics featured in this book include: The Tri-Ethnic Community Study. The Socialization of Problem Behavior in Youth Study. The Young Adult Follow-up Study. The problem behavior syndrome. The cross-national generality of Problem Behavior Theory. Problem Behavior Theory and adolescent pro-social behavior. The Origins and Development of Problem Behavior Theory is a must-have resource for researchers/professors, clinicians, and related professionals as well as graduate students in social and developmental psychology, criminology/criminal justice, public health, social work, and related disciplines.

This book, the second of two volumes edited by Kemshall and McCartan, focuses on responses to sexual offending, and how risk is used by policy makers, stakeholders, academics and practitioners to both construct and respond to unknown and known sex offenders within the contexts of criminal justice, health and social policy. The chapters provide an oversight of contemporary policies, practices and debates within the area to help both professionals and researchers. The collection focuses on emerging areas (crime linkage, predictive policing, sexual offending across borders, desistence, and public health approaches), as well as more traditional topics (multi-agency working, risk assessment, sex offender policies, and treatment). The authors examine how professionals can use multi-agency approaches to prevent sexual violence, and assessing the impact of desistance on framing sex offender management. A bold and engaging volume, this edited collection will be of great importance to scholars and practitioners working reframing traditional approaches to sex offender management in a contemporary fashion.

This book is a comprehensive inquiry into the rehabilitation of criminal offenders and is based on extensive cross-cultural research on legal, ethical, philosophical, psychological, and sociological aspects of rehabilitation. Materials from these disciplines are integrated into a cohesive argument for a new concept of rehabilitation. Particularly innovative is the book's differentiation between various historical models that have been generally confounded until now, the distinction between an authoritarian and a liberty-centered concept of rehabilitation, the development of the latter into the notion of rehabilitation as a right and the definition of this right essentially as an opportunity. Beyond its contribution to theory, the book is also intended to shape policy and practices. After dealing with the general issues of the history of rehabilitation, the author chronicles the evolution of the idea from ancient China to the present and compares the legislative impact of this evolution in Anglo-American and civil law systems. Four historical models of rehabilitation are defined and examined. Rotman clarifies the controversy over rehabilitation by responding in detail to the full range of recent criticisms of the rehabilitative idea. After examining the complex interrelation of rehabilitation with imprisonment, the book reviews a number of past and present forms of rehabilitation in the community, with an eye for their potential for future development. Particular attention is given to rehabilitation of mentally disordered offenders, including the special treatment of sex offenders and European social therapeutic establishments. The book's audience will include anyone interested in law, sociology and criminal justice.

In recent years there has been a significant increase in crime among persons suffering from major mental disorders. The authors attempt to describe the criminality of the mentally ill and to identify the complex chain of factors which cause it. As part of their analysis they examine a unique group of 15,117 persons born in Stockholm who were studied from prenatal development to the age of thirty. Their findings make a valuable contribution to ongoing debates on mental health and criminal justice policy and practice.

Winner of the 2014 Division of Women and Crime Distinguished Scholar Award presented by the American Society of Criminology Finalist for the 2013 C. Wright Mills Book Award presented by the Society for the Study of Social Problems Compelling interviews uncover why tough drug policies disproportionately impact women in the American prison system Since the 1980s, when the War on Drugs kicked into high gear and prison populations soared, the increase in women's rate of incarceration has steadily outpaced that of men. As a result, women's prisons in the US have suffered perhaps the most drastically from the overcrowding and recurrent budget crises that have plagued the penal system since harsher drugs laws came into effect. In Breaking Women, Jill A. McCorkel draws upon four years of on-the-ground research in a major US women's prison to uncover why tougher drug policies have so greatly affected those incarcerated there, and how the very nature of punishment in women's detention centers has been deeply altered as a result. Through compelling interviews with prisoners and state personnel, McCorkel reveals that popular so-called "habilitation" drug treatment programs force women to accept a view of themselves as inherently damaged, aberrant addicts in order to secure an earlier release. These programs were created as a way to enact stricter punishments on female drug offenders while remaining sensitive to their perceived feminine needs for treatment, yet they instead work to enforce stereotypes of deviancy that ultimately humiliate and degrade the women. The prisoners are left feeling lost and alienated in the end, and many never truly address their addiction as the programs' organizers may have hoped. A fascinating and yet sobering study, Breaking Women foregrounds the gendered and racialized assumptions behind tough-on-crime policies while offering a vivid account of how the contemporary penal system impacts individual lives.

It has long been known that the pathway through the criminal justice system for those with mental health needs is fraught with difficulty. This interdisciplinary collection explores key issues in mental health, crime and criminal justice, including: offenders' rights; intervention designs; desistance; health-informed approaches to offending and the medical needs of offenders; psychological jurisprudence, and; collaborative and multi-agency practice. This volume draws on the knowledge of professionals and academics working in this field internationally, as well as the experience of service users. It offers a solution-focused response to these issues, and promotes both equality and quality of experience for service users. It will be essential reading for practitioners, scholars and students with an interest in forensic mental health and criminal justice.

During the 20th century, only six women were legally executed by the State of New York at Sing Sing Prison. In each case, the condemned faced a process of demonization and public humiliation that was orchestrated by a powerful and unforgiving media. When compared to the media treatment of men who went to the electric chair for similar offenses, the press coverage of female killers was ferocious and unrelenting. "Granite woman," "black-eyed Borgia," "roadhouse tramp," "sex-mad," and "lousy prostitute" are just some of the terms used by newspapers to describe these women. Unlike their male counterparts, females endured a campaign of expulsion and disgrace before they were put to death. Not since the 1950s has New York put another woman to death. Gado chronicles the crimes, the times, and the media attention surrounding these cases. The tales of these death row women shed light on the death penalty as it applies to women and the role of the media in both the trials and executions of these convicts. In these cases, the press affected the prosecutions, the judgements, and the decisions of authorities along the way. Contemporary headlines of the era are revealing in their blatant bias and leave little doubt of their purpose. Using family letters, prison correspondence, photographs, court transcripts, and last- minute pleas for mercy, Gado paints a fuller picture of these cases and the times.

Sex, Crime, Drugs, and Just Plain Stupid Behaviors: The New Face of Young Adulthood in America is written for students, parents, and practitioners to provide insight into how emerging adulthood impacts the lives and behaviors of young people. Salvatore provides an insightful examination of the evolution of emerging adulthood as a distinct stage of the life course, bridging the gap between macro-level social forces and micro-level life experiences and behavior. Chapters discuss the influence of social institutions such as marriage, the family, religion, and parenting on behavior during emerging adulthood. Exploration and sensation-seeking are examined in relation to the behaviors and identity of emerging adults alongside issues such as criminal offending, substance use, and other risky/dangerous behaviors. Finally, the book concludes with informed policy recommendations for social institutions such as educational establishments and the criminal justice system on how to work with emerging adults.

This volume poses a series of key questions about the practice of probation as an integral part of the European criminal justice system. The contributors are established experts in their respective fields of study and together their questions address the legitimacy, and perhaps continued existence, of probation. The book offers analyses of why people offend and stop offending, and the wide ranging impacts of probation. This includes the impact on offenders' social reintegration, as a form of reparation for victims and communities, on public desire for justice and punishment, and on probationers themselves. The contributors further assess the state of probation and its adaptation to the current state of penality and society, the role of probation officers in pre-sentencing decision-making and the promotion of community sanctions and measures. By providing important recommendations and suggestions for application to practice, the book will be of great interest to academics, students, policy makers and practitioners alike.

In the lean and anxious years following World War II, Munich society became obsessed with the moral condition of its youth. Initially born of the economic and social disruption of the war years, a preoccupation with juvenile delinquency progressed into a full-blown panic over the hypothetical threat that young men and women posed to postwar stability. As Martin Kalb shows in this fascinating study, constructs like the rowdy young boy and the sexually deviant girl served as proxies for the diffuse fears of adult society, while allowing authorities ranging from local institutions to the U.S. military government to strengthen forms of social control.

The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Ethnography provides an expansive overview of the challenges presented by qualitative, and particularly ethnographic, enquiry. The chapters reflect upon the means by which ethnographers aim to gain understanding, make sense of what they learn and the way they represent their finished work. The Handbook offers urgent insights relevant to current trends in the growth of imprisonment worldwide. In an era of mass incarceration, human-centric ethnography provides an important counter to quantitative analysis and the audit culture on which prisons are frequently judged. The Handbook is divided into four parts. Part I ('About Prison Ethnography') assesses methodological, theoretical and pragmatic issues related to the use of ethnographic and qualitative enquiry in prisons. Part II ('Through Prison Ethnography') considers the significance of ethnographic insights in terms of wider social or political concerns. Part III ('Of Prison Ethnography') analyses different aspects of the roles ethnographers take and how they negotiate their research settings. Part IV ('For Prison Ethnography') includes contributions that convincingly extend the value of prison ethnography beyond the prison itself. Bringing together contributions by some of the world's leading scholars in criminology and prison studies, this authoritative volume maps out new directions for future research. It will be an indispensable resource for practitioners, students, academics and researchers who use qualitative social research methods to further their understanding of prisons.

This handbook promotes a comprehensive strategy founded on evidence-based programming for juvenile justice systems to adopt or enhance their current system. The comprehensive strategy is supported strongly by the broad research base that is now available. This strategy recognizes, first, that a relatively small proportion of the juveniles who initially enter the juvenile justice system will prove to be serious, violent, or chronic offenders, but that group accounts for a large proportion of the overall amount of delinquency. An important component of a comprehensive evidence-based juvenile justice system, therefore, is distinguishing these offenders from others and focusing attention and resources on that smaller group. Second, a comprehensive strategy recognizes that serious, violent, or chronic delinquency emerges along developmental pathways that progress from less to more serious profiles of offending. Priority must be given to interrupting these offender careers by calibrating the level of supervision and control of the juveniles' behavior to their level of risk. The third major component of a comprehensive strategy, therefore, is effective intervention programs that are capable of reducing the recidivism of those juveniles at risk for further delinquency. The Comprehensive Strategy for Serious, Violent, and Chronic Juvenile Offenders is an administrative framework that supports a continuum of services that parallel the development of offender careers. This framework emphasizes evidence-based programming specifically on recidivism reduction, and supports protocols for developing comprehensive treatment plans that match effective services with offender treatment needs along the life-course of delinquent careers, as they move from intake onward, to probation, community programs, confinement, and reentry. Juvenile justice systems will benefit from incorporation of a comprehensive strategy as provided in the handbook.

This book demonstrates that alternative approaches to criminal rehabilitation succeed in developing pro-social attitudes and in improving mental, physical and spiritual health for youth and adults in prison and community settings. The use of mindfulness is highlighted as a foundational tool of self-reflexivity, creative expression and therapy.

This ambitious volume brings together and assesses all major systematic reviews of the effectiveness of criminological interventions, to draw broad conclusions about what works in policing, corrections, developmental prevention, situational prevention, drug abuse treatments, sentencing and deterrence, and communities. Systematic reviews aim to minimize any possible bias in drawing conclusions by stating explicit criteria for inclusion and exclusion of studies, by conducting extensive and wide-ranging searches for possibly eligible studies, and by making all stages of the review explicit and transparent so that the methods can be checked and replicated. Over a decade ago, a concerted effort was made by members of the criminology community, including the Editors and contributors of this volume, to bring the practice of systematic reviews to the study of Criminology, providing replicable, evidence-based data to answer key questions about the study of crime causation, detection, and prevention. Now, the pioneers in this effort present a comprehensive stock-taking of what has been learned in the past decade of systematic reviews in criminology. Much has been discovered about the effectiveness of (for example) boot camps, "hot spots" policing, closed-circuit television surveillance, neighborhood watch, anti-bullying programs in schools, early parenting programs, drug treatment programs, and other key topics. This volume will be of interest to researchers in criminology and criminal justice, as well as in related fields such as public health and forensic science, with important implications for policy-makers and practitioners. Decisively showing that the "nothing works" era is over, this volume takes stock of what we know, and still need to know, to prevent crime. I plan to keep this book close at hand and to use it often! Francis T. Cullen, Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus, University of Cincinnati At a time when there is a broad commitment to bringing science to the front lines of practice, this book should be on the reading list of both policymakers and scholars. Laurie O. Robinson, Clarence J. Robinson Professor of Criminology, Law Society, George Mason University and former Assistant Attorney General of the U.S. Department of Justice

This book challenges the dominant narrative of young people being a uniquely violent group. Instead, the book critically examines how young people become violent as they enact and resist the available violent performativities in youth. It focuses on the experiences of 28 young people in Australia who are subjected to violence, who use violence and who resist violence. A critical analysis of these young people's "messy" stories facilitates a reframing of the physical violence routinely attributed to young people as a product of violating systems and structures. The author constructs a converging theoretical landscape to re-examine youth, violence and resistance at the intersection of the sociology of violence and the sociology of youth. Drawing on interviews with young Australians, the book makes a valuable contribution to contemporary international scholarship on youth and violence, while also examining the potential for complicity to violence in youth research and practice. In doing so it offers youth scholars and practitioners a framework for reassessing their theoretical frameworks and methods for studying and working with young people in connection with violence.

Truly international in scope, this Handbook focuses on approaches to discipline, surveillance and social control from around the world, critically examining the strategies and practices schools employ to monitor students and control their behavior. Bringing together leading scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, the chapters scrutinize, analyze and compare schools' practices across the globe, providing a critical review of existing evidence, debates and understandings, while looking forward to address emerging important questions and key policy issues. The chapters are divided into four sections. Part 1 offers accounts of international trends in school discipline, surveillance and punishment; Part 2 examines the merging of school strategies with criminal justice practices; Part 3 focuses on developments in school technological surveillance; and Part 4 concludes by discussing restorative and balanced approaches to school discipline and behavior management. As the first Handbook to draw together these multiple themes into one text, and the first international comparative collection on school discipline, surveillance and social control, it will appeal to scholars across a range of fields including sociology, education, criminology, critical security studies and psychology, providing a unique, timely, and indispensable resource for undergraduate educators and researchers.

This book examines how conflict has affected the rights of youth in Northeast India. Examining youth engagement in protracted conflict and its impact on youth rights, the author considers the complex issues besieging the region, including armed insurgency, conflicts between ethnic groups, human rights violations, poor governance and a lack of economic development, all factors contributing to the lack of growth in the region, and a consequent sense of alienation from the Indian mainstream. Moving beyond considering Northeast India as a theatre of insurgency, this pivot offers an alternative understanding of youth unrest in India and issues of non-representation in terms of rights and ethnic, national and cultural identities.