In March of 2011, several news media outlets published articles announcing the opening of a “pirate prison” in the northwest region of Somalia. Over the next five years, news articles about East African prisons holding piracy prisoners en masse were among the few ways in which the public came to know pirate prisons—what they look like, who they punish, and how they punish. Our analysis of the text and imagery in news articles about these prisons reveals that pirate prison narratives reflects the unique political, social, and economic issues of each location. The geographically-specific narratives are created, promoted, and in some cases silenced by different actors and entities to shape public perception of pirate prisons and motivate funding decisions. This case study aims to theorize what these pirate prison narratives tells us more broadly about the complexities underlying the promotion of criminal justice reforms in the media and the political economy of punishment in East Africa. We contend that the production and maintenance of particular pirate prison narratives helps various actors and agencies maximize benefits tied to a broader penal market where piracy prisoners are detained and transferred in exchange for development aid.
This paper analyzes how and why adverse side-effects have occurred in the implementation of two articles of Indonesia’s anti-corruption law. These articles prohibit unlawful acts which may be detrimental to the finances of the state. Indeed, the lawmakers had good intentions when they drafted the two articles. They wanted to make it easier to convict corrupt individuals by lowering the standard of evidence required to prove criminal liability. The implementation of these articles has raised legal uncertainty. The loose definition of the elements of the crime enables negligence and imperfection of (public) contracts to be considered as corruption. The Constitutional Court has issued two rulings to restrict and guide the interpretation of these articles. However, law enforcement agencies (Supreme Court and public prosecutors) have been unwilling to adhere to the rulings. There are two possible reasons for this. First, as has been argued by several commentators, the law enforcement agencies have misinterpreted the concept of “unlawfulness”. Besides, the law enforcement agencies wish to be seen to be committed to prosecuting and delivering convictions in corruption cases. To do so, they need to maintain looser definitions of the elements of the offence. This paper endorses the Constitutional Court rulings and provides additional reasons in support of their stance. The paper can be considered as a case study for other countries that may be contemplating similar legislation.
This article examines the ontological contestation that is inherent to the emergence of an international anti-corruption norm. First, the article briefly analyses the compatibility of an agenda on the social construction of problems from sociology and the well-established study of norms in constructivist IR. It argues that an analytical shift from the study of norms to the social construction of problems can shed light on the power relations that underlie international norms, and corruption in particular. The article traces the emergence of a global corruption problem up to the early 2000s when scholars have traditionally placed the establishment of an international anti-corruption norm. It first shows the contestation of corruption as a global issue on the level of problem definition, and then, it shows the role of venue shopping and venue shifting in the diffusion of anti-corruption talks and the norm cascade of the 1990s. The article concludes with an analysis of how the social construction of problems challenges the conventional approach of the emergence of an international anti-corruption norm.
This article analyzes the growing impact of an increasingly powerful China on the evolution of norms governing the global fight against corruption. Combining insights into the diffusion of anti-corruption norms and China’s ‘two-way socialization’ into the international order with an analysis of the Chinese leadership’s internationalized anti-corruption campaign, it argues that China’s active involvement in the international fight against corruption is bound to challenge prevailing international ‘definitions’ and ‘solutions’ of corruption. Despite the considerable attention to supposed incompatibilities between ‘culturally insensitive’ Western anti-corruption efforts and conflicting Chinese cultural norms, the actual ‘China challenge’ to the international anti-corruption regime is much less a cultural than a political one. While China’s formal-legal anti-corruption system has been receptive to international socialization, China’s own contributions to international norm making are defined by the Party’s top-level leadership, which promotes a different set of anti-corruption norms. However, a coherent alternative ‘Chinese model’ of anti-corruption, akin to the globally propagated ‘China path’ for economic development and poverty reduction, is not yet in sight.
Corruption is notoriously persistent in Nigeria notwithstanding the panoply of laws deployed over the years against it. This article argues that the factors constraining the effectiveness of laws in the fight against corruption are to be found not in the laws, but in the larger societal matrix of resilient social norms and institutions, which constitute the environment of corruption in the country. The environment thus constituted is either conducive to, or largely tolerant of, corruption. The article then suggests that the anti-corruption effort, to be successful, must engage broadly with the environment by instigating social change.
The mechanism of preventive non-conviction-based seizure and confiscation of assets derived from corrupt acts offers an intricate interplay of criminal and civil law norms. The preventive seizure and confiscation approach is analyzed as to its functions, purposes, and norm-changing effects. The normative change is observed in the preventive confiscation as the decision of the judicial or quasi-judicial organs is based on the degree of danger posed by the relevant person and corrupt activity on a suspicion-based inquiry, thus eliminating the need for criminal conviction. The normative side of the mechanism of preventive confiscation seeks to immunize the lawful economy from a “contamination” by the ill-procured assets through corruption. The approach includes various human rights protections established by the European Court of Human Rights such as the right to a fair trial, the right to property, and the rule of law. The preventive mechanism also focuses on measuring the likelihood to commit illegal acts in the future, and management and usage of the proceeds from the illegal corrupt activity for socially oriented goals.
This paper argues that using a legal approach to fight against corruption having a cultural root is unlikely to be effective. By analyzing the Eight-point Regulation, one of Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption measures, the present study shows that the efficacy of the Regulation is limited, notably when it comes to non-economic types of corruption. In fact, the Regulation does not halt the culture of gift giving, which is a common practice for the Chinese to establish guanxi (social connection) for potential or actual corruption. Based on the findings, this paper proposes complementary measures to curb corruption in addition to legal approaches.
The extractive industries sector is considered to be one of the most prone to illicit financial flows. To date, numerous instruments at the national, regional and international level have been adopted targeting the extractive industries sector or specifically combating illicit financial flows but the effectiveness of these instruments remains uncertain as highlighted with the recent scandals that tarnished this sector. In fact some stakeholders, in particular extractive companies and government officials, are being creative and innovative in order to play with legislations combating these illicit practices and perpetuate illicit financial flows. Playing with the rules of the game is made possible not only through the support of intermediaries but also the availability of legal tools. This article provides a glance at how these actors use the law to abuse and manipulate legal frameworks.
For the past two decades, rhino poaching has made headline news as the South African and global public increasingly endeared themselves to this species, in part due to their precarious status and conservation plight. On the African continent, whilst rhino-poaching pressure has topped out at the pandemic level, another conservation crime, namely elephant poaching, has surreptitiously amplified and annually been spiraling upwards. As rhino populations have dwindled, and amidst this decline and allied loss of poaching opportunities, wildlife poachers have ostensibly diverted their efforts to other more accessible species. This article highlights the auguring southwardly migrating poaching risk to elephants, the extent to which elephants are becoming a surrogate species for rhinos and/or other forms of wildlife in the context of poaching momentum, effort and economics, and the role that crime displacement and passé confidence in reactive intervention paradigms play, as potential drivers, in the continent-wide elephant defaunation.
Gusfield (1963) describes constitutional prohibition as symbolically representing status and not concerned with social control. The importance of this perspective for the prohibition of alcohol rests in the rural, Protestant, native segments of the United States symbolically demonstrating their values publicly through law over that of the urban, Catholic, immigrants. This case study tests the symbolic properties of constitutional prohibition through an analysis of the small German-American, rural, winemaking community of Hermann, MO. I analyze Hermann’s major English newspaper, the Advertiser-Courier, during two time periods: 1908 to 1911 and 1918 to 1921 to understand the changes in legislative reform and the importance of the social environment for each time period. In order to demonstrate the limitations of a strictly symbolic understanding of constitutional prohibition through Gusfield’s (1963) status politics paradigm, I utilize the theoretical tools of structural foundations and triggering events (Galliher (1980) 2012) to assess the social origins of prohibition legislation in Missouri. This perspective further demonstrates the instrumental aspects of social control involved during the passage of this law.
Turkey is among the countries with the richest biodiversity in Europe and the Middle East; it ranks ninth in the European continent in terms of biodiversity. Its distinct and varied geography affords a high level of endemism and genetic diversity. Due to its high level of endemism and genetic diversity, Turkey is also a center of attraction in terms of genetic resources. This raises the issue of bio-smuggling, which is a significant problem that threatens both the biodiversity and the economic future of the country. The insufficiency of legal, political and institutional systems are a major determining factor on the problem of bio-smuggling in Turkey. Although there are 50 different legislations (11 different international conventions, 14 different laws, 2 different statutory decrees, and 23 different specific regulations) germane to bio-smuggling, between 2002 and 2015 59 incidents of bio-smuggling were documented. Prevention of bio-smuggling in Turkey has remained low and insufficient. With this study, we will review and examine several case examples: legal ramifications of combatting bio-smuggling; pertinent national regulations; legal and administrative sanctions against bio-smuggling and their effectiveness.
This article examines the enlistment of educational providers in the surveillance and policing of non-citizen students. Employing the USA, UK, and Australia as cases, it situates efforts that render universities responsible for managing migrant “illegality” in broader trends concerning legal control and security governance. In particular, it analyzes the development of electronic surveillance and information-sharing systems that mobilize the knowledge, energies, and access of educational providers for the purposes of identification, tracking, and reporting. University personnel’s conscription as de facto border guards accentuates the pluralization of migration policing, highlighting how techniques of governance and surveillance are effectuated through quotidian actors and sites positioned beyond the sovereign state. By drawing universities into the orbit of territorial gatekeeping and interior enforcement, emergent policies are producing numerous tensions, whether in relation to their officially stated objectives or transformations in higher education’s character, ethos, and mission and their implications for non-citizens’ legal and social identities. Alongside enhancing understandings of migration control, this paper advances conversations regarding the increasingly networked, pre-emptive, and ubiquitous qualities of social ordering and control.
Private-to-private corruption has no direct victim and is therefore difficult to combat. Yet it undermines market competition, impedes growth, and sets development at risk. Therefore, knowledge about the reasons for committing crimes is necessary for changing corrupt practices within private sector. This article explores business managers’ perceptions of the extent of bribing within their lines of business and possible explanations for these perceptions. We analyze a survey of 1000 managers of private companies in Denmark and Estonia using structural equation models. Comparing two behavioral causes for bribes, a rational choice theory and a cognitivist theory of action, which adds moral judgment to instrumental rationality, we find that managers find corruption less common when they see it as a breach of their own moral judgment. Costs of bribing do not matter and benefits from bribing play a marginal role in the perceived extent of bribing. Context is also important: managers in Denmark and outside capital cities in both countries deem bribing less common and this is not because they are personally less tolerant of bribing. The implication of this study is that fostering condemnatory attitudes toward private-to-private corruption should be a standard act in combating this form of corporate crime.
This study deals with the fairly unexplored relationship between political decision-making and political framing. The intention is to figure out if there is a connection between the way political actors frame corruption and their commitment to the legislative fight against corruption in Austria. Thus, two research questions are focused: Are corruption-related framing practices of political actors of the Austrian National Council predominantly structural or personal? Do these framing strategies affect political actor’s willingness to legislatively combat corruption? Therefore the methodological approach is based on a manual dimension-reduced coding process and a further framing analysis of nine years (from 2007 to 2015) of political communication referring to corruption in the Austrian National Council. The framing analysis shows that the perception of corruption as an individual misconduct and a weakness of character of single and collective actors (parties) has significant impacts on anti-corruption policies and leads to an insufficient implementation of anti-corruption measures as well as the obstruction of meaningful policy reforms.
This article makes a contribution to the debate over the interconnectedness between democratization, corruption and resource dependence by way of a qualitative analysis of three African states, Ghana, Nigeria and South Sudan, in various stages of democratization, from post-conflict transition to increasingly consolidated democracies. The underlying question guiding the analysis is to assess how both the practice and perception of corruption change in the course of democratization. Using survey data, secondary literature and empirical observations, the article juxtaposes empirical findings with theories of the African state and finds neo-patrimonialism and the concept of the gatekeeper state the most satisfactory explanatory models for the sources and types of corruption in African democracies afflicted by the resource curse.
This article attempts to analyze the intersection of corruption and inequality not only in terms of the injustices and inequalities accentuated by corruption, but also in terms of the role of self-justification narratives of corruption based on perceptions of inequality. Despite the fact that the common definition as an ‘abuse’ of power removes the possibility of legitimation of corruption, legitimation narratives do exist and they also do appear in various surveys or case studies. By introducing Tilly’s perspective of inequality to corruption research, this article provides new input for understanding the dynamics of inequality and opportunity hoarding that fuel endemic corruption.
Political scientists have yet to agree upon a conceptual distinction between lobbying and corruption. Most scholars investigate these concepts separately and distinguish them by their legality. Relying on a legal distinction makes comparative research nearly impossible. This article presents a framework in which lobbying and corruption can be distinguished based on theoretical considerations investigating their harms to democracy. I argue that lobbying becomes corruption as soon as it is a source of exclusion from a democratic process. Using this approach, I discuss different gray areas between corruption and lobbying. Distinguishing lobbying from corruption helps to understand when they substitute each other and when they occur complementarily.
This study investigates the influencing factors of corruption in Europe over the period of 1995–2013. Considering corruption as a cultural, multilevel phenomenon, the project proposes the design of models at both the micro and macro levels, allowing for panel-analyses as well as cross- and within-national comparisons. The findings reveal that a bundle of factors adding up to a specific “democratic culture” in Europe that hinders the growth of corruption by generating strong democratic institutions and fostering citizen norms and values aimed at monitoring and sanctioning corrupt actors. As a result, democracy promotion was and it is still the best remedy against corruption spread in Europe. The article emphasizes the relevance and need of area- and cultural-specific knowledge of factors affecting corruption.
The present work aims to understand the process of expansion and consolidation of the organized criminal group the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) in São Paulo’s prison system over the past 20 years, and the social configuration that has formed as a result of the PCCs monopolization of opportunities of power. To this end, the work of Norbert Elias is utilized to analyze empirical data collected from various sources. The article consists of two lines of analysis. First, the PCC phenomenon is approached from a macro-sociological point of view, focusing on the social, political and administrative problems that are directly or indirectly linked to the PCCs social development. Second, a figurational analysis is used to explore the social dynamics produced from this process. In comparison to the “pre-PCC” situation, it is shown that the new social configuration produced from the hegemony of the PCC consists of a complexity of interdependencies, including greater functional division and social integration. Given this intensification of mutual dependencies, the social controls on individual behavior have been expanded and centralized. Here, the structure and organization of the PCC, its political dynamics, and individual self-control are central issues. The article concludes by calling into question the view that the most significant effect of the PCCs consolidation has been social pacification of São Paulo’s prison system. Fragilities in the power of the PCC are explored, principally the precarious nature of the relationship between the PCC and state authorities, and the extent to which the PCC’s authority is imposed.
In almost all West-European countries and large parts of the world the governance of public safety tops political priorities at both national and local level. We can observe a growing attention for public safety issues in our cities and streets, resulting in local communities and authorities that increasingly have the possibility to deal with these issues in a rather autonomous way. In this contribution, I discuss the local governance of safety through a critical analysis and reflection of inherent, new regulatory tools within an administrative or civil framework. In doing so, I focus on the precarious position of three specific categories, i.e., minors and youth, panhandlers and ‘potential’ drug users. This analysis starts off with and draws a parallel to broader social and political trends, which criminologists have described as the shift from a ‘post-crime’ to a ‘pre-crime’ society where pre-emptive logics, mechanisms of exclusion and the criminalization of behavior tend to prevail.
Prior research on corporate environmental behavior has produced myriad factors that explain offending and overcompliance, yet the literature lacks cohesion and would benefit from disentangling corporate- and individual-level explanations. In this study, a cross-level integrated theory of corporate environmental behavior uses Gunningham et al’s. (2003) license framework and Paternoster and Simpson’s (1993; 1996) rational choice theory of corporate crime to portray how individuals within corporations decide to offend or to overcomply with environmental regulations while accounting for the organizational context. Specifically, external pressures (legal, social, and economic) on the corporation, plus internal corporate policies and culture, affect individual-level cost-benefit analyses. In turn, these cost-benefit calculations impact the behavioral decisions made by corporate managers. Four sets of hypotheses based on this integration are tested using an environmental vignette survey of individuals. The results provide mixed support for the integrated theory. It is also noted that predictors of environmental offending are different from those predicting overcompliance. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
‘Research shows that Islam in prison poses a security threat only under certain conditions of confinement: In mismanaged understaffed and overcrowded maximum security prisons where offenders are radicalised through a process of one-on-one proselytizing by charismatic leaders. Otherwise Islam has a moderating effect on prisoners which plays an important role in prison security and rehabilitation’ (Hamm 2013, p. 214).
Mark Hamm has made himself something of an expert in the field of prisoner radicalisation.
A former prison warden himself and now a professor of criminology, he has carried out meticulous research in this field over many years. He writes vividly, outlining the powerful history of prisoner radicalisation, drawing on case studies of Winston Churchill, Mahatma Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, and Adolf Hitler (who said he would not have written Mein Kampf if he had not gone to prison), to make the important point that the experience of imprisonment, and individual responses to it, can pr ...
This article examines the emergence and configuration of community corrections in China. It argues that the adoption of this new sanction is a result of China’s recent rhetorical shift in penality from harshness and punishment towards leniency and rehabilitation. Nevertheless, based on a study of community corrections in Shanghai, the practice of this sanction manifests strong evidence of actuarial justice in its form and function. The findings from this study show that community corrections are used in practice as a managerial tool to identify, classify and regulate offenders to control dangerousness they may present, and to facilitate the implementation of correctional programs. This actuarial model of practice is represented by the risk-driven, differentiated approaches in the exercise of community corrections and the cost-saving aim of handling offenders in the neighbourhood.
The prominent growth in “illicit globalization” has been broadly construed as an anti-state phenomenon, and criminological literature has largely reflected this focus on nonstate actors. However, states too have used and will continue to rely on illicit globalization for their own ends. A state or states may be driving demand, providing supply, or facilitating the transport of any given illicit flow (or perhaps all of the above simultaneously). This article establishes a motive-based typology of state participation in international illicit flows, illustrated with current and historical examples. By focusing on why states may engage in illicit flows, I argue that there are four broad archetypes of state participation: direct revenue generation, indirect revenue generation, procurement, and territorial control. While the risks can be significant, state participation can drastically improve an illicit transaction’s chance of succeeding. Furthermore, many states that are heavily involved in illicit flows have little to lose even if their involvement is uncovered. This typology provides differentiation meant to enhance the study of state participation in illicit flows.
The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), known as the National Crime Survey (NCS) before 1993, was instituted in 1972 to provide an independent calibration for the Uniform Crime Report [UCR] and to measure the extent of criminal victimization. The first victim survey in 1973 showed a vast but anticipated discrepancy of victimization rates with the UCR rates. Since then the relationship between the two crime data series has shown such divergence narrowing. The divergence noticed in the past and the convergence between the two series observed now poses interesting substantive and methodological questions. Measurement of crime is an important criminological enterprise and these two data sets provide perhaps the best estimate of criminal victimization. If two different techniques display similar trends then confidence in measuring crime is strengthened. Above all, mathematical techniques to examine long-term trends in different data sources present new app ...
In recent years, corruption and its governance has become an important issue attracting an increasingly wide audience, including academics, politicians and the general public. Dan Hough explores the topic of corruption and its governance in his new book Corruption, Anti-Corruption and Governance. He sets forth a series of intriguing chapters exploring wide-ranging anti-corruption practices globally. In developing his views, a comparative case study approach in the context of place-specific countries is applied to analyse the relationship among quality of governance, specific anti-corruption approaches and respective anti-corruption outcomes. The author presents a qualitative depth- and nuance-based analysis to well-established quantitative findings of anti-corruption practices in specific case studies. Hough’s aim is to reach generalisable conclusions that can be applied to other countries facing similar corruption challenges. This short book is divided int ...
Forced labour has been regulated since 1930 on the basis of the ILO Convention on Forced Labour, and since 1957 on the basis of the ILO Abolition of Forced Labour Convention. In 2000 forced labour was included as one form of exploitation covered by the UN Trafficking Protocol, which situated trafficking into a context of transnational organised crime. In 2014 the ILO adopted a Protocol on Forced Labour, making a link between trafficking and forced labour. The aim of this article is to explore how forced labour came to be regulated and defined in these four treaties. The 1930 ILO Convention came about in a specific historical and political context, yet the 1930 definition remains in use even though the interpretation of forced labour, particularly as it relates to trafficking, has changed. This article focuses on the issue of trafficking for the purpose of forced labour within the context of migration and labour exploitation, and discusses the relevance of historical definitions of forced labour in the current discourse that sees human trafficking mainly as a security threat. It argues that a rigid interpretation of forced labour is not always useful in understanding forms of labour exploitation, at least in a contemporary European migratory perspective. The article calls for a broad interpretation of forced labour, which takes into account also subtle forms of control and coercion.
Although maritime piracy off the Somali coast has garnered a lot of media attention, little scholarly work has investigated its influence in the region and its long term consequences. This paper examines the causes of piracy and how it relates to the geopolitics of the Horn of Africa. Contemporary cases of Somali piracy and their political, legal and economic impacts are reviewed both in terms of how they affect the Somali population as well as the impact on the enterprise of private global shipping. Finally, the reaction by the international community to Somalia as compared to the involvement of the stable democracy of Somaliland is discussed.
Not much research has been done in the Netherlands on the ways in which Dutch women experience and survive a prison sentence abroad. The research underlying the present article focused on Dutch female prisoners in foreign countries, using an ethnographic research method. The article looks at the prison experiences of Dutch mulas in Peru and their strategies of survival. The ways in which these women react to their detention can be traced back to existing literature on the importation theory and the deprivation theory. The article also examines the various coping strategies that are used to survive a prison sentence abroad. These strategies appear to be related both to the life experiences of the women (importation theory) and the experienced prison environment (deprivation theory).
Prostitution exists and proliferates in different parts of the world. Diverse social, cultural, economic and legal conditions in different regions render it a complex issue that needs contexualization and cultural sensitivity. Research on it is interdisciplinary, as it brings together discussions about morality, emotion, gender relations; social, cultural and economic development; human rights, legislation, regional development, public health; and sex ratio balance. Among these issues, human trafficking, especially the trafficking of women and children, is the one that is almost always being asked in relation to prostitution. The general public may regard women prostitutes to be victims of human trafficking, or victims of coerce and force, suffering from dramatic experience and poor living conditions. Otherwise they would not enter this stigmatized business. To what extend is this true? What is the current situation concerning the trafficking of women and children into prostitution in ...
In the first years of the 21st century, there was a building boom in Spain, which triggered many corruption cases in municipalities. This paper contributes to the scarce literature on this issue by analysing the impact of socio-economic and financial factors on urban political corruption. Our sample covers the 110 Spanish largest municipalities for 2000–2009. The findings indicate that higher politicians’ salaries and more transparency are connected with lower corruption levels. In this way, we confirm theoretical assumptions that posit that municipalities where politicians have higher salaries present less corruption cases. Finally, municipal transparency should be enhanced, because it is related to lower corruption.
The purpose of this study is to investigate the well-being of female inmates in Italian prisons. The hypothesis is that stress in women prisoners is strictly related both to “external” networks and “internal” support, and is more linked to the feeling of loneliness than to coping with the difficulties of prison life. Qualitative study involving adult female prisoners in the prisons of three Italian regions (Campania, Lazio, Emilia Romagna). 37 individual semi-structured interviews were conducted. The interviews were processed using the CAQDAS contents (Computer Assisted/Aided Qualitative Data Analysis Software) by the software Atlas.ti, to practice the Grounded Analysis method to attain the construction of categories and its relations. The interviews show multiple levels of reflection, crossbreeding mainly two plans: a situational one and a personal one. The main dimensions emerged are: the access to activities in prison (work, projects, sociality) experienced as a deterrent to depression and as an opportunity for the future reintegration into the “free” society; the motherhood, as a spur to a resilience, but also in reference to the difficulties associated with the conditions of segregation. The main theme that crossed all the conversations is the loneliness lived as a prison disease. More attention should be given to the re-socialization aspect of prisons, constructing new ways to guarantee the prisoners a valid alternative to deviant behaviours so as to help restore family relationships and the reintegration in society.
Despite a number of policy decisions being based upon the premise that there is a large flow of Brazilian trafficking victims to Spain and Portugal, existing statistics are not reliable enough to confirm this assertion. Due to a number of reasons, including problematic, incompatible and evolving definitions, as well as fragmented data gathering systems, the available human trafficking statistics about Brazilian trafficking victims in the Iberian Peninsula are internally and cross-comparatively inconsistent. The widely varying scenarios presented by the available numbers compromise the individual and collective responses to the phenomenon. Although a number of possible solutions can be proposed to improve the data collection, it is unlikely that the systems will change significantly as long as the figures being presented continue to support the agendas defended by the countries in question.
Although crimes motivated by bias or hate are not a new phenomenon, these acts are increasingly being recognized as exceptionally harmful to both individual victims and to communities. In response, legislation criminalizing acts of hate has been implemented in various countries. As Mark Austin Walters, author of Hate Crime and Restorative Justice, points out, the criminalization of acts motivated by hatred serves at least two important social functions. First, it is an important public acknowledgment that hate crimes are intrinsically more harmful than those committed without the motivation of hate. Second, the legal framework for hate crime affords criminal justice agencies the ability to dedicate resources to dealing with these issues. While this book focuses on a restorative justice response to hate crimes, Walters maintains a balanced perspective throughout the book, often reminding readers of these benefits of a criminal justice response to hate crime, among others.
The crux of thi ...
Social control theories provide a sound theoretical basis for why crime doesn’t happen (or more precisely, why conformity is the norm). It is surprising then that the vast majority of all efforts to study control theories’ major tenets examine areas high in crime. In his book America’s Safest City: Delinquency and Modernity in Suburbia, Singer provides a refreshing look at both conformity and deviance in Amherst, New York, a low-crime city in America. This gives readers a prime example of why most kids get into some trouble but ultimately avoid a life of crime.
In America’s Safest City, Singer does not rehash the theoretical orientation espoused by other control theorists but borrows elements from their perspectives, particularly those of Sampson and Laub [6] and Hagan [2], and frames them within the concept of relational modernity. Relational refers to the bonds that we have with others; our friends, parents, siblings, teachers, coaches, and other mentors in our life. Without these bon ...
Fraud is one of the most costly crimes to society. There have been a number of studies documenting the low priority and resources allocated to fraud, but there has been little attempt to conceptualise the processes which lead to this. This paper develops a concept that is the antithesis to deviancy amplification, deviancy attenuation, to examine why the level of resources and interest in fraud are not commensurate with the size of the problem. The paper also develops two further reverse concepts to further explain attenuation: de-labelling and immoral phlegmatism. Empirical evidence is offered in the form of case studies, statistical and survey data to support the arguments presented. The paper also illustrates these arguments through the comparison of the response to benefits fraud in the United Kingdom, which can be considered the one exception amongst frauds where labelling, moral panics and deviancy amplification occurs; explained by some Marxist commentators as a consequence of it being a lower class crime actively pursued by the powerful.
Lanzarote is the most eastern island of the Canary archipelago (Spain). An important touristic resort, it was a pioneer territory in the fight against land speculation and was distinguished as a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1993. Despite this, recent police and court investigations have shown the existence of illegalities and corruption in the granting of building licenses in two of the most touristic municipalities, Yaiza and Teguise. The article examines the opportunities for urban corruption and the deterrents in place at the local level in Lanzarote between 1998 and 2006. It shows that corruption derived not only from an inadequate formal incentive structure, but also from the prevalence of certain expectations contrary to the common good and from the absence of “principled principals” willing to ensure that agents acting on their behalf did not engage in corruption.
This paper critically examines how the organ trade fits into the human trafficking discourse. The organ trade involves diverse actors and consists of various practices, i.e. organ trafficking, transplant tourism, organ sales and organ harvesting. Nevertheless the organ trade is predominantly defined in terms of organ trafficking. Although organ trafficking is a major concern it is not representative of the phenomenon as a whole. Evidence based research indicates that the organ trade is better characterised by organ sales and transplant tourism. This paper argues that co-opting the organ trade into the ‘meta- narrative’ of human trafficking resists a wider critique of the phenomenon linking the emergence of a global market in organs to broader socio-economic conditions. Further it is argued that the organ trade is not a direct consequence of the global shortage of organ supplies, but is rather linked to the transfer of transplant capabilities to the global South. The rhetorical positioning of the organ trade as an object of crime control diverts critical attention away from the transplant industry and frames the phenomenon within a narrow criminal paradigm. Formulaic criminal responses follow which overlook important intersections of agency, identity, culture and politics.
To attempt to summarize the last 40 years’ research in several disciplines on why corruption exists is ambitious in itself. To do so in less than 100 pages is daring. Yet that is precisely what Tina Søreide does skillfully in Drivers of corruption: A brief review Søreide [1]. In five short chapters, she takes us on a whirlwind tour of the economic theories and evidence regarding the conditions that are conducive to corruption, while incorporating and highlighting important insights drawn from political science, law, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. The result is a bold and insightful introduction to corruption that is useful to scholars, practitioners, and laypersons alike.
This book was commissioned by the World Bank and financed by the African Development Bank, in the context of the multi-organizational World Forum on Law, Justice, and Development. Its announced purpose is to serve as a foundation to guide policymakers in the International Financial Institutions (IFIs): by un ...
Criminology has returned to a stage of development where class is no longer seen as a relevant theoretical or empirical concern. This state of classless criminology reflects the decline in radical scholarship over the past two decades and the absence of radical/Marxist critiques of criminology. Despite the neglect of class by criminologists, class remains an important construct for understanding the main issues of concern within criminology: crime, the construction of law, and justice. This article reviews the neglect of class analysis in contemporary criminology, and draws examples of the ways in which class remains an important consideration in the contemporary world where the world economy of capitalism dominates economic, social and political relations globally. In reviewing the neglect of class, examples are provided of contemporary areas of criminological research where class based theory and empirical work could alter what we know about crime. While orthodox criminology has long neglected class, new forms of critical criminology that emerged since 1990 have also promoted the neglect of class analysis.
Erratum to: Crime Law Soc Change (2014)
DOI 10.1007/s10611-014-9527-5
‘The author would like to clarify that in the article ‘Struggles against subjection. Implications of criminalization of migration for migrants’ everyday lives in Europe’ published with the journal Crime, Law and Social Change, on p. 97 the reference to Amy Allen’s (2013) Power and the subject. In C. Falzon, T. O’Leary, & J. Sawicki (Eds.), Blackwell companions to philosophy: Companion to Foucault (pp. 301–319, Somerset: Wiley), pp. 345–346, should be acknowledged also in the second half of the paragraph. Also, on p. 100 the reference to Alessandro Spena (2013) Iniuria Migrandi: criminalization of immigrants and the basic principles of the criminal law, Criminal Law and Philosophy (pp. 1–23) pp. 4–5, should be acknowledged.’
These two articles are already included in the reference list under:
[4] Amy Allen’s (2013) Power and the subject. In C. Falzon, T. O’Leary, & J. Sawicki (Eds.), Blackwell companions to philosophy: Co ...
Originating in the early 1970s, the concept of moral panic has been used to describe the public’s reaction to a real or perceived threat. Moral panic has been linked to well-known social problems, including muggings, drugs, juvenile ‘delinquency, gangs, and terrorism. More recently, researchers have examined school shootings in this context. Notably absent, however, is a quantitative application of Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s (1994a, 1994b) attributional model of moral panic. The present study examines the five key attributes of moral panic—concern, hostility, consensus, disproportionality, and volatility – as they relate to school shootings and fear of crime among college students. The results indicate that respondents’ fear of crime is the best predictor of students’ subscription to moral panic. Directions for future research, as well as limitations of the present study, also are discussed.
Three major reforms have been introduced in South Korea since 1945. The recent ongoing reform was the Grand Reform conducted from 1999. The goal of the Grand Reform was to change the nation’s policing style from colonial policing to a more democratic policing that focuses on accountability to citizens and a service orientation of the police. Community policing was introduced as a core program of the Grand Reform in 1999. The survey of a national sample of 406 South Korean police officers suggested that some demographics and organizational characteristics were crucial factors that influence officers’ attitudes toward community policing. Policy implications and limitations were also discussed.
New specialized courts have emerged in many countries, both in response to international pressure for legal reform and reflecting states’ own choice. Among these courts are specialized anti-corruption courts. The Indonesian Court for Corruption Crimes in Jakarta, originally established by statute in 2002, gained prominence and notoriety for its near-100 % conviction rate in over 250 cases. However, in 2010, exclusive jurisdiction over corruption cases was ‘decentralized’ to special corruption courts established in Indonesia’s 34 provincial capitals. The prudence of this has been strongly criticized, with questions raised about whether these regional courts have maintained the professionalism of the sole Jakarta court. This paper examines the rationale for the establishment of these courts and whether conviction rates are useful indicators of their performance.
In God’s Gangs, Edward Orozco Flores draws on 18 months of fieldwork in two outreach organizations with “recovering” gang members from Los Angeles barrio and working-class Latino neighborhoods. Los Angeles, with its dubious title as the “gang capital” of the U.S., has a much-studied history of gangs—particularly Latino gangs—that stretches back to the Great Depression (Bogardus 1943; Klein 1971; Moore 1978; Vigil 1988). Flores contributes to this history in an important way with his focus on disengagement from gangs, what he terms “gang recovery,” an area of gang research that has exploded in just the last 5 years.
What differentiates God’s Gangs from the extant literature is how Flores weaves together themes of masculinity, religion, immigration, and marginalization to guide readers through the transformation from “shaved” (i.e., active gang member) to “saved” (i.e., former gang member). Religion and the faith-based practices of the two outreach organizations are doing the heavy liftin ...
China has witnessed significant changes in its criminal justice system in the last three decades. As one of the major components of criminal procedure reform, the (re)emergence of criminal defense lawyers (and their expanding roles) is among the most noteworthy. Nevertheless, research on criminal defense work in China continues to post serious questions about the effectiveness of criminal defense in the current Chinese legal system. Based on recent survey data from a diverse group of criminal justice practitioners in J province, China, this study examines how actual criminal defense practices are evaluated by defense attorneys themselves and by the dominant ‘iron triangle’ (i.e., the coalition of the court, the prosecution, and the police officials). Our empirical findings consistently reveal that the work of Chinese defense lawyers is grossly undervalued by the ‘iron triangle’. Chinese criminal defense lawyers concur readily with the ‘iron triangle’ that the effectiveness of their legal representation is questionable and that their work bears little substantive impact on the final outcomes of the criminal trials. Implications for future reforms and research are discussed.
Small arms and light weapons are the primary causes of death in the violent conflicts raging today. Although the small arms trade is difficult to track, and the illicit trade doubly so, a wealth of information is available. This article applies some basic tools of social network analysis (SNA) to reveal the high profile of former Soviet bloc countries in the illicit arms trade with Africa. I set up this analysis with a discussion of the features of social networks that allow them to facilitate the transfer of illicit weaponry, and follow the presentation of my findings with some explanations for the prominence of Russia and other post-communist countries in this trade. My discussion focuses on the importance of relationships, their quantity and quality, as providing opportunities for, and constraints on, the flow of material and social resources between the actors and locales that comprise the illicit arms trade network. I also highlight the extent to which the positions of key players may account for their power within the network and their roles in security governance, which in the illicit context requires the maintenance of secrecy and redundancy.
Core countries, such as the United States, have created economic and trade policies which encourage Latino migration for cheap, exploitable labor and new demands for Latino sex trafficking within the United States to serve new destination male migration communities. This theory-building exercise utilizes world system and intersectional theoretical frameworks to examine the implications of geo-political policies and unequal development on lived experience affected by the intersection of massive Latino migration; poverty; gender inequalities and vulnerabilities; and Latino sex trafficking. A feminist political economy theoretical analysis is essential to a more sophisticated understanding of the historical socio- and geo-political effects of hegemonic modern world system core policies on new destination Latino migration and the lives of Latina women trafficked for sexual exploitation.
Electronic Monitoring (EM) was delivered on to the global correctional scene as a potentially more effective, humane (and dubiously, cheaper) alternative to imprisonment. For different reasons, that prospect is exciting for some practitioners and bureaucrats as well as for old school Abolitionists. Others remain cynical, but the more common response is generally a lack of sustained engagement by the academy with the possibilities (good and bad) of this new penal form. We therefore owe the editors of this collection, Nellis, Beyens and Kaminski, a great debt for opening up the critical dialogue about EM as the new baby of penality.
The major surprise about EM’s development is that it took so long to be born. Like the computer in Star Trek, we instinctively grasped tagging and monitoring well before EM technology became a realistic possibility. Monitoring ‘anti-social behaviour’ remotely has, after all, been a staple of dystopian literature even before, and certainly after, Orwell. Yet, e ...
While the people who live with offenders who have been sentenced to electronic monitoring sometimes have to consent to the sanction, and the measure undoubtedly impacts their life and position, their experience has not received much attention from policymakers or in research. This paper analyzes the experience of 30 co-residents of offenders who are being electronically monitored. It finds that their experience is a balance between two competing roles: a “convict” and a “controller”. On the one hand, co-residents report changes in their daily and social life that make them feel as if they are also being punished. On the other hand, they see themselves as active in the administration of the punishment, becoming assistants, social workers and controllers of the electronic monitoring sanction and taking up roles as private individuals that were previously fulfilled by government.
Academic discussion about surveillance tends to emphasize its proliferation, ubiquity, and impact on society, while neglecting to consider the continued relevance of traditional approaches to human supervision, an oversight insofar as surveillance is organized through practices embedded in justice system-based casework. Drawing from a multi-site study of pretrial personnel utilizing global positioning system (GPS) technology for domestic violence cases in the U.S., a comparative analysis is offered to illustrate how the handling of a “problem population” varies across community corrections agencies as they implement surveillance regimes. In particular, the study finds that surveillance styles reflect whether an agency is directed toward crime control and risk management, providing treatment and assistance, or observing due process. These programmatic thrusts are expressed in how officers interact with offenders as cases, both directly and remotely. In contrast to the ambient monitoring of environments and populations through data-banking technologies, the interactive surveillance styles described in the present study highlight the role of casework in surveillance.
The past three decades have increasingly witnessed the adoption of electronic monitoring (EM) technologies by countries around the world; these technologies have become central to the ways justice agencies accomplish many of their objectives, in a variety of settings. As such, investigating how EM illustrates and forecasts the emerging landscape of punishment and control is a timely project for a journal dedicated to the study of crime, law, and social change. With the advent of technologies that track and remotely observe offender populations, monitor compliance with rules and restrictions, and provide virtual detention and incarceration, a range of philosophical, penological, legal, socio-cultural, and practical concerns are raised; many of these topics are addressed by the contributors to this special issue. A host of parties—from politicians to judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, budget hawks, offenders, and even victims—benefit from the adoption of EM in that it appears to enh ...
A little over a decade ago I wrote “From an American Point of View: Does Electronic Monitoring Have a Future in Europe?” for a workshop at the Max Planck Institute in Freiburg, Germany [1]. I believed EM would have a future, for better or worse, but wondered what the influences on it would be. I could see that European probation services had a strong desire to subordinate EM to their established welfare concerns, but it was still my contention that changes already seen in the US would shape European developments: a) economic insecurity (exacerbated by internal immigration) might increase punitiveness; b) concerns with cost-effectiveness might undermine support for traditional probation approaches, and c) the growth of commercial influence on criminal justice policy might strengthen the appeal of technological, surveillant solutions. Things have not been so bad as I feared, but I wasn’t entirely wrong: the fact that the Council of Europe [2] has chosen to produce an “ethical” Recommenda ...
Internationally, the 200 year honeymoon with the prison may be ending. Research showing that imprisonment is ineffective in reducing crime is finally being heeded by some conservative governments committed to cost cutting. But, as this case-study of Victoria, Australia, again highlights, punishment regimes are neither universal nor rational. Bucking the trend, prison numbers in Victoria have increased dramatically over the last decade and are set to rise higher. The lingering lure of the prison here, we argue, is a manifestation of Australia’s colonial history in which punitiveness has always competed with pragmatic innovation. Although the research findings are inconclusive, we contend that Electronic Monitoring (EM), while differently fraught, better meets the key objectives of sentencing. Using a counterfactual social science thought experiment in the form of an imagined Cabinet submission, we show how political decision makers might be persuaded to effect a shift from prison to EM if it is framed within the competing visions of Australian national identity. We argue that understanding how social policy decisions are made sharpens the scholarly research agenda and also highlights how the convergence of a unique set of non-rational cultural assumptions can shape major shifts (or near misses) in the history of punishment in a particular society.
The electronic monitoring (EM) of offenders, mostly using radio frequency (RF) technology to enforce home confinement, has been practiced in Europe for a quarter century. At least twenty seven countries make use it, at a range of points in the penal process. More seem likely to adopt it in the future. Few countries use it on a very large scale, compared to prisons and other community sanctions. Nowhere has it had a transformative effect on penal practice, although some countries have used it more wisely than others. In Western Europe, Germany has been the most reluctant user of RF EM, while the Scandinavian countries, Denmark especially, have arguably made the most creative use of RF EM in the context of their conditional prison sentences, to augment existing support and rehabilitation services for offenders. Some Eastern European and Balkan countries have sometimes used EM without the constraining effects of “probation values”. Pan–European attempts by the CEP (The European Probation Organisation) and the Council of Europe to shape and constrain the development of EM, given the perception that it could easily become a repressive technology, have been of some value. GPS tracking of high risk offenders now exists on a very small scale in a number of European countries, but government aspirations in England and Wales, which may or may not come to fruition, to develop a large scale GPS-based programme in the near future may signal the beginnings of an attempt to the use EM in more penally transformative ways, although it is probation rather than prison use which may be diminished as a result. The conclusion suggests that EM should be understood as a form of e-governance, that it should be theorized in terms of the “network society” and that its expansion is an expression of neoliberal penality.
The technologies used in the electronic monitoring of offenders continue to develop, and next-generation “tags” will likely feature new capabilities. As the technology becomes more powerful, older criminal justice institutions and practices may appear increasingly anachronistic in one form or other, and their legitimacy called into question. Electronic monitoring systems may appear progressive alternatives to older forms of punishing. However, given the surveillant and controlling qualities of electronic monitoring systems, extending their use is in many respects troubling. This article seeks to examine the electronic monitoring of offenders in the light of the concepts of “penal moderation” and “penal excess”, as well as to reflect on this sanction at the interface of the academic fields of the sociology of punishment and surveillance studies. It is argued that issues relating to intended aims and actual effects of the electronic monitoring of offenders go to the heart of contemporary debates and contradictions regarding penal purpose, the effects of the criminal justice system, electronic surveillance, and explanations of penal change.
Through tragic events, such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 or the kidnapping case of Jakob von Metzler the absolute prohibition against torture is increasingly challenged, even in steadfast rule-of-law states. This article deals with this development and discusses the different approaches relativizing the absolute ban on torture. As a historical introduction this article starts with a brief overview of the history of interrogational torture. In a second part the article focuses on the ban on torture in international law and the quality of this prohibition as an absolute and non-derogable provision. In a next step the article analyses (the implementation of) the prohibition on torture in German and US law. In a last step the different models challenging the absoluteness of the prohibition (the ex ante authorisation and the ex post justification) are analysed and critically discussed concluding that the ban on torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment should not be relativized on an ex ante level but arguing–in extreme cases–for the possibility of an excuse as regards to a criminal sanction for the interrogator breaking the absolute prohibition.
“As in other areas of counter-terrorism, when adopting and implementing measures against terrorist financing, we need to bear in mind the importance of respecting human rights and the rule of law. This is necessary not only to preserve our moral authority, but also to avoid fuelling grievances which terrorists exploit to justify their unjustifiable actions, to gain safe haven in different communities and to recruit new affiliates.”
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, UN Headquarters, 20 November 2012 Remarks to Special meeting of the Counter-Terrorism Committee [delivered by the Deputy Secretary-General]
With these words UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon draws attention to the complexities of any debate relating to counter-terrorism. Implicit in his words is not only the assertion that states still need to undertake significant steps to successfully combat terrorism but also the recognition that counter-terrorism measures which are perceived as unjust can do more harm than good.
The diverse challenges ...
As part of its response to terrorism the British government has established and employed a number of specially created Executive powers as an alternative to prosecution. These powers facilitate the imposition of controls on individuals judged to be involved in terrorism who are thought to present a continuing danger. This article examines the latest version of these powers, “Terrorism Prevention and Implementation Measures”, which replaced a regime of restrictions called “control orders”. The Government argues that the new measures are an improvement on the control order system because they represent a fairer balance between the human rights and civil liberties of the individuals concerned, and the need to protect society from the danger these individuals are thought to present. However it is argued that this is an inaccurate picture of these new measures. Many of the key features of the control order regime remain, and some of the changes are cosmetic rather than real. Further, other features of the new regime were necessitated by case law concerning control orders and therefore do not really represent concessions to civil liberties on the Government’s part. It will also be shown that some of the changes serve as a basis for questioning the underlying justification for this sort of regime. In particular, the imposition of a time-limit on these measures means that individuals still judged to be a danger, will have to be subjected to ordinary criminal law powers of surveillance and investigation in any event.
The attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001 in New York has led to a worldwide increase in anti-terrorism legislation and much debate about the proper (legitimate, proportional and effective) response to the perceived threat of mass casualty attacks. In practice, however, anti-terrorism legislation is frequently applied in criminal cases that are unrelated to such mass casualty attacks. Instead, terrorism charges are leveled against conduct that was previously not categorized as terrorism and which is not always easy to distinguish from ordinary crimes, civil disobedience or legitimate protest activities, such as aggressive leafleting, sabotage of machinery, arson and offensive speech. This article explores the political process behind the categorization of such conduct as “terrorism” and the expanded scope of anti-terrorism legislation in the United States, Spain and Chile. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and the analysis of cases in which conduct is newly charged as terrorism, the author shows that these charges are the result of a deliberate campaign by groups in society that feel neglected by the government and appeal to the terrorism label in their demand for better protection.
Forty years after Mathiesen wrote the ‘politics of abolition’ his work can enhance our understanding about radicalisation and de-radicalisation of social movements and terrorist groups. In ‘the politics of abolition’ Mathiesen explains the mechanism of two social factors that moderate the most contested goals and means of abolitionists groups. Due to these mechanisms, abolitionist movements often split into one rather moderate and one ‘radical’ current. The Islamist movement is an empirical example for the split the model predicts. Jihadism (e.g. al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups) represents the most radical form of contemporary Islamism, while nationalist Islamism (e.g. the Muslim Brotherhood) and non-jihadi fundamentalism (mainstream Salafism) can be considered less radical because these currents either dismissed their abolitionist goals in favour of political integration, or reject terrorist violence as a means to enforce abolitionist goals. The communiqués and public statements of al-Qaeda give insight into the discourse within the Islamist movement. A sample of jihadi media is reviewed in this article as to compare al-Qaeda’s political positions with those of other Islamist movements and organisations.
This paper is part of a research Project, “Limitations of freedom in the terrorism procedure”, financed by the Spanish Science Ministry, Ref: DER 2008-06178.
‘ETA is weaker now than ever before in the history of our democracy. We are closer to see the end of ETA, but it is not going to happen overnight […] the countdown has begun.’ So spoke the President of the Spanish government, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in an interview published in the newspaper El País on 21 November 2010.
The creation of the organisation Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) in 1959 went largely unnoticed by the security forces of the state. The insurrection activities of the group were initially minor and made little impact, until 1968 when the first armed confrontation took place, resulting in the deaths of an officer of the Spanish Civil Guard (Guardia Civil) and one ETA militant.
According to the Spanish Home Office, the officer killed in this attack represents the first fatal victim of ETA ( ...
The challenges presented by terrorism to our governments in the past decade have led to fundamental changes in many things. The way we travel and the way we bank have, for instance, changed perceivably. Some avoid travelling to the USA—the country formerly known as “the leader of the free world”—out of a desire to avoid the need for a passport featuring biometric information or “being treated as a criminal” surrendering fingerprints at the point of entry. The more data protection aware amongst us may have changed the way we use the internet and other forms of communication technology or simply accepted the feeling that we can be watched at all times. Less obviously, a new security architecture has emerged around us and for Europeans, the EU looms large within it.
For more general commentary see Wuertenberger et al. [118]
Not all changes in this setting can be ascribed to terrorism; the post-Lisbon EU
The Treaty of Lisbon is an international agreement between the EU member stat ...
During the past decade, Islamic terrorism is considered as a major political threat which had far-reaching consequences. Criminal law was enacted on both national and supranational levels in Europe. This fundamental change, however, was not prefigured by the terrorist attack in New York on September 11, 2001. It is rather an expression of an ongoing development. In the 1970’s, ethnic or national political terrorism (e.g., IRA, RAF) was on the table and prompted the adoption of security measures. The penal policy agenda was diverted to drug crimes in the 1980’s.
The “war on drugs” emanating from the USA.
In the 1990’s, as a consequence of the opening of the borders in Europe, organized transnational crime took the stage and was considered a critical threat.The adoption of covert investigative measures can especially be traced back to clandestine and partially transnational network structures. In contrast to organized crime, terrorist attacks pose a ...
The threat of international terrorism has led to new schools of thought about security throughout the entire world. In their wake, national legislators and international organisations have introduced or promoted legal grounds for preventive detention that are specifically tailored to persons suspected of terrorism [1]. With regard to Germany, various changes to administrative and criminal detention regimes have been contemplated in legal policy debates since the September 11 attacks. While efforts to further expand the respective coercive powers under administrative law stalled in 2005, new provisions facilitating the detention of potential terrorists have been enacted in substantive and procedural criminal law [2]. The principal reason for this development can be traced back to the incoherent standards applied to administrative and criminal detention by the German Constitutional Court (GCC) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).
Erratum to: Crime Law Soc Change (2014)
DOI 10.1007/s10611-013-9471-9
Unfortunately the original version of this Introduction article was finalised prior to some of the articles it refers to. Since the publication of this article, the titles of the papers included in this special issue have changed. The correct titles are given below:
Protesters as terrorists?
Radicalisation and de-radicalisation of social movements: The comeback of political Islam?
The prognosis of terrorist attacks—limits of scientific findings
Combating the terrorism of ETA with the penal model
From control orders to TPIMs: variations on a number of themes in British legal responses to terrorism
Preventive detention as a counter-terrorism instrument in Germany
Torture and the fight against terrorism
The European Union as a counter–terrorism actor: right path, wrong direction?
This paper represents an exploratory study of what is known about the current global trade in human remains, and in particular, specimens from archaeological or ethnographic contexts, regardless of which source countries they derive from and where they are destined. The paper is in four parts. In Part 1, we explain how the analysis of human remains forms an important component of archaeological research, and why looting activity at burial sites prejudice this research. In Part 2 we review the existing and relevant archaeological, ethnographic and criminological literature on the subject while in Part 3 we describe our own research into the online trade in human remains, both licit and illicit. To assess the current global prevalence and distribution of public and private dealers in human remains, keyword searches on common search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing), and online sites like eBay and Amazon were conducted. In Part 4 we draw some conclusions about our research and point in particular to various policy and law reform issues which require further consideration and study.
Jeffrey Simon’s book, Lone Wolf Terrorism, is one of the first books specifically devoted to a phenomenon that has garnered increased attention in policy, practitioner and academic circles over the past couple of years. For this reason alone, it offers a timely illustration of who these actors are, the factors that make them dangerous and the possible strategies that could be used to help mitigate their threat. The series of illustrative case studies that Simon provides in each chapter are particularly valuable.
Three core themes are pervasive throughout the book. The first argues that the “lone wolf is changing the dynamics of international terrorism” (p. 20). The second outlines “the key role that technology, particularly the Internet, is playing” in the rise of the lone wolf (p. 21). Finally, Simon depicts the lone wolf as “creative and innovative” because they are “not burdened by any group decision-making processes or inter-group dynamics that can sometimes stifle creativity in for ...
In Violence and Punishment: Civilizing the Body through Time, the Dutch criminal justice historian, Pieter Spierenburg, examines the subjects of inter-personal violence and punishment from a sociological-historical perspective. Spierenburg hypothesizes that there has been an overall global reduction in inter-personal violence and a shift to less violent forms of punishment. He relates both of these tendencies to several other interdependent long-term processes, mainly an overall civilizing process of societies. Spierenburg claims that his work is one of the few that considers interdependent long-term trends and processes related to a decrease in violence and a transformation in punishment. His individual chapters draw heavily on evidence from Dutch and European sources, so that the work can be seen as a European history of crime and violence. Comparisons are limited to the North American continent with a brief nod to East Asian societies in Chapter Three.
The nine chapters of the book a ...
Recent research on the legitimacy of law is dominated by the confirmed effect of procedural justice on views of legitimacy. The procedural justice research, however, neglects the substantive component of law and how that substance may conflict with value systems of the various subcultures that constitute a complex society. This paper reviews classic and contemporary theory, as well as supporting empirical criminological research, in order to argue that views of the legitimacy of a given law can also be affected by such conflicting value sets. Allotting subculture a central influence, a model is proposed that integrates a sociological conception of the legitimacy of law with the existing research from psychology on procedural justice.
Forced marriage is of current international concern in Europe. As many cases involve a transnational component linked to migration, it is increasingly receiving attention at the government level. The serious consequences for women, including sexual violence, and the physical and psychological health risks associated with it, seem to receive little consideration. Recent years have seen a rise in initiatives and measures taken by policy makers throughout Europe. As the focus is placed on criminalization and stringent immigration policies, ethnic minority population groups bear the greatest burden. It is argued that specific criminal laws make it more difficult for victims to come forward, while offering very little or no protection in return. The widespread 21-year age rule in immigration law has been denounced by scholars, institutes and magistrates alike for infringing on the fundamental human right to family life guaranteed by article 8 ECHR. The discourse on forced marriage appears to have reached a crossroads. European governments are faced with the challenge to create policies that protect and support victims, while simultaneously cracking down on perpetrators and safeguarding their borders from abuses in obtaining visas. There is a very pressing need to work more closely with those at risk, involving service provisions to directly support them, instead of a one-side top-down policy framework through which minority communities feel targeted and stigmatized.
The criminalization of migration has, over the last decade, gained unprecedented focus in migration, criminology and socio-legal literature. Recently, there have been some developments critically revisiting the criminalization thesis, particularly with reference to the European experiences: criminal law might exist ‘on the books’ but quite often it is not actually enforced in immigration practice. Therefore, whilst the incorporation of criminal law into the immigration domain serves mainly symbolic functions to demonstrate a government’s firm grip over immigration control, it also legitimizes a discourse presenting migrants as potential criminals, cheats and abusers. This begs the following question: how do migrants respond to this increasing conflation between criminal and immigration domains in the wider social context? How are the official and public discourses over ‘crimmigrant bodies’ reflected in migrants’ everyday life experiences? Do migrants resist, reproduce or redefine this criminal labelling? I grapple with these questions while qualitatively investigating the experiences of 270 return migrants from four European countries (Norway, Netherlands, the UK and Portugal): migrants’ responses to the stigmatizing force of symbolic criminalisation do not always mean resistance, but, quite often, are placed on a continuum between the contestation and the reproduction of the stigma and the hegemony of the law.
This paper reanalyzes the ten low-crime countries featured in Freda Adler’s 1983 publication, Nations Not Obsesses with Crime. It uses currently available quantitative data to present an updated statistical portrait of these countries. It aims to critically evaluate the criteria that have been and should be used to designate countries as low-crime. It also investigates whether these countries have been able to maintain this status over the past three decades. Finally, it discusses the theoretical implications of this updated statistical portrait for cross-national criminology.
Neither American law enforcement nor criminology was prepared for the events of September 11, 2001. Prior to 9/11, few criminologists had paid much scholarly attention to terrorism or terrorists. The situation has changed of course, and the study of terror, terrorists and the reaction to both has moved into the mainstream of what criminologists do as researchers and as teachers. Indeed, it is not an overstatement to say that academic degree programs and certificates for university level credit to study terrorism have expanded faster and more broadly than terrorism itself.
Strategies for Preventing Terrorism is an important book for those who study terrorism and terrorists. But it is more than that. Because of its effective integration into mainstream criminology and criminal justice practice, this book should have wide readership among scholars and practitioners. Bjorgo builds on a number of theories (deterrence, life course, rational choice) and study topics (recruitment and joining gr ...
Corruption is an undoubtedly a difficult conceptual area to operate in. This is particularly accurate for the post-Soviet space, where seemingly mutually exclusive forces appear to coexist on regular basis, defying and rejecting rational interpretations. Standard assumptions, definitions and theoretical perspectives often fail to generate useful understandings of corruption in Eastern Europe, habitually obscuring fundamental patterns, hence leaving corruption largely misunderstood. In order to construct anticorruption policies that would be effective in the environment where corruption is systemic, it is critical to resist the temptation of eschewing the complexity of societal factors by over-focusing on the corrupt individual. In an effort to reemphasize the imperative role played by societal variables in explaining corruption in the post-Soviet space, this article uses insights gathered from studying corruption in Republic of Moldova to discuss the role of three fundamental dynamics: “dirty hands,” the problem of “collective action” and the achromatic schema of white-gray-black corruption.
This paper examines a predominantly Australian sample of computer crime offenders involved in fraud and/or unauthorised access. This paper focuses on the extent to which offenders are involved in organised crime, the nature of the relationship between co-offending, initiation and knowledge transmission, and how the online environment facilitates organised crime and co-offending. This qualitative analysis draws from interviews with self-identified offenders, law enforcement officers who investigate these offenses, and court documents, providing a unique understanding of organised crime involving computer systems.
It is perhaps the bane of public policing that it finds itself in continuous cycles of reform. Reforming the police is generational; new expectations and shifting social mores invariably involve government and the police. No doubt some of these reforms have been a long time in coming, sparked by scandal and then reform, sometimes ill-conceived and discarded or sidestepped by police organizations resistant to change under any rubric. Serious students of police accept the idea that public bureaucracies in general and police bureaucracies more specifically have had rather long trajectories when it comes to change. In the ethos of the police, continuity has often superseded change. Moreover, by using the long lens of history change in policing can be seen as having been glacial and evolutionary rather than cataclysmic or abrupt. Contested Police Systems is focused on matters of organizational and institutional change in government policing and their governance. T ...
In the past decade, research on Chinese criminal justice has witnessed a notable shift from broad–brush doctrinal overviews to fine–grained empirical studies using social science methods. With different research agendas, both criminal procedure law professors in China and social scientists overseas (mostly criminologists and socio–legal researchers) have begun to collect and analyze empirical data on various aspects of the criminal justice system. Ni He’s new book Chinese Criminal Trials is a recent product of this new trend. While many existing books on the Chinese criminal justice system focus on one specific aspect of it, such as policing, court trial, or criminal defense, He’s study provides a comprehensive examination of the system with both historical length and empirical breadth.
The book opens with a short but ambitious overview of the historical context of Chinese criminal justice from antiquity to modernity. The author traces the legacy of the Chinese legal system and its inst ...
Governments and law enforcement agencies around the world seek to identify and confiscate the ‘proceeds of crime’ on the assertion that doing so will deter offending and symbolise to citizens and communities that ‘crime does not pay’. In the UK such assertions have underpinned the enactment of legislation, the investment in law enforcement agents and the development of wide ranging new technologies to facilitate the identification of assets and their recovery. This paper critically considers two key concepts which fundamentally drive the post-conviction confiscation regime in the UK. First, ‘criminal benefit’ which is the amount that a defendant is adjudged to have made from ‘criminal conduct’. Second, the ‘available amount’ which is the amount that the state hopes to recover from a defendant via the court ordered ‘confiscation order’. In so doing, this paper explores the assumptions at the heart of the 2002 Proceeds of Crime Act and their application in practice, concentrating on the nature of the powers accorded to financial investigators and how these powers have been interpreted and applied. It is argued that far from representing the ‘profit’ generated from crime these values are constructs founded in the relationship between legislation, the discretional practice of police officers and financial investigators, organisational restrictions and constraints and informal negotiation and compromise between the defence and prosecution. This has implications for both conceptualising the nature of the post-conviction confiscation regime as well as for shaping what the state might expect to recover from defendants.
Interdependent relations and cooperation between criminal groups are found to be recurrent when studying illegal market activities specifically and organized crime generally. However, there is little systematic research into the level and characterization of how criminal groups co-offend with one another. Based on a case-study approach, this article examines structural co-offending patterns between differently ethnic-based criminal groups involved in an illegal drug distribution network targeted during a law-enforcement operation in Italy. Data was extracted from electronic and surveillance transcripts obtained from court documents, and analyzed using social network analysis (SNA) techniques. The results provide an insight into the structure and organizational features of group co-offending networks. They also offer an investigation into ethnicity within between-group criminal activity in Italy’s illegal drug trade. Implications for crime control strategies are discussed.
The history of drug trafficking in Mexico appears to be strongly influenced by specific features of the post-revolutionary authoritarian regime that has been characterized by its rampant corruption and poor levels of accountability. This is a rigorous empirical case study of state domination of the relationship with traffickers in a particular historical epoch and place. Based on research conducted through the examination of historic sources, this work explores the hypothesis that some political figures might have been colluding with members of criminal organizations, with the aim of protecting their businesses and fostering their consolidation. Such collusion has hindered the institutional functioning of key law enforcement and judicial institutions in the country. The present analysis considers these relationships in the course of three decades, the 1960s through the 1990s, and focuses on the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, where one of the most powerful and dangerous organized crime groups emerged, the so-called Gulf Cartel.
As the new Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act came into force in 2007, Maria Eagle, then Justice Minister, noted that, with its passage, “We are sending out a very powerful deterrent message to those organisations which do not take their health and safety responsibilities seriously [1].” It is with this Act, and the symbolic message to which Eagle refers, that Almond’s book is concerned. Crucially, however, Almond places the emergence of the Act within the wider context of regulatory law and its enforcement—unremarked upon in Eagle’s comment but which, as Almond notes here, is characterised by rather different trajectories of enforcement, set in train by three successive Labour administrations and then accelerated under the post-2010 Coalition Government (below).
Let us first, then, place Almond’s specific concerns within some wider contexts. According to the most recent Health and Safety Executive (HSE) figures, in 2011/12 there was a total of 173 ‘workers’ killed by occ
Although a great deal of research has been conducted on fear of crime among the general public, much less is known about such fear among immigrants. Intensified fear may have detrimental consequences on immigrants’ lifestyles, acculturation process, and responses to law enforcement. Based on survey data collected from 148 Chinese immigrants in Metro-Detroit, this study assesses the effects of a variety of general and immigrant-specific explanatory factors on Chinese immigrants’ fear of crime. Results show that Chinese immigrants who had greater perceived risks of victimization, stronger perceptions of crime problems in home city, and lower English proficiency tended to have higher levels of fear of crime. Implications for policy and future research are discussed.
In the 2009 case of R. v. Grant, the Supreme Court of Canada reformulated the exclusion of evidence framework in the context of Charter breaches. The case was something of a revolution for those who study evidence law and the Charter. Thus far, the case has been the subject of much debate and even empirical study. Few academic papers have explored the philosophical predilections of the Court in the decision. In this paper, the authors briefly review the history of the exclusion of evidence test, explain the new framework and discuss the academic and legal responses to the case. The authors place the reasoning of the Court in a broader socio-legal context arguing that the test articulated by the Court is informed by a type of populism that combined with recent Charter cases in the police powers context allows for flexible potentials, ones that could, on occasion, encroach on due process protections. The authors call for scholars and activists to keep a close eye on the emerging jurisprudence in this critical area of Charter adjudication.
Efforts to gather systematic data and undertake empirical studies on the extent of environmental crime, the magnitude of environmental victimization, and the punishment of environmental offenders in the United States remains elusive in the criminological literature. We take a novel approach to studying these gaps in the literature, by examining federal environmental crime prosecutions. While not all encompassing, this approach advances the literature by providing valuable insights into what types of human victimization occur, the role victims play in prosecutions, and how offenders are punished. What is the nature and extent of case-documented environmental victimization with regard to human victimization in the U.S. over the past decade? We address this question through a content analysis of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) criminal investigation cases, 2001–11. Out of 972 total criminal cases, we find that only 3 % of cases involve acute or identifiable victimization. Environmental crime victims, unless immediately harmed, are not likely to play a major role in environmental crime cases; thereby limiting potential political and public attention to victims of environmental crime.
This paper explores the policing of a traditional wholesale fruit market located in a densely populated neighborhood of urban Hong Kong. Based on ethnographic and historical research, we outline the political arrangements that govern the discretionary arrangements of police power at the market. A historically developed system maintains an informal status quo against various pressures to change. We identify crucial features in the contemporary policing system that emerge from a fusion between the democratic ethos of community policing ideals and non-democratic aspects of local administration in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. These features of this historically developed mode of order-maintenance, we suggest, might be seen as broadly characteristic of a “Hong Kong style” community policing.
For scholars of crime, law and social change, one of the more interesting aspects of globalization is the way it produces new regulatory regimes. Markets, it seems, are not natural forces; they must be created. And the creation of a new market depends, in no small part, on the formation of a governing system capable of securing its new forms of property, rationalizing its new relations of domination, and organizing its new system of exchange. The emergence of a new regulatory regime is fascinating to watch anywhere, but perhaps the most intriguing place in which to explore the process is one of the sort that Mary Louise Pratt called “contact zones” [1], i.e. sites in which radically different economies of meaning encounter one another, find a footing for engagement across their differences, and set about exploiting the new possibilities afforded by combination and hybridity.
The Southern Chinese Seaboard is such a contact zone. It has been for a very long time and, as such, holds a posi
This study examines policing in Macau and identifies major forces that have shaped its transformation over past decades. Prior to 1999, Macau was a Portuguese colony. Its criminal justice system inherited key features of the Continental system, including two independent law enforcement agencies: the Judiciary Police and the Public Security Police. In the colonial era, expatriate commanders drawn from the military or legal professions headed both departments, while the rank-and-file was composed mainly of local Chinese. This policing mechanism, together with the ‘laissez-faire’ policing philosophy adopted by colonial leaders, created segregation between policing agencies and the community. Citizens preferred minimal interaction with police, since they were skeptical about their professionalism, capability, and reliability. Macau became part of the Peoples’ Republic of China in 1999. The de-monopolization of the gaming industries in 2002 brought huge GDP growth, but generated internal social conflict. Growing public demand for accountable governance motivated a series of governmental reforms, some of which have extended to policing. These reforms have improved the transparency of policing, but it remains to be seen if they will ultimately succeed in generating public trust in the police forces.
Despite unprecedented economic and social changes over the past three decades, China remains an authoritarian regime. However, the current authoritarian regime differs in many ways from that under Mao. Since the nature of a police force reflects the character of the political regime within which it operates, this paper explores current police practices in China. It argues that policing in China is neither completely authoritarian nor democratic, but best understood as soft-authoritarian. The case study examines policing of a motorcycle ban that was implemented to prevent motorcycle snatch theft in the Pearl River Delta. The police remained authoritarian and used many coercive strategies to push for the motorcycle ban. However, their hard-line strategies were matched by some soft-line persuasive tactics. I argue that changing state-society relations are leading to resistance to hard-authoritarian policing and contributing to soft-authoritarian policing in China.
This paper is an empirical study in comparative police ideology. It describes cultural qualities that distinguish Taiwan’s idea of democratic policing from comparable ideas in other places. I examine the historical process by which Taiwan’s police came to be organized around the population registry (the hukou). This process has institutionalized a Confucian understanding of civic virtue as an organizing principle in Taiwanese policing. Based on these historical and cultural observations, I formulate an ideal typical model of Taiwanese “policing through virtue” that can be compared to other stereotypical national policing styles such as Britain’s “policing by consent,” America’s discretionary policing, and France’s formalist emphasis on division of power and rule of law.
A number of police cooperation strategies have developed around the Southern Chinese seaboard, which encompasses the coastal provinces of Mainland China, Taiwan, and the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macau. Cooperation mechanisms in the region encompass intelligence sharing strategies and establishment of the Electronic Communal Information Sharing Platform (ECISP), common investigations, regular meetings, practitioner exchanges, and training. Although conducted on a regular basis, these cooperation strategies mostly lack a formally binding legal basis, relying purely on informal practitioner efforts at best supported by Memoranda of Understanding. Due to their historical independence all police forces involved in cooperation at the Southern Chinese seaboard have had to establish strategies to overcome legal, organisational and cultural differences. This region could therefore be compared to cooperation networks between sovereign nation-states in other regions. The historical development of Greater China’s highly informal, practitioner driven approach to cooperation is reminiscent of early forms of cooperation between the police agencies of states that are now members of the European Union (EU). This paper explores the development of both informal and formal strategies established among police agencies around the Southern Chinese seaboard and compares them with the EU to enhance the historical, political and legal understanding of the two regions.
The term “genocide” evokes vivid images for most who hear it. Genocide is known as “the crime of crimes”, and it is often associated with extreme violence. However, few individuals outside of the community of genocide scholars and human rights activists may be familiar with another term: “genocide by attrition”. According to genocide scholar Helen Fein, genocide by attrition occurs “after a group is singled out for political and civil discrimination; it is separated from the larger society, and its right to life is threatened through concentration and forced displacement, together with systematic deprivation of food, water, and sanitary and medical facilities” (Fein as quoted by [1], p. 2). Genocide by attrition does not necessarily involve the brutal acts we naturally associate with genocide, but nonetheless, it constitutes the crime of genocide under Article II of the UN Convention by causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of a group and deliberately inflicting on a group c
The purpose of this study was to develop and validate territorial functioning measures and to examine the link between territorial functioning and victimisation in a high-crime context. To this end, four sequential stages of scale development were undertaken: conceptual model development, item generation and content validation, exploratory study and confirmatory study. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the three dimensions of territorial functioning, namely, neighbourhood attitudes, sense of control and marking behaviour, as dimensions of the second-order territorial functioning construct. The results of the structural model support findings reported in the literature that associate high territorial functioning with low victimisation. The theoretical and practical implications of the study and directions for future research are discussed in the concluding sections of this study.
Which industry sectors bribe the government and, in turn, are exploited by the government the most in China? Or, as commonly satirized by the people, which sectors pay the most “tributes” (shanggong) to government officials? This article attempts to answer these questions by proposing a meso-level approach, which examines corruption in China at the sectoral level. We use a firm-level survey from 1997 to 2006 in China and treat two types of payments by private enterprises—public relations–building fees (yingchou) and forced apportionment of funds (tanpai)—as indicators of potential corruption in a sector. We find that the most corrupt sectors are those that rely on scarce and less mobile resources controlled by the government. Thus, further reform in the factor markets is necessary to reduce corruption caused by government intervention in the allocation of important resources.
The United States is often hailed as the world’s largest ‘free market’. But this ‘free market’ is also the world’s largest penal colony. It holds over seven million adults – roughly 5 % of the labour force – in jail, in prison, on parole and on probation. Is this an anomaly, or does the ‘free market’ require massive state punishment? Why did the correctional population start to rise in the 1980s, together with the onset of neoliberalism? How is this increase related to the upward redistribution of income and the capitalization of power? Can soaring incarceration sustain the unprecedented power of dominant capital, or is there a reversal in the offing? The paper examines these questions by juxtaposing the ‘Rusche thesis’ with the notion of capitalism as a mode of power. The empirical analysis raises an enigma: it suggests that the Rusche thesis holds under the normal circumstances of ‘business as usual’, but breaks down during periods of systemic crisis. During the systemic crises of the 1930s and the 2000s, unemployment increased sharply, but crime and the severity of punishment, instead of rising, dropped perceptibly.
We argue that an ‘electoral democracy’ is not sufficient to reduce corruption. Our contention is that the institutions associated with mature democracy are crucial to successfully deterring corrupt behaviour. At the core of our argument is the idea that with well-functioning institutions, the probability of detection and punishment is sufficiently high to deter most decision makers from choosing to act corruptly. The empirical evidence we present supports this idea. The nonlinearity of democracy variables is tested to confirm that an advanced stage of democracy is crucial for combating corruption.
Research on the implementation of reforms focusing on policies and practices of the criminal court system reveals that members of the courtroom workgroup often resist or circumvent these legal reforms. This is particularly true if the reforms require changes in the way cases are prosecuted, affect the likelihood of successful prosecution, or impede the efficient and effective processing of cases. In this paper, I demonstrate that the findings of the Farrell et al. study of the prosecution of human trafficking cases are consistent with the larger bodies of research on prosecutorial charging decisions and the implementation of legal reforms. Like reforms designed to enhance the likelihood of successful prosecution of sexual assault and domestic violence cases, the new human trafficking statutes may not be capable of achieving the instrumental effects that those who lobbied for the changes envisioned.
This article reports on the perceptions and experiences with labor trafficking of farmworkers, stakeholders, and law enforcement representatives in North Carolina. We found a sizeable number of farmworkers who had experienced labor trafficking violations, albeit with a convenience sample; and community agencies reported stories of labor trafficking victimization. However, most of the state and local law enforcement agencies that we attempted to contact simply ignored our requests for information about labor trafficking or reported no evidence of such victimization. Notwithstanding the sample limitations, we found a general lack of awareness of agricultural labor trafficking problems among law enforcement officials in our surveyed jurisdictions. We question whether our current law enforcement system will ever be in a position to effectively enforce the anti-labor-trafficking law; and suggest an alternative specialized mechanism be established.
All fifty states and the federal government have passed laws to combat human trafficking, but we know little about their effectiveness. Using data from investigative case records and court files for 140 human trafficking cases in 12 U.S. counties and qualitative interviews with law enforcement, prosecutors, and victim service providers, we examined the characteristics of and challenges to investigation and prosecution of human trafficking cases under new state and federal laws. We found that few human trafficking cases are identified by local law enforcement, most cases forwarded to state prosecution are sex trafficking cases involving U.S. citizens, and state prosecutors overwhelmingly charge human trafficking offenders with other, lesser crimes. The legal, institutional, and attitudinal challenges that constrain prosecution of human trafficking are similar across study sites despite varying types of state antitrafficking legislation. Study results suggest prosecution of human trafficking cases is challenging. If new laws are to be effective, then local law enforcement and prosecutors should work collaboratively and adopt proactive human trafficking investigative strategies to identify both labor and sex trafficking cases. There is social benefit to holding traffickers accountable, but more emphasis should be placed on policies that identify and serve victims.
In 2000, the Dutch authorities lifted the ban on brothels in the Netherlands. The essence of their approach was to regulate prostitution. People of legal age could now voluntarily sell and purchase sexual services. Brothels which complied with certain licensing conditions were legalized. This paper critically assesses the logic of a position that argues that human trafficking is reduced when actors in the legalized prostitution sector are made responsible for what happens on their premises (using licensing conditions). This idea is confronted with empirical evidence about the Netherlands in general and the city of Amsterdam in particular. Furthermore, the paper addresses two questions. What are consequences of the regularization of prostitution for the criminal investigation and prosecution of sex trafficking? How do criminal justice agencies collaborate with regulatory authorities in the regulated and non-regulated sectors of the prostitution market? The main conclusion is that the screening of brothel owners and the monitoring of the compliance of licensing conditions do not create levels of transparency that enable sex trafficking to be exposed. The prostitution business retains many characteristics of an illegitimate market and the legalization and regulation of the prostitution sector has not driven out organized crime. On the contrary, fighting sex trafficking using the criminal justice system may even be harder in the legalized prostitution sector.
The American and the global campaigns against the trafficking of humans for labor and for sexual exploitation have had more than a decade of time and millions of dollars of support in an effort to suppress trafficking and protect its victims. Four of the six articles in this issue explore the reasons why the campaign in the United States has not had more instrumental success with respect to its prosecution goals. The number of cases brought and convictions obtained are fewer than what might be expected. Most of the cases brought involve sex trafficking. The less than impressive record of enforcement against human trafficking appears to be another example of how even very popular law reforms and crusades can be cooled out by the social realities of the criminal justice system. Sex trafficking cases are difficult to make because the victims are difficult to work with, juries are unsympathetic, and the police, prosecutors, judges have their own priorities. The article on the attempt to eliminate sex trafficking by switching to a policy of regulating prostitution rather than treating it as a crime indicates that policy change did not succeed. An attempt to create an index for assessing the implementation of anti-trafficking programs was successful.
This research examines changes in the legalities of federal sentencing for forced labor trafficking offenses and for sex trafficking from 2001 to 2010. During this period Congress sought to increase substantially penalties imposed for these offenses. The research tracks Congressional directives and the United States Sentencing response via amendment changes. Increases in mandatory minimum penalties and extension of federal statues covered under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines § 2H4.1 Peonage, Involuntary, and Slave Trade, and under § 2G1.3 Promoting a Commercial Sex Act or Prohibited Sexual Conduct with a Minor; Transportation of Minors to Engage in a Commercial Sex Act or Prohibited Sexual Conduct; Travel to Engage in Commercial Sex Act or Prohibited Sexual Conduct; Travel to Engage in Commercial Sex Act or Prohibited Sexual Conduct with a Minor; Sex Trafficking of Children; Use of Interstate Facilities to Transport Information about a Minor reflected Congressional directives that amounted to a “get tough” policy. Having traced changes in federal sentencing for these two offenses, the research conducts a descriptive analysis of length of imprisonment imposed, the final offense level, the defendant’s criminal history, guidelines departures, pretrial detention, route of case disposition, and defendant characteristics for the purpose of assessing potential links between the changes in federal sentencing and the process and outcome of actually sentencing practices.
Quantitative ratings of policies of national governments are an important tool for the monitoring of compliance with international standards in many domains. In this article we present a global index of anti-human trafficking policies developed by a research consortium using the TIP country reports of the U.S. State Department (the 3P index) and an index based on the reports of the monitoring body of the Council of Europe Convention against Human Trafficking (GRETA). Although the global 3P index gives more favorable ratings to most European countries than the GRETA-based index, a moderately strong correlation was found between the two indices. This is an encouraging result lending support to the validity of the assessments of both monitoring mechanisms as well as to their transformation into quantitative scores. We also demonstrate that the detailed GRETA-based index can be used to identify best practices in anti-trafficking policies and specific areas where these policies are most in need of improvement, e.g. legal aid and compensation for victims. Our analyses of the relationships between the various items of the index revealed positive correlations between the existence of units of specialized prosecutors and the numbers of convictions of traffickers. Our paper, then, demonstrates the potential of quantitative indices of counter human trafficking policies as tools for both effective monitoring of the implementation of international standards and for analytical purposes.
Transnational environmental crime is a global problem encompassing not only criminal violations of the law, but harms against the environment and the people reliant upon it as a natural resource. Grounded in the green criminological theory of eco-global criminology, this paper explores the transnational environmental crime of the illegal timber trade in the Russian Far East unpicking the threats to ecological well-being and the global nature and impacts of this crime. In researching transnational environmental crime, it is crucial to uncover the distinct local and regional variations of the forces at play; for this paper that means analyzing the role of organized crime and corruption in Russia’s timber black market. This information was obtained by using the current literature and interviews with Russian and international experts in order to uncover the role of these actors in the harvesting, smuggling and selling of timber. From this exploration, a structure of the illegal timber trade in this region is proposed including at which points along the black market chain organized crime and/or corruption are involved. Additionally, from an eco-global criminological foundation this paper analyzes the consequences to Russia’s people, its environment and the global community if the illegal timber trade is to continue in its current state.
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.
Since the transition to democracy court delay has been a powerful signifier of the problem of the criminal justice in Argentina. This has been the case particularly in the Province of Buenos Aires where court delay was constantly projected by the Provincial Government’s narrative as evidence of injustice and/or inefficiency in the system. It has been the focus of sustained political attacks upon judges, defence lawyers and public prosecutors by members of the national and provincial parliaments of Argentina. These narratives of court delay have enabled a number of reforms of the criminal justice system which have reshaped organisational practices to the extent of constituting a new and different strategy of producing justice. This article identifies, describes and makes sense of those discourses and practices, and the strategies and tactics behind them by analysing the governmental narrative and the judicial and organisational reforms.
Various explanations have been offered regarding the causes of the current global economic crisis that was spawned by the collapse of mortgage-based securities in the U.S. that were sold world-wide and that contained "toxic assets" comprised of subprime loans. There is ample evidence that such loans were originated through fraud. Firms recorded huge profits, and executives were awarded large bonuses even though some had led their companies into bankruptcy and plunged both the U.S. and global economies into the greatest recession since the Great Depression. This paper assesses the reasons why there have been no major prosecutions to date, and compares the U.S. government's response to that in the savings and loan crisis. It analyzes the influence of large financial institutions on lawmaking, regulation, and the allocation of enforcement resources, the continued general lack of understanding of financial fraud including control fraud, and problems related to the higher status and power of potential defendants.
The present paper deals with the territorial movements of the mafia groups. After postulating that the concept of mafia refers to a form of organized crime with certain specific characteristics of its own, the paper presents: i) a repertory of the mechanisms underlying the processes whereby mafias expand beyond their home territories, and ii) a taxonomy of the forms that the mafia assumes in nontraditional territories. In a case study approach, the conceptual framework thus outlined is applied to the mafia’s presence in Germany, as reconstructed from documentary and judicial sources. Though this is an exploratory investigation, certain findings are clear: i) the ‘Ndrangheta is more active in Germany than the other traditional Italian mafias (Cosa Nostra and Camorra), and ii), even in “successful” expansions, the mafia does not reproduce the embeddedness it typically shows in its home territories, but chiefly concentrates on infiltrating the economy and dealing on illegal markets.
Previous studies of the electoral consequences of corruption in Spanish local elections (Jiménez Revista de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociológicas, 6(2):43–76, 2007; Fernández-Vázquez and Rivero 2011, Consecuencias electorales de la corrupción, 2003–2007. Estudios de Progreso, Fundación Alternativas; Costas et al. European Journal of Political Economy: 28(4):469-484, 2012) have found that voters do not necessarily punish corrupt mayors. As has been pointed out in the comparative literature, the average loss of electoral support by corrupt incumbents is small and does not prevent their reelection most of the times (Jiménez and Caínzos 2006, How far and why do corruption scandals cost votes? In Garrard, J. and Newell, J. (eds.) Scandals in past and contemporary politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press). What remains unsolved, however, is the remarkable variability in this pattern. This article explores some of the micro-level variables that may mediate the effect of corruption scandal on the votes. We focus on three factors: ideological closeness to the incumbent party, political sophistication, and employment status. Our results provide only partial support for our hypotheses, suggesting that the effects of corruption are much more complex than what may seem at first sight.
While we frequently hope electoral democracy can serve as an important constraint on corruption, there are good reasons to think that such might not be the case. This paper analyzes two closely-related questions: should we expect voters to punish corrupt politicians or parties at the polls, and should we expect such influences to check corruption generally? While there have been clear-cut cases in which such punishments have been massive and decisive, they are much the exception. Indeed, a variety of factors having to do with corruption as a concept and as a political issue, the nature of competitive electoral politics, and more recent economic and political trends reshaping important aspects of liberal democracy, all point toward a pessimistic assessment. Ideas for changing that state of affairs are few, because the difficulties reside less at the level of fixable “problems” and more with the inherent workings of liberal political and economic systems. Efforts to improve the quality of news coverage and civic education, however, and any prospects for strengthening and deepening civil society, may hold out some hope for the longer term.
Reelection of corrupted politicians points to a problem of democratic accountability. Voters do have the chance to ‘throw the rascals out’, but they do not take it. Employing a survey experiment, we test two popular explanations of why Greek voters fail to effectively sanction corrupt politicians. One is related to the distorting effects of psychological attachment to parties and the second to tradeoffs that seem to come into play when voters weigh the prevalence of corruption against other tangible benefits that they receive from governments and parties, such as lower taxes or clientelistic exchanges. Our findings suggest that collective benefits, such as cutting taxes, outweigh the costs of tolerating political corruption. On the contrary, exclusive provision of goods to specific voters, such as in the case of clientelistic exchanges, seems to be negatively related to support for a corrupt politician and therefore should rather not be regarded as a source of tolerance to corruption, at least not in present time Greece.
One of the intriguing phenomena in democracy is the fact that politicians involved in, accused of or condemned for corruption in a court of law get re-elected by their constituents. In some cases, corruption does not seem to negatively affect the development of political careers. In this introductory article, we try to develop a multidimensional framework for analysing electoral punishment of corruption. First, we will look into various studies on electoral punishment and highlight their advancements and shortcomings. Then, we will propose a more dynamic account of electoral punishment of corruption that takes into account individual as well as macro level explanations. Finally, we will disaggregate these two analytical dimensions into various explanatory factors.
Corrupt politicians have to a surprisingly great extent been found to go unpunished by the electorate. These findings are, however, drawn from case studies on a limited number of countries. This study, on the contrary, is based on a unique dataset from 215 parliamentary election campaigns in 32 European countries between 1981 and 2011, from which the electoral effects of corruption allegations and corruption scandals are analyzed. Information about the extent to which corruption allegations and scandals have occurred is gathered from election reports in several political science journals, and the electoral effects are measured in terms of the electoral performances—the difference in the share of votes between two elections—of all parties in government, as well as the main incumbent party, and the extent to which the governments survive the election. The control variables are GDP growth and unemployment rate the year preceding the election, the effective number of parliamentary and electoral parties, and the level of corruption. The results show that both corruption allegation and corruption scandals are significantly correlated with governmental performances on a bivariate basis; however, not with governmental change. When controlling for other factors, only corruption allegation has an independent effect on government performances. The study thus concludes—in line with previous research—that voters actually punish corrupt politicians, but to a quite limited extent.
This article ventures to be one of the first studies that examines the relationship between corruption and electoral turnout on the sub-national level. Taking Portugal, a southern European country with nationally relatively high levels of corruption and relatively low levels of turnout, as a case, we examine the relationship between the two concepts across Portugal’s 304 out of 308 municipalities for the legislative elections in 2005 and 2009. Controlling for municipal level GDP per capita, unemployment, the percentage of senior citizens, and population density, as well as the closeness of the election and the district magnitude, we find corruption to be a rather strong mobilizing agent. Compared to “clean” municipalities, our results indicate that turnout is several percentage points higher in “very corrupt” municipalities.
This article aims to analyze the relationship between judicial activism against political corruption and electoral accountability. The judiciary plays a pivotal role in enforcing anti-corruption legislation, and, in many countries, courts have moved closer and closer towards that kind of working. In the article, we analyze the conditions under which a judicial prosecution of corrupt practices can also lead to electoral punishment of political misconducts by voters, or to a failure of accountability mechanisms. The latter outcome is more likely to occur if judicial activism is politicized. The ‘politicization’ of anti-corruption initiatives is here defined as an increase in the polarization of opinions, interests, or values about judicial investigations and the extent to which this polarization is strategically advanced towards the political debate by parties, political leaders, and media. By crystallizing a new dimension of political conflict, political actors can negatively affect electoral accountability, diminishing the risk of electoral punishment. We study this phenomenon by analyzing the case of Italy, a country which has experienced high levels of politicization of anti-corruption. However, whether and to what extent anti-corruption policies can be politicized is a question open for many other countries that can take a similar path.
Based on a case study of the role of private financial institutions in the fight against terrorist financing, this article examines the rationales for, and actual results of, public-private partnerships in counterterrorism. It shows that there is still a lack of appreciation of the roles that regular private business play, both willingly and unwillingly, in the fight against terrorism. As profit, rather than security, maximizers, private sector actors may decide to take certain security risks rather than addressing them directly, which in contrast is expected from public agencies. As a consequence, public-private partnerships have not been the silver bullet that the representatives of public agencies had hoped for since 9/11. In fact, to many private sector representatives, they are more akin to public-private dictatorships.
This exploratory study operationalizes the variables comprising the choice model of white collar crime through analyzing cases decided by federal courts, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Cases were extracted from the LEXIS-NEXIS, WESTLAW, and the NERA Economic Consulting databases and categorized according to the indicators of the choice model: size of pool of criminally predisposed, supply of lure, prevailing beliefs about credibility of external oversight, internal oversight and self-restraint, and supply of criminal opportunities. The findings show that unequal access to information among the investors and misuse of trust and affinity relationships affected the size of the pool of criminally tempted individuals. Supply of lure was affected through advances in modern technology and promises of wealth and material success at low costs and risks. Prevailing beliefs about the credibility of external oversight and internal corporate regulatory controls were affected by the efficiency and effectiveness of enforcement authorities. Variables described by the choice model of white collar crime can be operationalized through analysis of existing case law.
In 2004 Theo van Boven, as Special Rapporteur of the United Nations, alerted the world community that torture and ill-treatment were more than sporadic practices within Spain. Numerous studies carried out by human rights organizations and international institutions endorse this affirmation. This paper attempts to analyse the elements that facilitate cases of torture and ill-treatment while proposing ideas about how to orient political action to eradicate these practices. Situated in the discipline of public policy this paper will try to understand the deprivation of freedom focusing the analysis on the most extreme practices of the State violation of human rights that are produced in these areas. This article first addresses a quantitative description of the presence of torture in Spain. The second section details the historical and political specificities of the Spanish case that are useful in order to understand the question and at the same time in order to establish points of reference for the design of public policy. In the third section the elements that make possible the existence of cases of torture in Spain are analysed, elaborating a typology of static and dynamic elements. The fourth section explains the relationship between democratic culture and torture.
This qualitative study examines the role of clients in petty corruption by analyzing actual corrupt exchanges between ordinary citizens and low level public and private employees in post-communist Hungary. Using a grounded theory approach, interviews reveal how clients from different social strata deal with low-level agents in corrupt situations. Findings suggest two contrasting forms of low-level corruption: transactions where the client and the agent do not have a prior relationship and where external factors dominate the relationship; and cases with stronger social ties between the actors, where the client has more freedom to structure the transaction. However, a client's social background frequently determines the form of corrupt transaction and the form of resources illegally exchanged in the deal.
This article examines an entrepreneurial criminology of mass political violencewithin the broader set of criminological communications on this theme, and identifies some troubling dimensions of the criminological closures on which the enterprise rests. The criminological enterprise over mass political violence testifies to ambitions of external expansion at the expense of other social scientific analyses, that are represented as ill-qualified for the study of this particular object, while evacuating from its conception of criminology intellectual traditions averse to the promotion of criminalization as a means to constitute and respond to troubling events. The normative values advanced in enterprising calls seem to have led to a failure to submit certain assumptions to rigorous intellectual (and political) critique. The result is an analytic conservatism that, perhaps unwittingly, reinforces dominant assumptions about crime, as well as an uncritical adoption of liberal internationalism and western cultural dominance.
In anthropological and legal literature, the phenomenon termed ‘legal pluralism’ has been interpreted as a co-presence of legal orders which act in relation to their own ‘levels’ of referring ‘fields’. The Afghan normative network is generally described in terms of pluralism, where different normative systems such as customs, shari’a (Islamic law), state laws and principles deriving from international standard of law (e.g., human rights) coexist. In order to address the crucial question of access to justice, in this article, I stress the category of legal pluralism by introducing the hypothesis of an inaccessible normative pluralism as a key concept to capture the structural injustices of which Afghans are victims. Access to justice can be considered a foundational element of every legal project. Globally, the debates concerning the diffusion and application of human rights develop at the same time ideologically, politically, and pragmatically. Today in Afghanistan, these levels are expressed in all their complexity and ambivalence. It is therefore particularly significant to closely observe the work done by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and to discuss the issue of human rights by starting from a reflection on what might be defined a socio-normative condition of inaccessibility.
Criminal law deals with very important aspects of the life in the society. The subjects of the crime, health, reputation … are so important that endangering them requires punishment and it is told that the society in order to protect the public order should punish the perpetrators. There is no doubt that the criminals should be punished. The punishment enacted by the legislator should be proportional. The more serious the crime, the more severe the punishment. But, it seems that in the process of criminal trial, the accused has rights too. It means that society has not an absolute authority in accusation and punishment and in addition to the proportionality and justification of punishment the trial should be fair. In other words, it is not possible to speak about justice any more if the criminal is punished proportionally and rightly but not fairly, i.e. without allowing him/her to present his/her case, defend him/herself and obtain legal aid or sufficient information. Iranian criminal law, like other criminal justice systems in respecting the rights of the accused, has provided the right to counsel. This value can be expressed in the concept of the rule of law, recognized in international documents. It seems that the standards of the criminal procedure are mostly determined and developed under the influence of this concept. The current paper considers different aspects of the right to counsel in Iran.
This article analyses the current knowledge about corruption and its legal consequences among university students. Based on data from 1,511 undergraduate and graduate students from all academic disciplines at four major universities in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, it appears that the majority of students have difficulty identifying corrupt behaviour and its legal consequences. Law students achieve slightly better results. However, even law students demonstrate a significant lack of knowledge of corruption issues. In particular, most of the students are unaware that corruption that occurs abroad can also be prosecuted in Switzerland. The limited knowledge among students regarding corruption and its legal consequences as identified in this study suggests that the teaching and study of anti-corruption-related subjects should be better integrated into the curricula of universities and business schools.
To acknowledge concerns about the rising power of the private sector, key international anti-corruption organisations have supported initiatives that emphasise the role that businesses play in corruption. Yet the way these initiatives have impacted the practices and perceptions of anti-corruption organisations in developing countries has received scant attention. As businesses can be key perpetrators of corruption, understanding the way anti-corruption organisations respond to the private sector can highlight the efficacy of anti-corruption efforts. Drawing on interviews with anti-corruption policy makers in Papua New Guinea (PNG) conducted between 2008 and 2009, this article shows how two international anti-corruption organisations perceived and worked with the private sector. It finds that there have been some initiatives designed to address, and raise awareness about private sector corruption in the country, reflecting international trends. At the same time the private sector is viewed, often uncritically, as an anti-corruption champion; this has affected the way anti-corruption organisations engage with businesses operating in the country. This article argues that despite a change in international discourse about the private sector’s role in corruption, in developing countries like PNG, neoliberal logic about the nature of the state still guide anti-corruption activity. These findings have implications for the efficacy of international anti-corruption efforts.
In many countries corruption is rife, despite the fact that there is a criminal-law legislative framework for corruption. Italy is one of these countries. The commitment of judges and prosecutors to combating instances of corruption is often frustrated by the consequences of the excessive length of the proceedings. The fight against corruption has been carried out mainly in the field of criminal law. The criminalisation of corruption both in domestic and in international contexts is not enough to reduce corrupt practices. In the last decade another front in the fight against corruption has been explored: the private law approach as a complement to criminal law policies. Indeed, the same corrupt practise may be subject both to criminal proceedings by public authority and to civil proceedings by the victims of corruption. The argument that private law instruments may be used in order to achieve a public policy goal is not new and goes beyond the definition of "private enforcement" in the context of competition law. The idea of creating a favourable social and legal background to encourage the victims of anti-competitive practices can also be transposed to the fight against corruption. In fact, in many cases of corruption the low percentage of successful criminal persecution and the class of punishment associated with corruption offences do not represent a deterrent, considering the benefits deriving from bribe. This paper aims to address the question as to whether private law remedies under national legal systems could constitute an effective disincentive against corrupt practices, alongside criminal prosecutions. The case CIR vs. Fininvest, Lodo Mondadori is one of the first cases involving damages actions resulting from corrupt practices, and addresses two of the main obstacles to civil actions in this field: evidence and the quantification of damages.
Recent large-scale cases involving multi-national corporations such as the BAE Systems and Siemens bribery scandals illustrate the difficulties faced by the UK and German sovereign states in controlling complex trans-national and multi-jurisdictional crimes. This article analyses the mixture of enforcement, self-regulatory and hybrid mechanisms that are emerging as part of UK and German responses to controlling transnational corporate bribery. This regulatory landscape incorporates a diverse array of direct and indirect state and non-state ‘regulatory’ actors of varying levels of formality. Mechanisms of a self-regulatory nature vary in terms of their mandatory/voluntary requirements and manufactured/organic formation. However, there is an assumption that the emergence of a variety of enforcement, self-regulatory and innovative hybrid mechanisms is sufficient but in reality this is not the case. Instead, the key argument of the article is that while these mechanisms are aiding the response, they are likely to fail leading to the default position of accommodation by state agencies, even where the will to enforce the law is high.
In the last 20 years, the risks of bribing foreign public officials have greatly increased for multinational companies based in OECD countries and those listed on their stock markets. Generally, these risks can be mitigated through corporate compliance programs. Such compliance programs are directed at reducing bribery and other unethical behavior in the private sector. This paper assesses how the international standard against transnational bribery has impacted anticorruption compliance programs in Argentina. It first traces the origins and logics behind corporate anticorruption compliance. It later describes the international standard against transnational bribery and, in the light of information collected through 16 in-depth interviews and a survey conducted among 70 companies based in Argentina, it assesses how corporate anticorruption programs work in this country. After distinguishing between “paper”, “cheap-talk” ideal-type programs and sound, truly committed ideal-type policies, it suggests that anticorruption compliance in Argentina is placed closer to the former than the latter, and it offers possible reasons for such findings.
Corporations have been fighting for decades to eliminate corruption. However, despite the proliferation of compliance programs and a recurrent surge of interest in business ethics, commercial bribery prevails as a “rational choice strategy” for economic success and thus is widely regarded as the result of immoral choices of greedy individuals. This article reports on a modus operandi study concerning corruption within a large industrial corporation (Siemens AG). Results highlight the fact that neither consistent anti-corruption norms nor severe formal sanctions were able to deter certain employees from deviant behavior in this landmark case of structural corruption. Sociologists and business economists have both pointed to the organizational culture that provides an explanation for this paradox. The author compares three diverging hypotheses: (1) private gain, (2) cognitive normalization, and (3) organizational cultures, and concludes that the structural causes of corrupt practices fit the definition of ‘useful illegality’ (Luhmann). To a large extent, this old sociological concept resembles the criminological idea of corporate crime, but it emphasizes the cultural factors that undermine management’s preventive strategies, and thus holds the promise of theoretical progress. Implications that emerge from the case analysis for the social control of corporate bribe payers are discussed. The discussion reveals why challenges to successful anti-corruption efforts persist at the organizational level.
Why would a country choose to actively take part in the illicit organ trade, and later reverse course and cease that participation? The article answers this question with respect to Israel, where patients in need of a transplant received public funds to allow them to purchase organs abroad. I argue that the Israeli policy of financing “transplant tourism” resulted from the pleas of desperate patients facing a local organ shortage, combined with cost-saving considerations. Yet pressures from the Israeli and international medical community, together with media reports, led to a legislative prohibition on the trade in organs—a prohibition that has sharply reduced the outflow of patients. The article highlights the main influences that motivated Israel’s policy change, including concerns for the country’s international reputation, and offers lessons for other countries where organ trafficking flourishes.
Conventional approaches towards the impact of corruption on post-conflict stabilization suggest that corrupt practices impede a successful war to peace transition. When transparency and accountability are absent, the risk of corruption threatens to turn the state apparatus into a tool of enrichment for those in power and affect the “exit” from violence/insurgency towards demobilization and reintegration. However, corruption may have redeeming values by serving the function of a power-sharing arrangement between antagonistic parties, thereby, reinforcing peace. Radical anti-corruption programs in post-conflicts situations may bring adverse results such as a renewal of violence. Aimed to fill the void in research on corruption in post-conflict situations, the article inquires about the links between corruption, peacebuilding and violent non-state actors. By combining various disciplinary approaches, the article theorizes the outcomes of corruption in post-conflict situations and discusses them in the context of Kosovo and Chechnya.
At the end of the 1990s, a moral panic erupted in the Netherlands about the phenomenon of what came to be known as ‘loverboys’. The suspicion was that a growing number of Dutch girls were being groomed by handsome young men who employed all sorts of devious methods to prepare their girlfriends for life as a prostitute. Stories about a new generation of pimps, often of Moroccan origin, regularly appeared in the Dutch media. In this article, based on ethnographic fieldwork on pimps operating in the red-light district of Amsterdam, we describe the ways in which these young men operate and how they justify their behaviour. On the basis of empirical research we intend to present a more realistic picture of what goes on in the prostitution industry and highlight the discrepancy between what is reported in the media and what is actually happening in the prostitution sector. We also examine the background to the moral panic about loverboys and the ways in which these young men were supposedly able to induce many young girls into becoming prostitutes.
Some economies in the Former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe (FSU&CEE) are known as cybercrime hotspots. FSU&CEE economies have shown complex and varied responses to cybercrimes due partly to the differential incentives and pressures they face. This study builds upon literatures on white-collar crime, institutional theory and international relations (IR)/international political economy (IPE) perspectives to examine the low rates of prosecution and conviction of suspected cybercriminals in some economies in the FSU&CEE and variation in such rates across these economies. The findings indicate that cybercrime cases are more likely to be prosecuted and sanctions are imposed in economies that are characterized by a higher degree of cooperation and integration with the West. Cybercriminals are less likely to be jurisdictionally shielded in such economies. Our findings also suggest that a high degree of cooperation and integration with the West would lead to access to resources to enhance system capacity and law enforcement performance to fight cybercrimes.
Strain and Defiance are criminological theories that lay ambivalent emphasis on the notion of “rebellion,” which is to say that they both regard mutinous behavior as being motivated by positive or negative ends alike. Individuals rebel, say, by stealing in order to achieve higher status (economic strain); or they may violently antagonize authority as a way to “salvage dignity” in an environment in which they have no social stake whatsoever (defiance). Conversely, they may responsibly protest to oppose blind consumerism (strain); or they may civilly disobey racist laws (political defiance). It is here argued that both theories may be construed as special cases of a general problem, which Thorstein Veblen had already diagnosed in 1899. Veblen depicted social dynamics as a battle between the deterring forces of conservatism, which are animated by an overpowering predatory-pecuniary instinct, and those of progressivism, which rely, on the other hand, on an (ever more enfeebled) instinct of cooperation and workmanship. In this Veblenian model, civil defiance represents a challenge of the peaceable middle-class to the rule of the elite, whereas economically-strained defiance is the expression of the attempt of (middle to low) classes possessed by a pecuniary drive to emulate the status of the elite itself.
This study examines how immigrants from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) who have lived in Israel for an average of 10 years perceive white-collar crime. After a survey of the literature about the Soviet economy and how Soviet society regarded white-collar crime, we examine the relationship between FSU immigrants’ tolerance of white-collar crime (relative to their Israeli counterparts) and the degree of their involvement in Russian culture and society. This involvement was analyzed using a system of variables that indicate the subjects’ affinity for Russian culture and society and rejection of (isolation from) Israeli society. The study’s 1,028 participants are a representative sample of the olim (immigrants to Israel) from the FSU between 1990 and 2005. Our findings reinforced the hypothesis that the more involved these immigrants are in Russian culture and society, and the more alienated they are from Israeli society, the more permissive their view of white-collar crime. Nonetheless, our study explains 27 % of the variance in their view of white-collar crime. Hence the question requires further research. Our findings are discussed in terms of the decisive impact of the Soviet process of socialization on the values, perspectives, and behavior patterns of Post-Soviet man and its ramifications for the rule of law and their conception of Israeli democracy.