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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

Theory and Green Criminology  

Kimberly L. Barrett and Rachelle F. Marshall

Green criminology refers to a perspective within criminology that, broadly speaking, is devoted to the study of crime against and harms to the natural environment. Initially, green criminology was introduced as the study of environmental harm from a political-economic vantage point and was informed by theories from critical, radical, and political-economic (e.g., “conflict paradigm”) perspectives. Over time, however, new definitions of green criminology have emerged, as have new terms for the criminological study of environmental crimes (e.g., “conservation criminology”). These developments have invited new theoretical interpretations of environmental crime and justice. While conflict theories still maintain a degree of centrality in green criminology, the perspective has expanded to include mainstream theoretical orientations (e.g., “classical paradigm,” “consensus/positivist paradigm”) as well.

Article

Visual Criminology  

Michelle Brown

Visual criminology emerges from a call to rethink the manner in which images are reshaping the world and criminology as a project. The mobility, malleability, banality, speed, and scale of images and their distribution demand that we engage both old and new theories and methods. Visual criminologists pursue a refinement of concepts and tools as well as innovative new ones to tackle questions of crime, harm, culture, and control. Concerned with how ways of seeing are foundational to social orders, visual criminology gives close attention to the production of crime’s power and spectacle in the visual field and relies upon emergent conceptual terms and vocabularies to do so. It insists that it is no longer possible to understand crime and control separately from how they are represented. Visual criminology is born as an alternative academic space that is neither supplementary nor secondary to mainstream social science; rather, it calls us to understand the power of crime and punishment beyond the written and numeric registers of reports, studies, and research. The concerns of visual criminology are numerous. Visual criminologists are interested in the role of vision and the visual in the historical foundations of criminology as a discipline. They push crime and media scholars to investigate more deeply the role of the image itself, beyond conventional studies of crime and media. Using a growing and sophisticated set of theories, methods, and concepts, they track how the various optics of criminology and criminal justice (defined by disciplinary, institutional, and epistemological boundaries) are produced, culminating in popular and scientific perspectives that inevitably bring certain principles, claims, and possibilities into the line of vision and omit others. They also give attention to how these optics are contested and transgressed. Focal points of this work span a variety of media and artistic modes that continue to grow at an unprecedented rate: photodocumentary, photoethnography, new and social media, interactive and social documentary, architecture, data visualizations, design, conceptual and performance art, mixed media, theater, embodiment, spatialization, surveillance and aerial/satellite/drone technology, graffiti and urban aesthetics, ruins and dark tourism, models, exhibitions, and imaginative interventions to envision crime and punishment otherwise. Even as this visual focus expands the disciplinary tools and insights of criminology, it also broadens the field’s boundaries, drawing from a rich theoretical terrain of interdisciplinary studies.

Article

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.

Article

Group-Based Trajectory Modeling  

Thomas W. Wojciechowski

Group-based trajectory modeling (GBTM) is a variant of growth mixture modeling that has risen to prominence in the field of criminology as a useful method for understanding heterogeneity in developmental patterns of outcomes of interest. The method entails identification of a trajectory model that best fits a set of longitudinal data and is comprised of a set number of trajectory groups of varying complexity that participants are assigned membership to. Following identification of a best fitting model, extensions of the method can then be used to better understand nuances of the developmental outcome of interest. The use of particular extensions of the method then relies on the research question. These extensions may be used to identify predictors of differential development, understand how differential development predicts a later outcome, or understand how development of another outcome predicts concurrent development of the outcome of interest. While the GBTM method has been demonstrated to have a high degree of utility for modeling criminological outcomes of interest, there remain a number of notable gaps in the manner in which it has been applied in the field. Given the general shift toward a life-course understanding of criminology, there remain numerous areas where GBTM may be useful for advancing existing criminological theories within this paradigm. While not an exhaustive list, social control theory, social learning theory, general strain theory, and the dual systems model are all examples of criminological theories which may be particularly amenable to the use of GBTM to better understand nuances of development of constructs of interest and advance the perspectives on criminogenic processes that these theories currently offer. These issues indicate the continued need for examination of relationships of interest using GBTM and related extensions of the method within the field of criminology.

Article

Epidemiological Criminology  

Ali Rowhani-Rahbar and Haylea Hannah

Health and crime are interrelated in numerous ways. Criminal offending can influence health outcomes, while health and well-being can change the likelihood of criminal offending. In addition, tools of the criminal justice system can affect health, while health policy may influence criminal offending. Notably, the tools of the public health and criminal justice system can work synergistically or antagonistically to impact both health and crime outcomes. Epidemiological criminology (EpiCrim) has been viewed as a paradigm linking the methods of public health with those of the criminal justice system and integrating epidemiological theories and practices with their corresponding theories and tools in criminology. The specific contribution of this framework is toward the development of strategies and interventions that address multiple factors underlying health and criminal behavior at different biopsychosocial levels. The overarching premise of this paradigm is that sustained and intentional efforts toward applying the principles of EpiCrim could improve health and well-being and reduce criminal behavior in manners that exceed the contribution of each field separately.

Article

Indigenous Peoples and Criminology  

Juan Marcellus Tauri

Indigenous criminology has developed since the start of the 21st century as a result of the regeneration of Indigenous epistemologies and reinvigoration of Indigenous critique of the criminal justice practices of settler-colonial states. In stark contrast to Carlen’s call for criminology as a scientific art, Indigenous formulations—political, partisan, and subjective, reflective of the stated aims of activist scholars such as Agozino, Monture-Angus, Victor, Tauri, and Porter—are evangelical by necessity to hold the settler-colonial state accountable for the violence it perpetrates against Indigenous peoples, and to subject western criminologists to critical scrutiny for their historical and contemporary support for the state. This support manifests through the use of theories and research methodologies that silence Indigenous experiences of settler-colonial crime control, and approaches to crime and social harm, and through the discipline of criminology’s continued support for the state’s continued subjugation of Indigenes. The Indigenous critique challenges the Eurocentric nature of much western criminological analysis of Indigenous over-representation in criminal justice, especially in settler-colonial settings, which often lacks a theory of colonialism, reserving analysis for the recalcitrant native and their supposedly criminogenic culture. Also problematic is the tendency of many criminologists to utilise non-engaging methods for researching Indigenous peoples, a process that too often sidelines their experiences of crime control processes. In contrast, Indigenous scholars and their non-Indigenous allies propose an Indigenous variant of the discipline based on core principles that distinguish their activist scholarship from the mainstream, including rejecting the false dichotomy between objectivity and commitment, giving back by speaking truth to power, and making research real for Indigenous peoples.

Article

Colonialism, Crime, and Social Control  

Viviane Saleh-Hanna

Crime is a distinctly European concept that was institutionalized into the criminal justice system through the penal code, created in the 1700s by founding theorists of criminology’s classical school of thought. In practice, crime is a concept that limits what can be defined as harmful and violent. Written at the height of Europe’s genocidal colonial wars and chattel slavery, the penal code excluded, and continues to exclude mass atrocities and violations committed through these institutions. Since criminal justice institutions were birthed through and spread by Western Europe’s colonial wars around the globe, the study of colonialism, crime, and social control requires a re-evaluation of the pillars of Western European thought and the peculiar colonizing economies and punitive praxis that produced the criminal justice system. Through an anticolonial, genealogical framework scholars and researchers can better locate criminal justice institutions, practices, and concepts within their colonial contexts, allowing for a more thorough understanding of how history, power, politics, and economy shape crime and practice social control in the 21st century. At the core of an anticolonial study of crime and social control is an understanding that Europe’s crime-concept depends upon institutionalized constructions of dangerousness for colonized people and nations, and lack thereof, for colonizing people and nations. Dangerousness, as defined by colonial renditions of race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, nation, and so forth, anchors the cultural and implemented processes of criminalization; as a result, proper and comprehensive deconstructions of colonizing definitions of dangerousness require an intersectional understanding of power and oppression. Therefore, an effective framework for the study of colonialism, crime, and social control necessitates a re-evaluation and re-articulation of the following questions: what is colonialism?; what is crime?; what is colonial social control?; and what is criminology’s relationship to colonialism?

Article

Historical Representations of Crime and the Criminal  

Eamonn Carrabine

The enduring popular fascination with crime and criminality suggests that history matters. In the most obvious sense, current representations of crime in the media bear traces of earlier codes and practices. Recognizing this past enables a more sophisticated understanding of the present—especially since many current controversies have much longer histories than is usually acknowledged. This is not to suggest a long line of steady continuity stretching back to the earliest forms of oral, face-to-face storytelling from the latest mediated technology that encompasses the lives of millions around the world. Instead, the argument is that understanding changing forms of representation requires attention to how developments in communication media are themselves integral to the formation of modern societies. For example, it has been argued that the blurring of fact, fiction and entertainment is indicative of a postmodern “hyperreality,” where the boundary separating reality from its representation has “imploded” to such an extent that there are now no real-world referents (Baudrillard, 1988). However, the boundaries between fact and fiction have always been fairly fluid. For instance, during the 16th and 17th centuries, both novels and news reports were seen as neither entirely factual nor as clearly fictional (Davis, 1980, 1983). Moreover, what we now regard as a “news story” would have to have been cast in the form of fiction for it to appear in the press during the 18th century. None of this is to suggest that people are incapable of distinguishing between the real and the imaginary, but to insist that understandings of crime in everyday life are continually informed by representations of crime in popular culture. The importance of bringing to bear a historical perspective is emphasized throughout, as is the sheer range of material. The tendency to refer to “the media” in the singular obscures the diversity of media forms (film, television, magazines, newspapers, the Internet, books, and so on) that surround us. The word “media” is the plural of “medium,” which was initially used to refer to the materials used for communication (Briggs & Burke, 2005, p. 5). From the papyrus, clay, and stone of the ancient world to the plastic, metal, and wire of modern media, it is clear that the technologies of communication have an immense influence, ranging from the most inner dimensions of personal experience to the global organization of power. In a time of fast-paced media developments and rapid information delivery, a thorough understanding of media history and changing forms of representation is needed more than ever.

Article

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.

Article

State Crime  

Thomas MacManus

While state crime is a relatively recent event in the discipline of criminology, tracing the roots of its modern form to the 1990s, it has attracted some of the best minds to research and theorize on the immense and fatal excesses of the modern nation state. State crime is defined most convincingly by Penny Green and Tony Ward as state organizational deviance involving the violation of human rights. The crimes are organizational in nature and are carried out by vast state systems and corporate structures. This approach can be contrasted with the individual criminal liability, “scapegoat” ideology of international criminal law and other criminal law regimes. The definition relies on the criminological concept of deviance, a label applied by a social audience, to make up for the lack of criminal legal definition of the behaviors, legitimacy, and human rights norms in order to differentiate it from crimes that are carried out without harm to human or planet (such as minor international economic treaty violations). A sub-field of state crime, state-corporate crime has developed to track those crimes which occur at the intersection of the state and the market.

Article

Experimental Methods in Criminology  

Rylan Simpson

Experimental methods have been a hallmark of the scientific enterprise since its inception. Over time, experiments have become much more sophisticated, complex, and nuanced. Experiments have also become much more diverse, and their use within research settings has expanded from the physical sciences to the social sciences, including criminology. Within criminology, experimental methods can manifest in the form of laboratory experiments, field experiments, and quasi-experiments, each of which present their own strengths and weaknesses. Experimental methods can also be applied in the context of between-subject and within-subject paradigms, both of which exhibit unique characteristics and implications. Experimental methods—as a research method—are unique in their ability to help establish causal relationships among variables. This article introduces the topic of experimental methods in criminology, with a specific focus on the subfield of policing.

Article

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.