Internet and telecommunications, ubiquitous sensing devices, and advances in data storage and analytic capacities have heralded the age of Big Data, where the volume, velocity, and variety of data not only promise new opportunities for the harvesting of information, but also threaten to overload existing resources for making sense of this information. The use of Big Data technology for criminal justice and crime control is a relatively new development. Big Data technology has overlapped with criminology in two main areas: (a) Big Data is used as a type of data in criminological research, and (b) Big Data analytics is employed as a predictive tool to guide criminal justice decisions and strategies. Much of the debate about Big Data in criminology is concerned with legitimacy, including privacy, accountability, transparency, and fairness.
Big Data is often made accessible through data visualization. Big Data visualization is a performance that simultaneously masks the power of commercial and governmental surveillance and renders information political. The production of visuality operates in an economy of attention. In crime control enterprises, future uncertainties can be masked by affective triggers that create an atmosphere of risk and suspicion. There have also been efforts to mobilize data to expose harms and injustices and garner support for resistance. While Big Data and visuality can perform affective modulation in the race for attention, the impact of data visualization is not always predictable. By removing the visibility of real people or events and by aestheticizing representations of tragedies, data visualization may achieve further distancing and deadening of conscience in situations where graphic photographic images might at least garner initial emotional impact.
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Big Data and Visuality
Janet Chan
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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.
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International and Comparative Legal Perspectives on Victim Participation in Criminal Justice
Marie Manikis
Victim participation in common law has evolved across history and jurisdictions. Historical developments within conceptions of crime, harms, and victims in common law as well as the different victims’ movements provide an understanding of the ways that victim participation has been shaped in more-recent common law criminal justice systems. Victim participation in the criminal legal process has also given rise to various debates, which suggests that providing active forms of engagement to victims remains controversial. The forms of victim participation are also diverse, and the literature has provided typologies of victim participation. Forms of participation also vary across jurisdictions and the different stages of the criminal justice process, including prosecutorial decisions, pretrial and trial proceedings, sentencing, parole, and clemency. Finally, research that focuses on victim participation in legal traditions beyond the common law would provide an additional and important contribution to the field.
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Methodological Approaches to Studying Crime and Popular Culture in New Media
Francine Banner
Researchers across varied disciplines have begun to explore social media as a new delta of communication; however, few are taking a hard look at social media as it relates to crime. Sites such as Twitter and Facebook increasingly are being used by law enforcement as tools for engaging in criminal investigation, improving public relations, and increasing public awareness. Similarly, persons engaging in crime increasingly employ such sites in novel and unique ways to network, exchange information, and execute and record criminal activities. A survey of research in fields ranging from computer science to sociology to communications demonstrates that both quantitative and qualitative research on and about social media have the capacity greatly to advance contemporary understanding of social organization and protest, crime and criminal behavior, and law and social control. For example, Facebook and Twitter have become key sources for gaining insights into criminal behaviors, such as gang activity, as well as on-the-ground data regarding significant events, such as the Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring, the Black Lives matter movements, and elections of public figures. Other applications, such as Snapchat and Kik, provide the opportunity for immediate transmission of content and a new source of evidence to be used in criminal prosecutions. Studying social media from a criminal justice perspective, however, is a complex endeavor. While the Internet offers seemingly limitless opportunities for social organizing and networked engagement, the forum bears as much capacity for exclusion as it does for liberation. The growth of new social ills or crimes, such as “doxing,” “phishing,” and “revenge pornography,” for example, highlight that the confluence of immediacy of communication, perceived anonymity, and lack of moderation often renders the online environment threatening for perceived outsiders, particularly young women. On the other hand, as incidents, such as online threats against gamer Zoe Quinn and blogger Anita Sarkeesian, have come to light, online content is increasingly monitored, regulated, and controlled by its corporate ownership, who generally reveal little about how information is sorted, prioritized, and disseminated. As a researcher, one must be mindful that data, particularly qualitative data, collected from social media sites may not be random, representative, or generalizable. In addition, attendant to studying the Internet are unique ethical and privacy concerns not present in non-virtual fora. Many describe the Internet as a public sphere, and law enforcement often treats the online environment as a location in which Fourth Amendment privacy protections can be less rigorously observed. For researchers, however, it is essential to carefully consider whether the study of online discourse is archival or is human subjects research, and in the case of the latter, whether and how consent might be obtained. It is also important that researchers are attentive to the particular characteristics of the online site or sites they choose to examine, as the mission, rules, and practices of each site vary dramatically.
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Documentaries about Crime and Criminal Justice
Jamie Bennett
Documentary films have significant appeal because of their claim to represent truth and authenticity. Within the criminal justice system, they are important not only because of the public fascination with crime and punishment, but also because the everyday workings of the criminal justice system often remain outside of the direct experience or sight of most people.
There have been major stages in the technical and institutional development of documentary film. In its early years, actualités, short shots of realistic events, illustrated the new technology. As rudimentary narrative forms emerged, real events, including crimes, were recreated on film for paying audiences. Fiction films soon came to dominate and documentary was relegated to a supporting role, particularly in the form of newsreels that offered news and features prior to movie presentations. It was during the late 1920s and 1930s that the potential for film, including documentary, came to be recognized as a potential medium of state power. This was most notoriously seen in Nazi Germany, but also more benevolently in New Deal America. In the United Kingdom, John Grierson’s documentary movement spearheaded the use of documentary in workplaces, professional clubs and institutions as a means of promoting state sponsored social improvement. State control remained important during the Second World War and the subsequent period of reconstruction. The growth of television and the development of portable cameras and sound equipment opened up a new approach in the late 1950s and 1960s. Cinéma-vérité and direct cinema not only brought about stylistic innovations, such as hand held camerawork, but also took the filming into new spaces and offered a voice to previously unheard people, reflecting the social upheavals of the age. This approach became more widespread as a stylistic trope, but its original political purposes waned. Since the 1980s, the documentary field has become more diverse and fragmented, as a result of deregulation and the expansion of media markets, and the greater accessibility of equipment. Popular documentary on large network channels has often focused on entertainment, leading to new forms of infotainment. In contrast, there has been more opportunity for critical voices to be heard that contest dominant ideas. Throughout these eras, documentary has featured and responded to crime and criminal justice within the context of broader social change.
The evolution in documentaries about crime and criminal justice has, in particular, been shaped by three factors. The first is the role of individual agents, such as prominent filmmakers whose work has stood the test of time or has influenced the field. Second, there have been institutional factors, including the technology of film, notably the development of more portable and affordable equipment, but also there have been changes in the production process including sources of funding and distribution. The third factor is ideology. Cultural products, including documentaries about criminal justice, are created and consumed within a contested ideological context, and their meanings or significance can only be understood by reference to that context. As a result, these documentaries are important means of understanding the criminal justice system and the wider social context in which they are situated.
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Popular Criminology
Steven Kohm
Popular criminology is a theoretical and conceptual approach within the field of criminology that is used to interrogate popular understandings of crime and criminal justice. In the last decade, popular criminology has most often been associated with analyses of fictional crime film, while in previous decades, popular criminology referred most often to “true crime” literature or, more generally, to popular ideas about crime and justice. While the term has appeared sporadically in the criminological literature for several decades, popular criminology is most closely associated with the work of American criminologist Nicole Rafter. Popular criminology refers in a broad sense to the ideas that ordinary people have about the causes, consequences, and remedies for crime, and the relationship of these ideas to academic discourses about crime. Criminologists who utilize this approach examine popular culture as a source of commonsense ideas and perceptions about crime and criminal justice. Films, television, the Internet, and literature about crime and criminal justice are common sources of popular criminology interrogated by criminologists working in this field. Popular criminology is an analytic tool that can be used to explore the emotional, psychological, and philosophical features of crime and criminal justice that find expression in popular culture. The popular cultural depiction of crime is taken seriously by criminologists working in this tradition and such depictions are placed alongside mainstream criminological theory in an effort to broaden the understanding of the impact of crime and criminal justice on the lives of everyday people. Popular criminology has become solidified as an approach within the broader cultural criminology movement which seeks to examine the interconnections between crime, culture and media.
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Justice-System Monitoring Technologies and Victim Welfare
Craig Paterson
The evolution of criminal justice technologies is inextricably linked to the emergence of new modes of electronic and digital governance that have become essential components of a surveillance and crime control culture continually seeking out novel responses to actual and perceived threats. The slow emergence of these technologies in the second part of the 20th century was often theorized through a discourse of order and control that has subsequently evolved in the 21st century to emphasize the protective potential of technologies oriented toward the interests of victims. The potential of criminal justice technologies to improve public safety and address issues of repeat victimization has now been subjected to significant scrutiny from scholars across the globe. While it would be conceptually inaccurate to split offenders and victims into two discrete groups, there has been an increase in analytical focus upon the intersections between victims of crime and technology within the context of criminal justice processes that had traditionally been oriented toward offenders. A more sophisticated understanding of the psychological and behavioral potential of criminal justice technologies has emerged that has permanently adjusted the landscape of crime and disorder management and has had a transformative impact upon the relationship between victims, technology, and criminal justice. Yet, at the same time, the integration of digital technologies into the crime control and criminal justice infrastructure still is at an early stage in its evolution, with future trends and patterns uncertain.
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Crime Control, Community Relations, and Barriers to Community-Based Reforms in Policing
Kevin Petersen and Danielle S. Rudes
Efforts to prevent crime often involve high concentrations of police presence in disadvantaged minority communities. When combined with aggressive enforcement and proactivity, these efforts may negatively affect police–community relations. There is often a tendency to view community relations and crime reduction as discrete goals; however, citizen cooperation is an important component of efficient crime control. Policing strategies that incorporate problem-solving and community involvement show promise in their ability to simultaneously reduce crime and improve community relations. Despite the growing number of police agencies that report implementing these strategies, however, police–community relations have not shown widespread improvement. Organizational frameworks help to identify factors that might lead police agencies to prioritize enforcement and crime control over community relations, as well as the organizational barriers to effective community-based reform. A reliance on efficiency and centralized authority, resource dependency, and symbolic legitimacy all may help to explain police agencies’ lack of effective community-based reform efforts.
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Law Enforcement
Angus Nurse
Law enforcement can be considered in both the “narrow” sense of the policing and enforcement of law and a wider sense of the maintenance of order and reinforcement of societal rules and dominant ideologies. The maintenance of social order, protection of citizens, and prevention of and redress for harms against citizens, property, and nonhuman nature are heavily reliant on law enforcement. Effective criminal justice is arguably dependent on law enforcement as a dominant feature of criminal justice systems that adopt the notion of punishment as a tool of social control. Societal construction of harm and the definition of unacceptable behavior often manifests itself in laws, rules, and regulations that serve as both control mechanisms and expressions of societal norms. Where societal rules, in the form of laws and regulations, are broken, effective law enforcement is essential both to demonstrate societal disapproval of the “deviant” behavior and to provide for social sanction through appropriate redress and retributive justice mechanisms. Accordingly, law enforcement and policing are inextricably linked in the context of providing a means through which serious social harms can be dealt with.
But law enforcement goes far beyond policing, both conceptually and with respect to the mechanisms that are deployed to express society’s disapproval and ultimately secure redress. In a narrow sense, policing can be defined as that which the police (or recognized policing agencies) carry out. This often centers around enforcement of the criminal law and a detection, investigation, and apprehension model inextricably linked to ideas of retributive justice. By contrast, law enforcement is broader, involves civil and criminal justice agencies, and can incorporate administrative and regulatory law mechanisms and even alternative dispute resolution as a means of resolving disputes and ensuring appropriate redress. Thus, law enforcement can also extend beyond the confines of retributive criminal justice to incorporate restorative and rehabilitative justice mechanisms to encourage compliance.
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Qualitative Interviewing
John J. Brent, Peter B. Kraska, and Justin Hutchens
Given the multifaceted and interdisciplinary nature of studying crime and criminal justice, the pursuit of credible, reliable, and rigorous knowledge requires a well-developed methodological infrastructure. To explore and examine these areas, there are times when research needs to document probabilities, examine rates, identify correlations, and test theoretical propositions. There are also times when research needs to explore the more qualitative elements, namely the perspectives, interpretations, lived experiences, and constructed realities. Among the more prominent qualitative methods within the field’s methodological toolbox are interviews. Aiding other approaches, qualitative interviews contribute to the field’s methodological means by first offering a more inductive and interpretive framework to study crime-related phenomena. From these foundations, they are replete with avenues through which to conceptualize, construct, and administer research efforts. They also provide a host of unique and beneficial methodological means to collect, code, and analyze collected data. When their overall impact is examined, the continued use and development of qualitative methods—more specifically, interviews—can progress the field’s body of knowledge while contributing to more informed practices and policies. Given their use and utility, interviews have become some of the most used methodological approaches within the social sciences.
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Qualitative Methods in International and Comparative Criminology
Max Travers
Although the field of international criminology has mostly employed quantitative methods to test universal theories, there is a growing recognition of the potential value of qualitative methods in understanding crime and criminal justice in a globalizing world. The difficulties in developing this field are partly practical and financial. It is difficult visiting different countries and overcoming language barriers. But there are also conceptual challenges. Criminology generally is only just starting to understand and engage with the distinction between quantitative and qualitative research methods and to discover the wide range of qualitative methods employed in interdisciplinary fields, such as education, health, environmental, media, and management studies, and to recognize that theories are important in this field.
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Queering Criminology Globally
Matthew Ball
Queer criminology is an emerging field of research addressing significant oversights within the disciplines of criminology and criminal justice studies—namely the limited attention paid to the criminal justice experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people. Drawing from the diverse meanings of the concept of “queer”—as an umbrella identity category and as an impetus for deconstruction and political disruption—queer criminology is developing along multiple paths including research into: LGBTQ people as victims and offenders; LGBTQ people in their interactions with the criminal justice system and its agents; LGBTQ people as criminal justice agents; and the ways in which criminal justice policies may be “queered.” It has also been a site of important theoretical development regarding issues such as: the role of deconstructionist and identity-focused approaches for addressing injustice for LGBTQ people; the best place for queer criminological research to be positioned in relation to the broader discipline of criminology; and who ought to constitute the subjects of queer criminology and thus how fluid the boundaries of the field can be. Queer criminology is also developing a stronger presence in a global context. It is increasingly moving beyond the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom where it developed, and the relevance of its insights are being tested in new political, social, and cultural contexts. As an emerging and dynamic field, queer criminology in its many forms is set to continue to disrupt criminology for some time to come, offering important insights to ensure that criminal justice knowledges and practices respond appropriately to the experiences of LGBTQ people.
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Indigenous Courts
Valmaine Toki
In many jurisdictions, including Australia, New Zealand, Canada, United States and across the Pacific, offending rates for Indigenous peoples continue to be disproportionate to population size. For example, in New Zealand, Māori comprise over half the male prison population yet constitute only 15% of the national population. In Canada and the United States, where Indigenous people constitute 3.6 and 1.7% of the population, respectively, imprisonment rates are also disproportionate.
Notwithstanding attempts to address these statistics, the overrepresentation of Indigenous peoples in prisons continues. However, Te Kooti Rangatahi, a marae-based (traditional-setting) “Indigenous court” for youths, has demonstrated some initial success as a unique initiative. This “court” integrates tikanga Māori (Māori culture) into the judicial process, with the aim of facilitating the reconnection of young people with their culture and involving the wider community. Te Kooti Matariki, an Indigenous court for adults, employs tikanga but within a mainstream court. A comparative perspective with the Navajo Common Law and Navajo Nation Tribal Court system demonstrates that the inclusion of Indigenous concepts into Western legal systems is not novel and should not in and of itself prevent the extension of Te Kooti Rangatahi and Te Kooti Matariki’s jurisdictions.