Originating in the tradition of classical sociology (Durkheim, Merton), anomie theory posits how broad social conditions influence deviant behavior and crime. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim was the first to discuss the concept of anomie as an analytical tool in his 1890s seminal works of sociological theory and method. In these works, anomie, which refers to a widespread lack of commitment to shared values, standards, and rules needed to regulate the behaviors and aspirations of individuals, is an intermediate condition by which social (dis)organization impacts individual distress and deviant behavior. An observant of the massive social changes of 19th-century Europe, Durkheim argued that anomie resulted from rapid social change and the weakening of traditional institutions, particularly the reduced authority of such institutions in the economic sphere, as well as changes in the principles legitimizingsocial inequality. A few decades later, the American sociologist Robert Merton re-formulated anomie theory, arguing how a particular malintegration of the culture-structure constitution of modern society produces high rates of crime. Echoing selected themes in Durkheim’s work, and discussing the United States as a prime example, Merton argued how a shared overemphasis on monetary success goals undermines individual commitment to social rules and generates a particularly acute strain on individuals in disadvantaged social positions. Thus, having implications for research on crime rate differences between societies as well as between individuals and groups within the society, anomie theory has inspired a broad range of both macro- and micro-level applications and extensions. On the one hand, the theory has shaped studies of crime rates across large social units, such as countries and metropolitan areas. Such research, while often limited in terms of the types of crime that can reliably be compared across large social units, has linked crime with economic inequality, materialistic values, the institutional dominance of market-driven processes and values, and rapid social change. An important development in this tradition is the advent of multilevel research that links societal factors with individual normlessness, strain, and criminal behavior. On the other hand, micro-level implications of anomie theory, often referred to as classic strain theory, have shaped studies of individual and group differences in criminal behavior within societies. This type of work often studies youths, at times bringing in notions of gangs, subculture, and differential opportunities, focusing on the criminogenic effects of strain stemming from opportunity blockage and relative deprivation. Yet the work rarely examines individual normlessness as an intermediate process linking social structure and delinquency. Finally, anomie theory has been extended and applied to research on business/corporate and white-collar crime. While more research is needed in this area, the extant work suggests how anomie theory provides a powerful explanation of national-level differences in business/corporate crime (e.g., bribery). The article concludes by noting that an increased emphasis on multilevel research may lead to an integration of the macro-level and micro-level extensions and applications of anomie theory in the future.
Article
Anomie Theory
Jón Gunnar Bernburg
Article
Biosocial Theories in Criminology
Jessica Wells and Anthony Walsh
While the roots of criminology largely lie in sociological explanations for crime and delinquency, a resurgence has begun wherein human behavior is explained as a product of both environmental and biological factors: biosocial criminology. Biosocial criminology encompasses many perspectives that seek to explain the relationships between human behavior and genes, evolution, neurobiology, and more. While biosocial criminology does not have a long history in the broader field of criminology, modern advances in technology have made access to data to explore biosocial criminological questions far more readily available. Advanced technology, coupled with studies suggesting that a large proportion of the variance in antisocial behavior is attributable to genetic factors has spurred many criminologists to explore how both nature and nurture influence behavior.
A wide variety of perspectives is apparent within biosocial criminology. These perspectives can be seen as tools to uncover different elements of the equation seeking to understand human behavior. Behavior genetic studies seek to explain what proportion of the variation in a trait or behavior is due to genetic factors. Molecular genetic studies seek to uncover which genes are related to that trait or behavior and how strongly they are associated. Evolutionary psychology seeks to explain why a trait or behavior emerged and remained through the process of natural selection. Neurobiological studies explain how the complex structure and function is related to traits and behavior. While these perspectives vary widely in their approach, one fact remains: neither environmental nor biological explanation for human behavior is sufficient on its own; rather, the complex interplay between environments and biology is critical to advance knowledge about the causes and correlates of criminal and delinquent behavior.
Article
Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
Hugo Goeury
In the mid-1970s, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), which came to be known as the “Birmingham School,” published two major books that contributed substantially to the field of critical criminology: Resistance Through Rituals (RTR) and Policing the Crisis (PTC). These two groundbreaking and complementary works aimed to contribute to the two main topics of criminological enquiry: deviance/crime and social reaction/punishment. In both cases, the Centre deployed a Marxist-inspired and sociologically driven approach whose main objective was to study both deviance and social reaction from a critical perspective that takes into consideration the broader social, political, economic, and cultural context in which they take place.
RTR challenged the dominant discourse of the postwar era, which proclaimed the end of class antagonism and the exhaustion of “class” as a relevant social category. The Birmingham School’s research demonstrated that the many subcultures—punks, mods, teddy boys, rastas, etc. —that flourished in the United Kingdom at the time were not symptomatic, as many argued, of the rise of a “classless youth.” On the contrary, RTR made the case that subcultures are part of a century-long tradition of symbolic, working-class resistance against the hegemonic order. From this perspective, subcultures were seen as an attempt, on the part of working-class youths, to solve the many contradictions of their class experience at a time of broad, multidimensional changes. While the Birmingham School’s work on subcultures was a celebration of working-class resistance and agency, ultimately, it reached the conclusion that this form of resistance, which remained restricted to the symbolic sphere, could not offer a solution to the exploitation and oppression faced by working-class youth, which stemmed from the material, social relations of production of capitalism.
While RTR focused on “deviance,” PTC shifted the analysis to the other side of the equation, that of social reaction and punishment. In this second publication, Stuart Hall and his co-authors developed an impressive “conjunctural analysis” approach that allowed them to move from the study of the so-called “mugging crisis” of the United Kingdom in the early 1970s, to the elaboration of their groundbreaking theory on crisis of hegemony and the rise of a new, “law and order society.” PTC is one of the pioneering studies that argued that the rise of “authoritarian populism” and the birth of a “law and order society” that were taking place in the United Kingdom in the 1970s were not temporary phenomena but were representative of a long-lasting change of epoch. More than 40 years after the publication of this seminal work, it leaves no doubt that the Birmingham School’s predictions have been validated, as is corroborated by an extensive literature studying the “punitive turn” that has taken over the globe over the last few decades.
Overall, at a time when criminology was becoming increasingly dominated by positivism and disconnected from the sociological tradition, the Birmingham School’s most influential and long-lasting legacy resides in RTR and PTC’s invitation to critically investigate what the CCCS members called the “social and political ‘conditions of existence’” of both deviance/crime and social reaction/punishment.
Article
The Characteristics of Illegal Markets
Matías Dewey
The phenomenon of illegal markets is pervasive. The circulation of illegal goods and services reaches all social segments, crosses national boundaries, and produces enormous revenues. Scholarship has typically addressed issues of illegal exchanges by focusing on criminal organizations, their members’ activities, internal structures, and businesses while leaving the very notion of illegal markets conceptually underdeveloped. Different from organized crime, the notion of “illegal market” compels us to consider the demand side and to investigate the varied ways it relates to the supply side. Following the path opened up by economic sociology scholarship, this article brings illegal markets to the center of the scene in order to develop them conceptually, observe them in a differentiated way, and investigate their relationships with legal structures. From this perspective, the social organization of markets comes to the fore, highlighting such aspects as the formal and informal institutions sustaining illegal markets; the modes of internal coordination that deal with problems such as value, competition, or trust; moral attitudes toward the production, exchange, or consumption of certain products or services; the cultural elements or cognitive dispositions that promote illegal exchanges; the role of state power in defining what is and is not illegal, and thus how it controls certain exchanges; and the role of the enforcement of the law in the emergence, expansion, or extinction of these markets.
Article
Climate Change
Rob White
Climate change is the defining problem of the 21st century. Global warming is transforming the biophysical landscape in unprecedented ways, with far-reaching negative consequences for all life on the planet. Extreme weather events, prolonged droughts, rising sea levels, and melting glaciers have enormous ramifications for humans and nonhuman species across the globe. Climate change criminology focuses on the crimes and harms associated with climate change. It examines the dynamics of criminality from the point of view of the causes of climate change, as well as the social consequences of climate change. Criminologically, strain theory provides one lens by which to understand climate-related criminal behavior, while the concepts of ecocide and state-corporate crime provide a nexus between crimes of the powerful and global warming to explore. The notion of differential victimization describes how some suffer the effects of climate change to a greater extent than others and includes reference to nonhuman victims such as animals, rivers, and trees. For criminology, climate change demands much greater attention than hitherto has been the case—for it constitutes a profound existential crisis affecting all.
Article
Control Balance Theory
Charles R. Tittle
Control balance theory (CBT) was developed in the mid-1990s, primarily to illustrate a particular method for building integrated theory and to show how general theories are useful in addressing various issues in studies of crime and deviance. A major theme on which the theory has been built is the idea that deficient control, a well-established classic notion, and excessive control all can have deviogenic consequences. In addition, the theory rests on expectations that sufficient explanation will necessarily involve complex arguments. Thus, CBT not only attempts to explain the phenomena within its domain, but it also challenges simplistic theories, contentions that theoretical integration is both impossible and undesirable, and neglect of contingencies in theorizing.
Article
Corporate Crime and the State
Adam Ghazi-Tehrani
State-corporate crime is defined as criminal acts that occur when one or more institutions of political governance pursue a goal in direct cooperation with one or more institutions of economic production and distribution. This concept has been advanced to examine how corporations and governments intersect to produce social harm. The complexity of state-corporate crime arises from the nature of the offenses; unlike traditional “street crime,” state-corporate crime is not characterized by the intent of a single actor to violate the law for personal pleasure or gain. Criminal actions by the state often lack an obvious victim, and diffusion of responsibility arising from corporate structure and involvement of multiple actors makes the task of attributing criminal responsibility difficult. Sufficient understanding of state-corporate crime cannot be gained through studying individual actors; one must also consider broader organizational and societal factors.
Further subclassification illuminates the different types of state-corporate crime: State-initiated corporate crime (such as the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion) occurs when corporations, employed by the government, engage in organizational deviance at the direction of, or with the tacit approval of, the government. State-facilitated state-corporate crime (such as the 1991 Imperial Food Products fire in Hamlet, North Carolina) occurs when government regulatory institutions fail to restrain deviant activities either because of direct collusion between business and government or because they adhere to shared goals whose attainment would be hampered by aggressive regulation.
Article
Corporate Fraud, Corruption, and Financial Malfeasance
Harland Prechel
Corporate failures and financial crisis in the early 21st century generated an increased awareness of the pervasiveness of corporate corruption, fraud, and financial malfeasance. In addition to the tremendous financial costs to society and the loss of public confidence in corporations and social institutions, corporate wrongdoing adversely effects corporations by undermining profits, morale, and trust.
Understanding contemporary corporate corruption, fraud, and financial malfeasance requires an examination of the extent to which historical variation in organizational, political-legal, and ideology arrangements affect opportunities for managers to engage in these behaviors. These components of the social structure are not mutually exclusive but are part of a dynamic system that consists of many interconnected component parts. As a whole, the literature examined here suggests that the components of the formal and informal structure create incentives, motivations, and opportunities to engage in corruption, fraud, and malfeasance.
The emphasis on social structure is critical to advance our understanding of how corporate political embeddedness, the social organization of markets, and corporate characteristics all affect wrongdoing. The main findings include the following.
1.Contemporary research confirms and extends Sutherland’s initial insight that differential social structure creates variation in opportunities to engage in corporate crime. Corporate characteristics, including structure, size, vertical integration, prestige, cognitive assumptions, corporate norms, dependence on institutional investors, bounded rationality, opportunities, and political embeddedness, are associated with corporate corruption, fraud, and financial malfeasance.
2.Corporations in the United States engaged in political behavior to re-regulate multiple spheres of corporations’ political embeddedness that permitted management to enter existing markets, create new markets, and engage in high-risk behaviors in them.
3.Corporate culture and ethics interact with markets and other dimensions of the social structure to create normative conditions conducive to corporate corruption and fraud.
4.Individual characteristics, including chief executive officer’s (CEO’s) age and the networks among top management and corporate boards, affect corporate corruption, fraud, and malfeasance.
5.Given that few policy changes were implement in the 2008 post-crisis era, the political embeddedness and characteristics of corporations continue to provide opportunities for corporations and their agents to engage in corruption, fraud, and malfeasance.
Article
Crime Pattern Theory
Paul Brantingham and Patricia Brantingham
A broad understanding of crime requires explanations for both the origins of individual and group criminal propensity and when and where criminal events occur. Crime pattern theory provides explanations for the variation in the distribution of criminal events in space and time given a range of different propensities.
In the organization of their everyday lives, both occasional and persistent criminals spend most of their time engaged in the same legitimate everyday activities as everyone else. The location of criminal events in space–time are shaped by these everyday activities and the specific criminal’s activity. Occasional and persistent offenders develop activity spaces and awareness spaces. The shape and dynamics of these spaces is influenced by the structures of human settlements that channel and limit movement patterns in time and space. These structures include the built environments and the socioeconomic and cultural environments in which people live, work, or go to school, and in which they spend their social, entertainment, and shopping time.
Crime pattern theory utilizes the major components of the built and social environment—activity nodes, paths between nodes, neighborhoods and neighborhood edges, and the socioeconomic backcloth—in conjunction with the routine movements of the population in general to understand crime generator and crime attractor locations and the formation of repeat areas of offending for individuals and groups of offenders as well as more aggregate crime hot spots and cold spots. This information is translated into a geometry of crime that describes the journeys to crime by individual criminal offenders and groups of offenders and their victims or targets. Crime pattern theory explains the process of criminal target search, suggests strategies for crime reduction, and describes potential displacements of criminal events in space and time following changes in the suitability of targets or target locations at particular places and specific times.
Article
Critical Criminologies
Walter S. DeKeseredy
There is no single critical criminology. Rather, there are critical criminologies with different histories, methods, theories, and political perspectives. However, critical criminology is often defined as a perspective that views the major sources of crime as the unequal class, race/ethnic, and gender relations that control our society. Critical criminologists oppose prisons and other draconian means of social control. Their main goal is major radical and cultural change, but they recognize that these transitions will not occur in the current neoliberal era. Hence, most critical criminologists propose short-term anticrime policies and practices and fundamental social, economic, and political transformations, such as a change from a capitalist economy to one based on more socialist principles.
Article
Critical Criminology and the Critique of Domination, Inequality and Injustice
David O. Friedrichs
Critical criminology has achieved a substantial presence within the field of criminology over the past several decades. Critical criminology has produced a framework for the understanding of crime and criminal justice that challenges core premises of mainstream criminology. Critical criminology emerged—principally from about 1980 on—in relation to radical (and “new”) criminology in the 1970s, and various influential societal developments and forces associated with the Sixties. The roots of critical criminology can be located in Marxist theory, in the work of Willem Bonger, and in that of other scholars who were not self-identified radicals—including Edwin H. Sutherland. Interactionist (labeling) theory and conflict theory provided an important point of departure for the development of radical—and subsequently critical—criminology. More specifically, the Berkeley School of Criminology in the United States and the National Deviancy Conferences in the United Kingdom were influential sources for the emergence of critical criminology. The core thesis of critical criminology can be most concisely summarized as a critique of domination, inequality, and injustice. Starting with the definition of “crime” itself, critical criminologists expose the biases and political agenda of mainstream criminology and advance an alternative approach to understanding crime and criminal justice. That said, some different choices are made by self-identified critical criminologists in terms of underlying assumptions, methodological preferences, and different forms of activist engagement. A call for news-making criminology, or a form of public criminology, is one theme for activism: direct political mobilization is another. The term “critical criminology” today is best understood as an umbrella term encompassing a wide range of different perspectives with quite different core concerns. Some of these strains were more dominant at an earlier time; some have emerged or become more prominent recently. The following are among the most enduring and consequential strains of critical criminology: neo-Marxist, critical race, left realist, feminist, crimes of the powerful, green, cultural, peacemaking, abolitionist, postmodern, postcolonial, border, and queer criminology. Some critical criminologists have called for replacing the core focus on crime with a focus on harm, broadly defined, and replacing criminology with zemiology, or the study of harm. Critical criminologists have concerned themselves with crimes of the powerful; gendered, sexualized harm and intimate partner violence; raced harm and racial oppression; hate crime; the war on drugs; the war on immigrants; police violence and the militarization of the police; mass incarceration and privatized criminal justice; carceral regimes; mass imprisonment; the death penalty, and alternative forms of justice including a form of restorative justice—among many other substantive concerns. The call for a Southern criminology that incorporates the outlook and concerns of the Global South is one significant development within critical criminology. Critical criminology has the potential to be of special relevance within the context of a historical period characterized by intense conflicts in relation to the political economy and civil society.
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
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.
Article
Developmental and Life-Course Theories of Crime
Tara Renae McGee and David P. Farrington
Developmental and life-course theories of crime are collectively characterized by their goal of explaining the onset, persistence, and desistance of offending behavior over the life-course. Researchers working within this framework are interested not just in offending but also in the broader category of antisocial behavior. Their research aims to investigate the development of offending and antisocial behavior throughout life; risk and protective factors that predict this development; the effects of life events; and the intergenerational transmission of offending and antisocial behavior. While there have been a number of developmental and life-course theories of crime, the more influential and empirically tested ones include Sampson and Laub’s age-graded informal social control theory and Moffitt’s typological model of life-course-persistent and adolescence-limited offending. While developmental and life-course criminology has come to be viewed a single type or grouping of criminology, there are distinctions between the more sociological life-course perspectives and the more psychological developmental perspectives. These are a result of the disciplinary training of the individuals working in the field and are reflected in the types of variables examined and the theoretical explanations developed and applied to explain the relationships. The broader life-course perspective focuses on the examination of human lives over time, with an understanding that “changing lives alter developmental trajectories,” according to Glen Elder in his 1998 work. Life-course approaches to studying human development are not unique to criminology and are represented within many disciplines, such as medicine and epidemiology. There are four central themes of the life-course paradigm: the interplay of human lives and historical times; the timing of lives; linked or interdependent lives; and human agency in making choices. Therefore the life-course perspective within criminology focuses on the examination of criminal behavior within these contexts. Given its sociological origins, life-course theoretical explanations tend to focus more on social processes and structures and their impact on crime. Developmental perspectives within criminology tend to be more psychological in nature, and its theoretical explanations tend to focus more on individual characteristics and the impact of familial processes on the individual. Both of these perspectives require longitudinal data, that is, data collected over time for each individual. Collectively, developmental and life-course criminology allow for the examination of: within-individual changes over time; the impact of critical life events; the importance of the social environment; and pathways, transitions and turning points.
Article
Economic Crises, Common Crime, and Penality
José A. Brandariz and Ignacio González-Sánchez
The influence of economic crises on crime and penality is one of the fundamental issues in economic analysis of the punitive field, and the topic has been explored from various perspectives in a wide range of criminology theories. From a criminal-motivation viewpoint, economic crises are seen to favor crime-rate growth because of their serious effects of increasing unemployment, increasing in poverty, and generating inequality. Similarly, diverse economic approaches to penality (though not all of them, for example, law- and economics-based theses) hold that economic crises usually produce a rise in punitiveness and a consequent rise in incarceration rates.
However, specialized academic literature has highlighted that the generally accepted view is far from accurate in all cases. Economic crises do not necessarily produce an increase in crime (at least not in all types of crime), nor do they always lead to an increase in punitiveness. Indeed, empirical studies about the effect of diverse economic crises (the Great Depression, the oil crisis of the 1970s, and the recent Great Recession) reveal an ambiguous panorama of the evolution in crime and penality.
The impact of economic turmoil on crime and punishment should be examined in all its complexity. Crime rates and incarceration rates are hardly correlated, and the latter are far more influenced by a variegated set of political, social, cultural, and economic forces than by changes in crime patterns themselves. To scrutinize the effect of economic determinants on the penal field, the analysis of economic crises and crime should therefore be separated from the analysis of economic crises and penality. Unfortunately, there is a shortage of academic literature and empirical data on the implications of pre-21st-century financial crises for crime and punishment. The recent Great Recession thus has great utility for delving into the consequences of periods of economic chaos on crime and punitiveness.
Article
Enemy Penology
Susanne Krasmann
When Guenther Jakobs introduced the concept of “enemy criminal law” (Feindstrafrecht), or enemy penology, into the legal debate, this was due to a concern with the increasingly anticipatory nature of criminalization in German legislation in the last decades of the 20th century. Against the backdrop of a series of terror attacks in the West and the ensuing debates on how to deal with the dangers and threats of the new millennium, Jakobs’s theory gained new momentum in Germany’s public discourse and beyond. As it seems, the author himself turned the concept into a device for political intervention, declaring the notion of the enemy as indispensable for dealing with certain extreme crimes and notorious offenders, not only to prevent future crime and avert harm from society but also, and most notably, to preserve the established “citizen criminal law” (Bürgerstrafrecht): the enemy is the one to be isolated and excluded from the system. Enemy criminal law may be a peculiar legal concept. The logic of enemy penology, however, leads us to some more fundamental insights into the conundrums of liberal political thinking and attendant legal conceptions. It requires us to think about the enemy as a liminal figure that points to the preconditions and the paradoxes of our legal system. The history of criminology attests to the discipline’s struggle with penal law’s inherent limitations. And if we live today in times where exception and rule, internal security and external security, and military and police concerns increasingly overlap and intermingle in the face of ever new threats, the notion of enemy penology helps us to critically reflect on the mechanisms that drive these transformations.
Article
Evidence-Based Policing
Renée J. Mitchell
Evidence-based policing (EBP) by its original definition is “the use of the best available research on the outcomes of police work to implement guidelines and evaluate agencies, units, and officers.” Since then, the definition of EBP has been evolving, with academics adjusting the definition to better fit how police and researchers apply research in the field. EBP is best described as an approach to law enforcement and public safety. It involves the application of empirical research, scientific methods, and data-driven decision-making to policing practices, strategies, and policies. The term “evidence-based” is borrowed from the field of medicine and has been adapted to various disciplines, including education, social work, and, in this case, policing.
An EBP approach emphasizes the following:
1. Use of research and data: Implementing strategies and practices shown to be effective through rigorous research.
2. Evaluation and adaptation: Continuously assessing the effectiveness of policing methods and making adjustments based on empirical evidence.
3. Scientific methodology: Applying the principles of scientific inquiry to test the effectiveness of different policing strategies.
EBP is a practical approach that integrates scientific research into police work to improve outcomes, decision-making, and policy development in law enforcement. This approach has slowly begun to create a shift in both academics’ and practitioners’ points of view. When a paradigm shift occurs in a scientific discipline, there is always a period before the shift occurs where the definitions and parameters of the discipline are ambiguous. A paradigm shift refers to a fundamental change in the underlying assumptions or dominant methodologies within a given scientific discipline or more broadly in any intellectual field or approach. This concept was popularized by philosopher and historian of science Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Paradigm shifts can initially face resistance until the new paradigm becomes widely accepted and mainstream.
In essence, a paradigm shift is not just a small modification or improvement, but a complete overhaul of the foundational principles and methods in a particular field, leading to a new way of thinking and understanding. As EBP developed from evidence-based medicine, it has followed the same developmental trajectory of changes in definition and application, resistance to adoption, advocates and critics of the approach, and the development of societies to assist with incorporation of practices by police departments. EBP is different from other disciplines such as criminology or crime science, as the core of EBP is to use rigorous research methodologies to test policing practices in the field. The reason for this approach is to determine whether policing practices “work” under real-life circumstances rather than just theoretically. Additionally, EBP advocates argue that rigorous testing is a better approach to serving the public than having officers use anecdotes to drive practices. EBP is an approach that not all academics or practitioners agree with, but it is one way of determining the causal effects of a policing practice.
Article
Extortion and Extortion Racketeering
Atanas Rusev
Extortion as a crime has long attracted the interest of scholars, and much effort has been put into coining a precise definition that would allow distinguishing it from other similar predatory practices such as blackmail, bribery, coercion, and robbery. Academic literature classifies extortive practices according to their degree of complexity and involvement of organized crime. In this sense, the simplest form of extortion displays one offender who receives a one-time benefit from one victim, while the most sophisticated form is illustrated by racketeering, whereby an organized crime group systematically extorts money from multiple victims. Extortion as an organized crime activity can involve both episodic extortion practices and well-rooted systemic practices over a certain territory, where the latter is usually regarded as perpetrated by Mafia-type criminal organizations. Some scholars argue that extortion racketeering as a Mafia crime should be defined as sale and provision of extralegal protection services—protection of property rights, dispute resolution, and enforcement of contracts. However, others contend that extortion by Mafia-type organizations should not be counted as an economic activity but instead be considered a kind of illegal taxation that is imposed by quasi-political groups. Hence, they argue that it is a form of illegal governance and is a transfer of value that creates no economic output.
In contrast with the traditional understanding of extortion racketeering as “defining activity of organized crime,” some scholars have also focused on “extortion under color of office,” or, in other words, extortion perpetrated by public servants or politicians in their official capacity. Extortion has often been compared with bribery, since both crimes can be defined as an unlawful conversion of properties and goods belonging to someone else for one’s own personal use and benefit. The debate on the differences between bribery and extortion, however, is a contested one, and has followed two lines of argument: respectively, the degree of coercion involved in the crime and the role (or modus operandi) of public officials in the bribery and extortive scheme. The common element of both crimes is the fact that representatives of the state abuse their power and official position for their own benefit.
Article
Frameworks of Critical Race Theory
Lee E. Ross
Critical race theory (CRT) concerns the study and transformation of relationships among race, (ethnicity), racism, and power. For many scholars, CRT is a theoretical and interpretative lens that analyzes the appearance of race and racism within institutions and across literature, film, art, and other forms of social media. Unlike traditional civil rights approaches that embraced incrementalism and systematic progress, CRT questioned the very foundations of the legal order. Since the 1980s, various disciplines have relied on this theory—most notably the fields of education, history, legal studies, feminist studies, political science, psychology, sociology, and criminal justice—to address the dynamics and challenges of racism in American society. While earlier narratives may have exclusively characterized the plight of African Americans against institutional power structures, later research has advocated the importance of understanding and highlighting the narratives of all people of color. Moreover, the theoretical lenses of CRT have broadened its spectrum to include frameworks that capture the struggles and experiences of Latinx, Asian, and Native Americans as well. Taken collectively, these can be regarded as critical race studies. Each framework relies heavily on certain principles of CRT, exposing the easily obscured and often racialized power structures of American society. Included among these principles (and related tenets) is white supremacy, white privilege, interest convergence, legal indeterminacy, intersectionality, and storytelling, among others. An examination of each framework reveals its remarkable potential to inform and facilitate an understanding of racialized practices within and across American power structures and institutions, including education, employment, the legal system, housing, and health care.
