To make some advances in international criminology, one needs to face that, historically, criminological knowledge has often been used to support colonial and authoritarian rule and acknowledge that international criminologists operate by and large in a culturally ill-informed vacuum in which a “universal” validity of Western theories is taken for granted. Starting from Edward Said’s famous critique of the “orientalism” of Western academics, an investigation is needed on how current cultural anthropological debates on cultural landscapes and cosmopolitan identities could help overcome this problem. The main scholarly debates in non-Western and counter-colonial criminology set a dialogue between perspectives elaborated by Global North scholars and viewpoints proposed by authors working in a variety of Global South regions. It constitutes, in this regard, a contribution to decolonize and globalize international criminology debates because it considers voices and visions all too frequently overlooked by the extant English-speaking literature. In addition, a nexus is set between current developments in this academic field and viewpoints put forth by critical criminology authors decades ago. It is argued that a culturally informed international criminology is not based on humanitarian do-gooderism or shame over a colonial past, rather, it is fundamental if criminologists are to understand the world around us and the “glocal” questions that confront the field.
81-100 of 433 Results
Article
Cultural Bias in International Criminology
René van Swaaningen
Article
Cultural Criminology
Jeff Ferrell, Keith Hayward, and Michelle Brown
Cultural criminology is concerned with the convergence of cultural, criminal, and crime control processes; as such, it situates criminality and its control in the context of cultural dynamics and the contested production of meaning. It seeks to understand the everyday realities of a profoundly unequal and unjust world, and to highlight the ways in which power is exercised and resisted amidst the interplay of rule-making, rule-breaking, and representation. The subject matter of cultural criminology, then, crosses a range of contemporary issues: the mediated construction and commodification of crime, violence, and punishment; the symbolic practices of those engaged in illicit subcultural or postsubcultural activities; the existential anxieties and situated emotions that animate crime, transgression, and victimization; the social controls and cultural meanings that circulate within and between spatial arrangements; the interplay of state control and cultural resistance; the criminogenic cultures spawned by market economies; and a host of other instances in which situated and symbolic meaning is at stake. To accomplish such analysis, cultural criminology embraces interdisciplinary perspectives and alternative methods that regularly move it beyond the boundaries of conventional criminology, drawing from anthropology, media studies, youth studies, cultural studies, cultural geography, sociology, philosophy and other disciplines, and utilizing new forms of ethnography, textual analysis, and visual production. In all of this, cultural criminology seeks to challenge the accepted parameters of criminological analysis and to reorient criminology to contemporary social, cultural, and economic conditions.
Article
Cultural Representations of Nineteenth-Century Prostitution
Per Jorgen Ystehede and May-Len Skilbrei
Paradoxically, in the 19th century, an era very concerned with public virtue, prostitutes were increasing being represented in Western European cultural expressions. Prostitution was a prevalent social phenomenon due to the rapid urbanization of Western Europe. People were on the move as both urban and rural areas underwent considerable material and normative change; the majority of Western European cities grew rapidly and were marked by harsh working and living conditions, as well as unemployment and poverty. A seeming rise in prostitution was one of the results of these developments, but its centrality in culture cannot be explained by this fact alone. Prostitution also came to epitomize broader social ills associated with industrialization and urbanization: “the prostitute” became the discursive embodiment of the discontent of modernity.
The surge in cultural representation of prostitutes may also be seen as an expression of changing norms and a driver for change in the public perception of prostitution. In particular, artists came to employ the prostitute as a motif, revealing contemporary hypocrisy about gender and class.
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Cultural Representations of Torture
Honni van Rijswijk
Scenes of torture are central to the Western imaginary of law, animating questions of power, authority and legitimacy. This examination of key cultural representations of torture provides some historical background on torture in the Western imaginary and focuses on its contemporary significance. A flexible set of analytical and aesthetic approaches to practices of representation are used to assess the changing significance of torture. In particular, three figures are central to the representation of torture—the torturer, the tortured, and the torture chamber. The significance of these elements differs depending on the form and perspective of representation. These elements of representations of torture changed following the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and have complicated the social and legal work done by previous cultural texts and government policies around the effectiveness of torture and the risks of states of exception. Not only do popular films and television series support and justify the use of torture as a legitimate information-gathering tool, but representations of torture have become sites of pleasure and enjoyment. The emergence of new figures and genres in representations of torture suggests that the use of torture in violent or conflict scenes has been of increasing interest to the public and possibly have become increasingly accepted since the rhetoric of the Global War on Terror (GWOT).
Article
Cultural Studies Approaches to the Study of Crime in Film and on Television
Neal King, Rayanne Streeter, and Talitha Rose
Crime film and television has proliferated such influential variations as the Depression-era gangster film; the post–World War studies in corruption known as film noir; the pro-police procedural of that time; and then the violent rogue-cop stories that eventually became cop action in the 1980s, with such hits as television’s Miami Vice and cinema’s Die Hard. Mobster movies enjoyed a resurgence with the works and knockoffs of Scorcese (Goodfellas) and Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs), resulting in such TV series as The Sopranos, and with a return to “blaxploitation” with the ’hood movies of the early 1990s. Recent developments include the neo-noir erotic thriller; the rise of the corrupt cop anti-hero, paralleled by the forensic procedural, often focused on baroque serial killers; and the near disappearance of black crime movies from cinema screens. Such developments may owe to shifts in relations between real policing, real crime, and citizens, but they may owe more directly to shifts in the movie/television industries that produce them. Such industry shifts include freewheeling depictions of social problems in early cinema; carefully controlled moralism over the 1930s established by such industrial regulators as the Production Code in Hollywood and the British Board of Film Censors; further repression of subversion as anti-Communism swept through Hollywood in the 1950s; then a return of repressed violence and cynicism in the 1970s as Hollywood regulation of depictions of crime broke down; and a huge spike in box office and ratings success in the 1980s, which resulted in the inclusion of more heroes who are not both white and male. The rise of the prime-time serial on television, enhanced by the introduction of time-shifting technologies of consumption, has allowed for more extended storytelling, usually marketed in terms of “realism,” enabling a sense of unresolved social problems and institutional inertia, for which shows like The Wire have been celebrated.
The content of such storytelling, in Western film and television, tends to include white male heroes meeting goals (whether success as criminals or defeat of them as cops) through force of will and resort to violence. Such stories focus on individual attributes more than on social structure, following a longstanding pattern of Hollywood narrative. And they present crime as ubiquitous and both it and the policing of it as violent. The late 1980s increase in the depiction of women of all races and men of color as heroes did little to alter those patterns. And gender patterns persist, including the absence of solidarity among women and the absence of women from stories of political corruption or large-scale combat.
Article
Cultural Studies Approaches to the Study of Crime in Literature
Deborah Henderson
Crime in literature takes advantage of two basic assumptions: (1) that the storyline generally begins with a crime (very often murder) that underlies the subsequent narrative, often serving as the driving force of the story; and (2) that the crime itself and its narrative implications will be rooted in the actual workings of a culture’s justice system at any given moment in time. Consequently, crime literature in particular provides readers with a snapshot of prevailing attitudes about the nature of justice in a society and the basic fears about crime that threaten its collective conscience.
To understand crime fiction from a cultural studies perspective, it is necessary to develop a broader understanding of the larger culture from which an author and his/her fictional creations emerge. Although writers create fiction for various reasons, publishers put their efforts into projects they hope will be somewhat financially profitable. Thus, published works exist in a culturally-specific space that never veers too far from the values, beliefs, and expectations of its mainstream society. To understand the fictional world conjured by an author a cultural studies approach takes into consideration larger socio-historical phenomena: What kinds of mythologies underlie a culture’s traditions? What historical events have helped shape the culture’s identity? What sort of political and legal systems organize the culture? What specific kinds of crime tend to be highlighted in a culture’s crime literature (guns, drugs, race, violence against women, class warfare, government corruption and repression, etc.)? What role do legitimate legal structures tend to play in a culture’s crime literature? What role does climate play in a culture’s identity? In short, a cultural studies approach begins by trying to determine the assumptions authors make about readers’ cultural knowledge, values, beliefs, and myths about crime and justice in order to develop a context for understanding what is taken for granted in the narrative.
Article
Culture of Punishment in the USA
Anne-Marie Cusac
Beginning in the mid-1970s, enormous changes governed U.S. punishment of criminal offenses, leading to harsher laws and longer prison terms than convicts in earlier decades served for the same offenses. The stark policy shift resulted in soaring prison populations that are disproportionate compared with most Western nations. The United States, with 5% of the world population, has more than 20% of the world’s prisoners. Its prison population rose 700% from 1970 to 2005. Today, one in 34 adults is under correctional control. The rates are disproportionate for minorities, especially less-educated black men (Lee, 2015; Pew, 2007, 2014; U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, 2012).
Shifts in physical treatment of prisoners accompanied the population boom. Jails and prisons adopted control technologies that would likely have been considered inappropriate and inhumane decades earlier. These included the stun belt and the restraint chair, devices that can cause considerable pain. These also included extensive use of solitary confinement in Supermax prisons, an echo of a method used in 18th- and 19th -century American penitentiaries and discarded because of the dangers it posed to inmate mental health. And, following the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, treatment in U.S. prisons seemed to echo overseas in abuse of foreign prisoners in American hands. The Bush administration attempted to declare physical coercion as legal during interrogations, in apparent violation of the Geneva Conventions (Shane, Johnston, & Risen, 2007).
What caused such a shift? Much of the change appears to be cultural in nature, connected strongly to forces such as politics, religion, pervasive beliefs about evil and children, popular culture, and economic realities. This also means that American punishment is historically more influenced by such cultural forces than by more seemingly related phenomena such as research on effective punishments, prisoner experience, or crime statistics.
That American cultural trends strongly influence American punishment also means that American daily lives respond to shifts in punitiveness. Such evidence of American punishment trends appear in popular television shows and treatment of children.
Article
Cybercrime Perpetration Theories
Theodore Curry
Theories of cybercrime perpetration seek to identify and explain the causes of individual- and/or group-level variation in the performance of cybercriminal behavior. Fundamental to this effort is a debate pertaining to whether extant theories of crime, previously developed to explain crime in the physical world, are useful for accounting for cybercrime or whether new theories, explicitly aimed at cybercrime, are needed. This debate hinges largely on the question of whether cybercrimes can be considered to be a type of crime in general, or whether there are features of cybercrime, such as the lack of physical contact between victims and offenders or the dissociative anonymity afforded by the collapse of time-space barriers that occurs in cyberspace, that sufficiently differentiate cybercrime from crime in the physical world such that new theories are needed to explain its occurrence. To date, however, scholars have relied almost exclusively on extant theory in cybercrime studies and only one new theory has been developed that focuses exclusively on cybercrime. Moreover, cybercrime theory has focused heavily on individual-level variation in cybercrime and largely ignored group-level variation, which is a shortcoming because understanding differences across, for example, different nations or political or religious groups, is an important part of the study of crime in the physical world. Another important problem is that basic facts about cybercriminals and victims (e.g., the approximate proportion of offenders who are male or female) are largely unknown due to a lack of systematically collected, representative, or longitudinal data on cybercrime—a situation that hinders the development of cybercrime theory. Research testing cybercrime theory shows support for a number of theories from the field of criminology, especially general strain, low self-control, social learning, and techniques of neutralization and drift. A notable development in this literature are findings that social learning and low self-control theories, working in an integrated fashion, are found to provide an especially useful explanation for cybercrime such that, on their own, individuals with low self-control may not engage in a great deal of cybercrime owing to the complexity that such offending often entails. However, if low self-control individuals have friends who engage in cybercrime, they may learn the skills needed to commit certain cybercrimes and, as a result, start offending at higher levels. Psychological studies also provide important results, including that cybercriminals tend to be more introverted than offenders in the physical world, which may tap into the dissociative anonymity afforded by offending in cyberspace. Psychological research also shows that individuals with higher levels of psychopathy are more involved in cybercrimes, particularly those that entail aggression or attempts to cause harm to others, and that more impulsive (a concept that is similar to low self-control in criminology) individuals engage in more cybercrime.
Article
Cyberpolicing
Jin R. Lee
Cybercrime is generally understood as behaviors that involve the use of virtual environments and/or networked computer systems to generate harm. This broad definition of cybercrime captures a variety of different online behaviors, including interpersonal violence offenses such as cyberbullying and online harassment, as well as those involving the unauthorized use and access of computer systems such as malware dissemination, ransomware, and distributed denial of service attacks.
Cybercrimes are policed by both law enforcement (e.g., local, state or provincial, federal) and extralegal agencies. Local law enforcement agencies are composed of police officers, who are generally tasked with maintaining public order within a specific municipality or county, including investigating crimes, apprehending offenders, and implementing crime prevention mechanisms (e.g., educating the public on available resources; proactive neighborhood patrol) within their local jurisdiction. State and provincial law enforcement agencies are larger police forces that are generally responsible for conduct that occurs within their wider state and provincial borders, including conducting highway traffic control and providing forensic services to smaller local agencies residing within their state or province. State and provincial agencies often become involved only when local forces are limited in their resources to adequately respond to an incident or when local jurisdictional conflicts exist. Federal agencies operate at the highest level of law enforcement, because they deal with crimes that involve homeland security. In fact, federal agencies can obtain cooperation among several national jurisdictions depending on existing political ties and extradition agreements. Several extralegal agencies (e.g., Internet Crime Complaint Center; Computer Emergency Response Teams) are also active in responding to cybercrime incidents. These agencies, which may develop from either public or private sectors, generally perform acts that support law enforcement, including facilitating communication and information sharing between victims and law enforcement agencies.
Despite efforts to sanction online offenses, research suggests that cybercrimes present several challenges for law enforcement agencies across all levels of government. First, cybercrime offenders often anonymize their attacks and offline identities, making arrests and criminal prosecutions extremely challenging. Second, even if offenders and their actions are identified, agencies are limited by their geographic location and jurisdiction. Third, the technical nature of cybercrime means that victims may not be aware of their victimization until months after the attack, which may affect the identification of digital evidence necessary to prosecute an offender. Fourth, law enforcement officers may not possess the knowledge and expertise needed to secure and investigate a digital crime scene adequately.
One approach that could improve how cybercrimes are enforced and regulated is the paradigm of evidence-based policing (EBP). EBP is a collective effort involving law enforcement agencies, academic researchers, and industry personnel/practitioners, whose central focus is to develop a robust evidence base that can identify current and emerging problems in policing, examine possible solutions to these problems using rigorous scientific methods, and monitor these solutions over extended periods of time to ensure successful outcomes are maintained. Knowing which operational practices work best in different situations will not only lead to a more intentional use of officers’ time and agency resources but also strengthen public perceptions of law enforcement in responding to cybercrime calls for service.
Article
Cyberstalking Victimization
Erin Faucher and Jaeyong Choi
The creation and accessibility of technology have led to an increased use of the virtual world. The percentage of Internet users is increasing, especially with the advent of social media, which subsequently heightens the risk of cyberstalking incidents. Generally, cyberstalking involves the repeated pursuit or harassment of a target by a stalker through digital technology. However, there is no universal working definition of cyberstalking that has been agreed upon by policymakers and academics. Still, there are noticeable patterns involving methods of and risk factors for cyberstalking perpetration and victimization. Moreover, perceptions of cyberstalking among the general population and victims have been studied empirically. Research on cyberstalking ranges from the issues involving definitions and prevalence of cyberstalking to intervention and prevention efforts to stop stalking behaviors in cyberspace. A review of such literature on cyberstalking can shed light on what is known and unknown regarding cyberstalking.
Article
Cyberterrorism
Mehmet F. Bastug and Ismail Onat
Many real-world crimes have long been transformed into cyberspace, and terrorism is no different. Cyberspace is becoming a new battleground where different rules, strategies, and tactics apply. Cyberterrorism is a form of terrorism that can briefly be described as a form of terrorism that takes place in the cyberspace. However, there has not been a consensus among experts and scholars regarding what exactly constitutes cyberterrorism. In its pure form, cyberterrorism refers to politically or ideologically motivated cyberattacks to coerce or intimidate governments or societies that result in violence, severe economic damage, or significant fear among the public. In a broad sense, it may also incorporate terrorist use of cyberspace, including online information and communication technologies, in furtherance of terrorist objectives. Various taxonomies of cyberterrorism have been developed in the literature, most of which distinguish the terrorist use of the Internet from terrorism in which cyberspace becomes a weapon or a target. The lack of a unified understanding of cyberterrorism hinders the development of effective strategies to prevent or mitigate cyberterrorist activities.
Article
Dark Tourism
John Lennon
Dark tourism has passed into the language and study of tourism since it was first designated as such in 1996 (see Lennon & Foley, 1996; Seaton, 1996). It is now established as a term to designate those sites and locations of genocide, holocaust, assassination, crime, or incarceration that have served to attract visitors. The phenomenon exists across a range of global destinations and demonstrates commonality and unifying elements across a range of societies and political regimes. The interpretation of these sites can of course be the product of ideology and dominant belief systems, and they act as the meeting place for history and visitation where questions of authenticity and fact are sometimes juxtaposed with the operation of tourism facilities. What is celebrated, interpreted, and developed is often selective, and dilemmas of commemoration of the unacceptable and acceptable are reflected clearly in the condition, nature, and content of these sites. This selective interpretation is demonstrated in destinations from Cambodia to Lithuania, from Auschwitz to Dallas, and from Moscow to London. In these locations, such tourist attractions become key physical sites of commemoration, history, and record. They provide the visitor with a narrative that may well be positioned, augmented, and structured to engage, entertain, or discourage further inquiry.
Dark tourism attractions demonstrate demand but also constitute commemoration, historical reference, narrative legacies, and populist heritage attractions. These tourism sites in some cases become one of the few remaining commemorative elements of victims and their testimonies. In such cases the content and its narrative interpretation take on critically important values in understanding a shared past.
Article
Dark Tourism, Penal Landscapes, and Criminological Inquiry
Justin Piché and Kevin Walby
Dark tourism researchers who examine sites of death, suffering, and despair have generated a significant amount of research over the past two decades. Different ways of conducting dark tourism research are emerging. These include studies oriented toward making sense of the supply and demand for such excursions, and research that explores how cultural meanings are negotiated at these destinations. There are also critiques of the wide-ranging application of the dark tourism concept, which has led some scholars to argue that it is analytically imprecise. New directions for future dark tourism research have also been proposed, including a call to shift away from discipline-centered analyses. Engaging with these developments, we suggest that the future direction of dark tourism research should involve grounding such studies in the concerns and insights offered in specific social science disciplines, including criminology and criminal justice studies among others, to add focus and precision to cross-disciplinary debates. To do so we draw from the emergence and development of penal tourism research, which examines how cultural representations of penality shape and are shaped by the practice of punishment in given societies. Since penal tourism research tends to focus on prison museums, we propose future directions for the study of this phenomenon rooted in criminological concerns for understanding how penal meaning making, including definitions of acts that are criminalized and what constitutes (in)justice, takes place in other sites of punishment memorialization including police and courthouse museums. Other future research directions include studying sites that memorialize corporate and state harms.
Article
Death Penalty and Capital Punishment in Comparative Perspective
Philip L. Reichel
More than 70% of the world’s countries are considered to have abolished the death penalty. The nearly 30% of countries retaining the death penalty and carrying out executions are found primarily in the Middle East, North Africa, Asia-Pacific, and some states in the United States. Where the death penalty continues to be authorized, legislators must determine the crimes for which the penalty may be applied and the method by which the execution will occur. International law stipulates that a death sentence should be imposed for only the most serious crimes, but the term “serious” is not defined. As a result, the death penalty is not only applied for the crime of murder (generally considered an example of “most serious”), but also for other crimes against the person (e.g., rape, kidnapping), crimes against the state (e.g., treason, espionage, terrorism), offenses against the community (e.g., drug-trafficking), offenses against property (e.g., robbery, arson, and burglary), and crimes against religion (e.g., blasphemy or apostasy, and offenses against sexual morality). After conviction, the method of executing those convicted may be by hanging (currently the most widely authorized and frequently used method), shooting, beheading, stoning, lethal injection, or electrocution.
Where the death penalty is retained, arguments favoring its use are likely to focus on issues of deterrence, retribution, and religious doctrine. Where it has been abolished, the arguments have highlighted concerns of questionable fairness in its application, the possibility of executing an innocent person, public opinion, and how capital punishment violates human rights. This last point that the death penalty violates human rights is the predominate view under international law and provides the primary theme explaining the world trend toward abolition.
Article
The Death Penalty in the 21st Century
Daniel LaChance
The dawn of the 21st century marked a turning point in the history of the American death penalty. Politically, the death penalty seemed vulnerable. A wave of abolitionism not seen since the Progressive Era took hold in the 2000s, as six states abandoned the death penalty, and governors in five others instituted moratoria, promising to use their executive power to stay all executions while they remained in office. While the Supreme Court remained committed to the constitutionality of the death penalty, it slowly chipped away at it in a series of decisions that narrowed the range of persons whom the state could execute.
Public support for the death penalty, already in decline during the late 1990s, continued to fall in the 21st century. A number of factors depressed support for the death penalty to levels not seen since the early 1970s: a decline in violent crime and fear of crime; highly publicized DNA-based exonerations of death-row inmates; and wariness of the cost of maintaining the death penalty, particularly during the great recession of the late 2000s.
The use of the death penalty was declining as well. The expansion of life without parole as an alternative punishment in the 1990s and 2000s gave juries in some states harsh alternatives to death sentences that they did not previously have. Longer-term changes to the judicial and penal administration of the death, meanwhile, continued to make the path between conviction and execution longer and more difficult for state officials to traverse. Most offenders sentenced to death since the 1970s were not (or have not yet been) put to death, and the average wait on death row for those who have been executed has grown to over a decade and a half. Growing problems with the practice of lethal injection, meanwhile, have posed new problems for states seeking to execute capital defendants in the 2000s, producing new legal battles and bringing executions nationwide to a temporary halt in 2007–2008.
The 2016 election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency of the United States, however, may portend a slowing or reversing Americans’ 21st-century turn away from the death penalty.
Article
Defensible Space
Robert I. Mawby
While the term “defensible space” is widely referenced in literature on situational crime pre vention and Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, it is commonly mentioned in passing, almost as an historical landmark, with its relationship to more recent work assumed rather than rigorously examined. Yet, Oscar Newman’s work bridged the gap between criminological theories and preventive approaches in the pre-1970s era and the more grounded and policy driven approaches that are common today. Consequently, this article looks at the context within which Newman developed his ideas and revisits his core work. It then considers the initial response from the criminology and planning communities, which focused on the methodological and theoretical weaknesses that undermined what were, essentially, a series of imaginative, exploratory propositions about the influence of design on crime patterns. In this sense, it is clear that Newman both provoked and inspired further research into the relationship between urban design and crime, and indeed, between crime, crime targets, and space, looking at the specific influence of design, technology, social engineering, and so on. Terms such as ownership, visibility, occupancy, accessibility, image, and juxtaposition, which Newman used, are now incorporated into more sophistical theories of situational crime prevention. This article thus offers a reanalysis of defensible space in the context of later refinements and the application of Newman’s ideas to current policies.
Article
Deportation and Immigration Enforcement
David C. Brotherton and Sarah Tosh
While deportation as a practice has roots that reach far back into history, the state’s removal of immigrants in the modern era is unprecedented, in terms of both its mechanisms and its breadth. Over the past few decades, the United States in particular has developed systems of immigrant enforcement, detention, and deportation that serve to restrain and remove hundreds of thousands of immigrants each year. In the late 20th century, along with a punitive turn in criminal justice and drug policy, came an era of punitive immigration legislation in the United States, culminating in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996. Among other laws, IIRIRA laid the groundwork for astronomical rates of deportation in the early 21st century—rates the current administration vows to exceed in coming years. The increasingly criminalized immigration policy of the United States has been paralleled in many ways in immigrant-receiving countries around the world, resulting in a “global deportation regime” that transcends national borders. Theories that frame deportation as a necessary product and constitutive practice of social membership in our modern system of sovereign nation states are supplemented by those that view it as a tool used by neoliberal governments to control a vulnerable surplus population of immigrant workers. Another theoretical thread on deportation focuses on the culture of vindictiveness in late modernity, and the social bulimia of contemporary societies that simultaneously integrate and exclude the immigrant Other. Theories of subcultural resistance are also relevant for attempts to understand individual agency and collective mobilization, both of immigrants against deportation, as well as deportees against stigmatization. Post-deportation studies focus on the deportee experience, with a focus on social displacement/exclusion and stigmatization.
Article
Detecting Healthcare Fraud and Abuse in the United States
Paul Jesilow and Bryan Burton
Healthcare fraud involves wide-ranging illegal behaviors. It includes such activities as individual physicians who bill insurance companies or the government for services that were never provided, as well as corporate behavior, such as pharmaceutical companies that falsify clinical tests in order to get unsafe drugs approved for use. Thousands die each year in the United States due to these behaviors, including deaths from incorrectly prescribed medications or from tainted drugs that were approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration based upon fraudulent testing and reporting. Thousands of additional patients likely are injured and killed by unnecessary surgeries performed by physicians who want to maximize their reimbursements. The illegal activities also add billions of dollars each year to the total healthcare cost in the U.S. Despite these costs, there is relatively little outrage as a result of the behaviors, largely because they remain hidden from public view.
Healthcare fraud, as with almost all white-collar crime, is rarely detected and that prevents the frauds from becoming known to victims, law enforcement, and policy makers, which in turn prevents analysts from compiling a complete picture of the behaviors and prevents policymakers and law enforcement from developing efficient enforcement strategies. Moreover, the lack of detection assures perpetrators that they will get away with their crimes and limits the potential preventative effects of punishment. Lack of detection and reporting has been a particularly strong problem for those trying to control healthcare fraud and abuse in the United States and elsewhere. The enforcement mechanisms that have evolved have been strongly influenced by the difficulties of detecting the illegal behaviors.
Article
Deterrence and Sanction Certainty Perceptions
Timothy C. Barnum and Daniel Nagin
Deterrence research has evolved in two distinct, nonoverlapping literatures. One literature is evaluative in nature and examines issues such as: How do police numbers and patrol tactics affect crime rates? Do higher rates of imprisonment reduce crime? Does the experience of incarceration decrease or increase recidivism? This literature generally finds that police numbers and proactive policing tactics such as hot spot policing are effective in preventing crime but that increases in already lengthy prison sentences have modest deterrent or incapacitation effects at best. Concerning the effect of the experience of incarceration on reoffending, most studies find either no effect or a criminogenic effect. The perceptual deterrence literature focuses on the underlying perceptual mechanism by which sanction threats may affect behavior, an issue that the evaluative literature largely leaves in the background. The findings of this literature are mixed. Some studies conclude that sanction risk perceptions are uncorrelated with legislated sanctions. Others, however, find that sanction risk perceptions are grounded in reality, especially among active offenders. This literature also finds that perceptions of risk of apprehension are highly dependent on situational factors such as lighting or police patrol activity that in reality materially influence apprehension probability.
Article
Developmental and Life-Course Perspectives on Gangs
Molly Buchanan, Elise T. Simonsen, and Marvin D. Krohn
With distinct advances since the 1980s, developmental, life-course criminology has expanded to become one of the most prominent subdivisions in the field of criminology, as the knowledge gained from this perspective has propelled the field forward. Although studies of gangs and gang membership predate the emergence of developmental, life-course criminology, the proliferation of research in both of these areas shares many parallels. Furthermore, increased applications of developmental, life-course perspectives to gang-related research, as well as scholars’ continued efforts to generate life-course-rooted theories specific to gang delinquency, can and have benefited the study of gangs.
Some of the life-course models and theories commonly applied in studies of gangs include Sampson and Laub’s age-graded theory of informal social control, Hawkins and colleagues’ social developmental model, Thornberry and Krohn’s interactional theory, and Howell and Egley’s developmental model of gang membership. The foundation of each of these theories is the life-course perspective, the thrust of which demonstrates the utility of following individuals, or gang members, throughout their lives. Viewing gang-related issues through a developmental, life-course lens further permits studying gang membership from multiple time points and angles and has allowed for theoretically rooted analyses of the precursors to gang joining, experiences while being gang involved, and factors related to gang exiting.
For example, studies have found that, in general, the “timing” of most gang joining aligns well with the average onset of criminal careers, both typically occurring during early to mid-adolescence. Studies informed by the developmental, life-course perspective have also explored the periods during which individuals are actively engaged in their gang activities and identities, along with members’ abrupt or gradual gang-exiting processes (i.e., desistence). Overall, research guided by these models and theories has established myriad consequences of gang membership in the short-term and over the life course. The findings have been integral in informing new and continuing gang-related prevention and intervention efforts, as well as in highlighting relevant topical arenas in need of continued scholarly attention.
