Academic literature on the topic 'Criminology; Law; Sociology'

Criminology and in more general terms ‘crime research’ have a very long tradition in Croatia, dating back in terms of formal institutionalization as far as 1906, when the Chair for Criminal-Complementary Sciences and Sociology at the Zagreb Faculty of Law was established. Despite criminology’s long institutional tradition in Croatia, criminology as a serious and independent research discipline started rather late to take off in Croatia in a systematic manner. The article presents basic facts and figures about Croatian criminology, crime and criminal justice, providing a solid overview of the complex country situation, which is still struggling with many transitional challenges. Croatia, like many other countries in the region, does not seem to have a ‘conventional crime problem’ and does not fit the profile of a ‘high crime region’ when compared with the rest of Europe, but it struggles with corruption and organized crime, and it still has to deal with atrocious crimes from the recent past and the far-reaching consequences of war profiteering and criminal ‘privatization’.

In this article, I focus on green criminology’s relationship with theory with the aim of describing some of its animating features and offering some suggestions for green criminology’s further emergence. In so doing, I examine green criminology’s intra-disciplinary theoretical engagement and the notion of applying different meanings and interpretations to established theory. Following this, I explore green criminology’s interface with theories and ideas outside criminology – what I refer to as green criminology’s extra-disciplinary theoretical engagement. I conclude by suggesting that green criminology has shed light on the etiology of environmental crime and harm (including climate change), and that it will continue to illuminate not only how and why environmental crime and harm occurs, but also the meaning of such crime and harm.

This article begins with some brief observations about the current state of sociology and the field of criminology with which it has close ties. These remarks center on a central complaint, to wit, that much of what passes for theory in sociology and criminology is fuzzy and imprecise. The article then turns to a more basic issue, namely the endemic problem of flawed writing in criminology. Bad writing in criminology and criminal justice is attributable to ineptitude, sloth, and hubris. Finally, because this is an institutional rather than an individual problem, organized efforts will be required in order to ameliorate it.

A variety of opinions and observations about public sociology are reviewed in this paper, which then examines how criminology (as a branch of sociology) has reacted to the call to ‘go public’. Dilemmas, potential strengths and manifest weaknesses are brought to light. These, it will be argued, are mostly due to the peculiar disciplinary position of criminology, an area of enquiry which, by claiming improbable independence from sociology, is forced to neglect those very sociological concepts that would indeed make it more ‘public’.

In this article we use Emirbayer and Desmond’s institutional reflexivity framework to critically examine the production of racial knowledge in British criminology. Identifying weakness, neglect and marginalization in theorizing race and racism, we focus principally on the disciplinary unconscious element of their three-tier framework, identifying and interrogating aspects of criminology’s ‘obligatory problematics’, ‘habits of thought’ and ‘position-taking’ as well as its institutional structure and social relations that combine to render the discipline ‘institutionally white’. We also consider, briefly, aspects of criminology’s relationship to race, racism and whiteness in the USA. The final part of the article makes the case for British criminology to engage in telling and narrating racisms, urging it to understand the complexities of race in our subject matter, avoid its reduction to class and inequality, and to pay particular attention to reflexivity, history, sociology and language, turning to face race with postcolonial tools and resolve.

The article substantiates the approach of domestic criminology to social and legal sciences. The authors analyze other approaches, according to which criminology is a part of criminal law and is the result of the application of sociological methods in criminal-legal research, or is a branch of knowledge beyond the legal sciences. The difference in the subject of criminal law and criminology is stated. It lies primarily in the fact that criminal law does not study crime, and the study of crime is carried out mainly as a legal phenomenon; criminal law examines the prevention of crimes carried out by the measures of criminal-legal policy (punishment, probationary conviction, etc.). Criminology studies mainly criminality but crime is studied as a social phenomenon and as a private expression of criminality; criminology examines crime prevention by measures that make up the content of criminological policy (control, assistance, educational impact, etc.). It is noted that despite the use of basically unified terminology both in criminal law and criminology, the content of the same terms e.g. “crime”, "criminal identity," "prevention," "criminal group" etc. is different. The authors believe that the use of methods and approaches developed by other sciences e.g. sociology, social psychology, etc. in criminological studies does not turn criminology into the branch of knowledge beyond the legal sciences. Using the borrowed methods and approaches criminology studies criminality as not only a social phenomenon, but a criminal-legal one, consisting of acts recognized as crimes in criminal law. The socio-legal nature of criminality, which is the main subject of criminology, the use in criminological research of methods of other social sciences and approaches developed by them, enable the authors to conclude that criminology is a complex social and legal science.

Law enforcement analysis is increasingly utilized by police organizations to help its warranted officials understand the public safety and security environment and make decisions about threats, harms and risks. While there is a well-developed practitioner literature and a number of evaluative studies about law enforcement analysis, there has been little empirical research into the day-to-day work practice of law enforcement analysis. This thesis utilizes participant observation and semi-structured interviews to construct an ethnography of the daily work practice of law enforcement analysis in three sites in the USA, Ireland and the UK. This empirical research at the intersection of the organizational structures and work cultures of both the law enforcement analytic units and the larger police organisation to which they belong helps explain not only how knowledge is created but also what knowledge and why. The thesis concludes that while law enforcement analysis produces valuable knowledge about current threats and harms and plays a role in organizational risk management, a variety of factors circumscribe the type of knowledge that is produced. The result is that the future is left largely unknown and that law enforcement analysts play a limited role in brokering organizational uncertainty about the public safety and security environment.

With overwhelming public support, pressure has been mounting on police departments to improve accountability and public trust by equipping their officers with body worn cameras (BWCs) to reduce police violence and hold officers responsible for excessive use of force, unjustified shootings, and other forms of misconduct. As police departments have begun to employ BWCs, however, concerns have risen regarding the application of this new technology and its potential to benefit police officers more so than the communities they serve. This study focuses on the city of Chicago’s recently implemented Body Worn Camera Pilot Program. The goals of this study were to determine if racial demographics could predict which of Chicago’s 22 police districts received BWCs during its pilot program, and whether and to what extent BWCs and the racial makeup of those districts influenced the arrest to crime ratios within them. A preliminary analysis revealed crime rates were not a statistically significant predictor for whether a district received BWCs. There was, however, an association between race and BWCs, where majority white police districts were much less likely to receive the technology. Standard multiple regressions indicate that as the white population percentage increases, arrests decrease. This finding was statistically significant at the .05 alpha level while controlling for the crime rate and BWC implementation. Three-way mixed ANOVA models were run to compare arrest to crime ratios pre- and post-BWC implementation for overall crime, serious crime, violent crime, non-index crime, and property crime. Although no significant two- or three-way interactions were found in any of the ANOVA models, when plotting the pre- and posttest arrest ratios there were noticeable differences between control and experimental groups across race.

Since deinstitutionalization, the responsibility for mentally ill members of society has shifted to the criminal justice system in a process of trans-institutionalization or “criminalization of mental illness” (Slate & Johnson, 2013, p. 28). Though various groups have been studied to ascertain their perception of mentally ill individuals and offenders, previous research focuses largely on students of psychology, social work, and medicine. Little research has been conducted regarding the perceptions of criminal justice students toward mental illness, despite the increasing involvement of the criminal justice system in treating and handling mentally ill individuals in the past thirty years. This exploratory research serves as a replication to a study which was conducted by Thompson, Paulson, Valgardson, Nored, and Johnson (2014).

Peace bonds are a legal tool of governance dating back to 13th c. England. In Canada, a significant change in the application of peace bonds took place in the mid-1990s, shifting their purpose from governing minor disputes between individuals to allowing for persons who have not been charged with a crime to be governed as if they had. Given the legal test for a peace bond has always been the determination of ‘reasonable fear’, the advent of these ‘specialized’ peace bonds suggests that the object of reasonable fear has changed. Despite their lengthy history, peace bonds have limited coverage in academic literature, a weakness compounded by a predominant doctrinal approach based in a liberal framework. The central inquiry of this thesis moves beyond this predominant perspective of ‘peace bonds as crime prevention’ by developing a governmental criminology, which deepens our understanding of the role of specialized peace bond law in contemporary society. Specifically, governmental criminology takes a Foucaultian critical legal studies approach, which acknowledges legal pluralism and sets out the historical context required for analysis. Ultimately, by unearthing underlying social, economic, and political power relations it is possible to critique the accompanying modes of calculation of fear and risk, thus challenging the regimes of practices that make specialized peace bonds possible. Specialized peace bonds merely manage the consequences of a criminal justice system limited by social, political, and economic circumstances, in a broader biopolitical project of integrating risky populations.

The geographic concentration of crime led to the proposal of the law of crime concentration in 2015 by David Weisburd. This contribution to crime and place literature needs further research to properly define, measure, and confirm this law. This study builds upon measurement techniques used in previous studies to measure crime concentration across a random sample of mid-sized cities, estimate the expected Gini coefficient in mid-sized cities, and analyze the variation in crime concentration across mid-sized cities. Determining the expected level of crime concentration and whether it varies across cities will advance the literature by providing both a benchmark for and a test of the law of crime concentration. This study brings a unique perspective on crime concentration, by having a random sample of midsized cities, representing varying regions in the United States. This filled in gaps within the literature that gravely needed to be addressed (i.e., smaller, midsized cities, larger sample size, and regionally representative.

The problem addressed through this program evaluation was that no formal study had been conducted regarding the implementation and effectiveness of the BlueTeam Program (BTP) within the law enforcement agency (LEA) serving as the study site. The BTP is a program that utilizes a computer application to track officer behaviors and alert administrators to potential trends in officer misconduct and complaints against officers. The program evaluation was guided by the process and product segments of Stufflebeam's (2003) content, input, process, and product model.

To conduct the evaluation, the researcher used a mixed methods approach for analyzing both qualitative and quantitative data. The perceptions of LEA stakeholders regarding the BTP, such as the sufficiency of staffing, budget, training, and ongoing support for effective implementation, were first collected. Quantitative data, consisting of archived, deidentified indicators of officer misconduct and complaints against officers acquired through the BTP, were then analyzed.

Findings of the study were that the BTP was effective in reducing incidents of officer misconduct and complaints against officers and for use in identifying which alerts were valid indicators of misconduct and complaints against officers. The one concern of stakeholders involving the BTP was limited nighttime vision; the recommendation for program improvement is that this shortcoming be addressed to determine possible solutions. Recommendations for future research involve the need for initial determinations, as well as formative evaluations, pertaining to the following three areas: (a) ascertaining the way in which the early intervention system will be used, (b) identifying the indicators of misconduct that will be tracked, and (c) determining the threshold at which the system will issue an alert.

In order to help the fight against organised crime, particularly drug dealing, the problem of money laundering has become more significant.
The various techniques used by money launderers are also subject of this thesis. Through the many ways utilised to launder money, it shows how difficult it is to pinpoint what action is on the border of legality and what is not.
These difficulties become more apparent when precise analysis is made of the law as applied in both Switzerland and the U.S.A.
Neither approach has proven successful. On the contrary, the question of constitutionality of many rules becomes relevant. Many authors do not find the application of the laws easy from the point of view of constitutional law.
The present thesis suggests to review the present laws and redefine them in a simpler manner which makes them acceptable internationally.

Responses to sex offenders often involve collective campaigns that target political and criminal justice systems rather than individual offenders. Scholars have described these community responses as part of a broader moral panic, but that interpretation generally overlooks differences in the form of responses across places. This dissertation uses data from case studies of three California towns to examine how local political and legal contexts contribute to variation in community responses to violent sex offenders. I argue that communities' orientations to authority shape how they respond to perceived injustices.

I introduce my main arguments and overarching concepts in chapter one. Then, in chapter two, I explore why communities deploy moral authority in service of their collective goals. Moral authority is an endogenous source of community power, and moral claims emerge within formal institutional contexts that allow for and even encourage morally based arguments. Because these institutions limit the effectiveness of moral claims, communities sometimes turn to other mobilization strategies. Chapter three shows how an orientation to political authority as a source of entitlement contributed to one community rallying around political mobilization. I contrast this case with a second community in which an orientation to political authority as a source of alienation contributed to ambivalence toward political strategies. In chapter four, I argue that the third community's orientation to legal authority as a source of protection contributed to litigation as the centerpiece of their response. I compare this case to the second community in which legal authority was perceived as a source of control, which facilitated indifference toward legal mobilization.

This research contributes to a new perspective on participation in moral panic as a contemporary form of civic engagement. By illuminating the social processes underlying the relationships between communities and formal institutions, my findings have implications for understanding community responses to crime, legal and political mobilization, collective action, and social control within communities. More practically, this research can inform discussions about how community members should be involved in decision-making about sex offender reintegration.

This study deals with the French action civile, whereby the victim of a criminal offence may participate, as civil party, in the criminal proceedings brought against the offender, and there claim reparation from such offender if he can prove that he has suffered loss or damage directly resulting from the offence. This procedure differs from what obtains in the common-law jurisdictions, where a crime victim's participation in the criminal trial is limited to being a witness for the prosecution, and can only bring an action for damages before the civil courts.
In addition to examining the requirements for the admissibility of the action civile, the study elicits certain procedural and evidentiary issues, such as the burden and standard of proof, the Civilian approach to tortious liability, res judicata, the problem of judicial interpretation of code provisions by a common-law jurisdiction and the respective merits that justify the civil party action. These issues occasionally provide the background for a critical and comparative analysis in relation to common-law procedural practice.
The study also seeks to demonstrate the need for greater victim participation in the criminal process and, thereby, attempts to defeat the generally-held view in common-law jurisdictions that the victim's place is the witness box. In this way, it may be a helpful source of reference for a common-law - Civil law mixed system, like Cameroon's, that is going through a legal harmonisation process, and other common-law jurisdictions that may want to adopt the civil party procedure.

Since as long as one can remember, child protection and juvenile delinquency have been included in the same field. And today's centers for readaptation do indeed accommodate, as did the institutions for minors of the 19th century, both the problem children in need of protection and the juvenile offenders. Such institutions always had the same mandate: to lock up recalcitrant youth in order to better discipline them. Now, the evolution of the legal system has been such that the rights of young offenders are much better protected, at least formally, then those of the minors in need of protection.

‘Introducing criminology’ explains that according to American criminologist, Edwin Sutherland, criminology is the body of knowledge regarding crime as a social phenomenon including within its scope the process of making and breaking laws, and reacting to the breaking of laws. Criminology dates back to the late 18th century when small groups of people developed an interest in explaining crime alongside their main occupations such as running asylums or collecting statistics on prisons or court proceedings. There was no form of collective enterprise until the end of the 19th century. During the 20th century, ‘criminology’ gradually formed and solidified. Its constitutive disciplines include sociology, history, psychology, law, and statistics.

Criminology’s concerns already encompass matters of sociology, psychology, law, political science, economics, history, and biology to name a few. Essentially, criminology’s focus remains those forms of human conduct we treat as criminal or deviant, or which produce such harms that intervention is argued to be necessary. ‘Where next for criminology?’ suggests that the swiftly changing nature of the world we inhabit poses huge challenges for criminologists that cannot be ignored: globalization, the increasingly complex and transnational nature of economic authority, the growing voluntary and forced movement of peoples across borders, the spreading power and influence of the Internet and new communication technologies, and the profound risks posed by environmental change.

The on-line course on criminological topics carried out in an undergraduate course for “Security and Social Control Operators” (Faculty of Political Science “Ruffilli”, University of Bologna) represented a real challenge for three different reasons: 1) it was inserted in the syllabus of a three year undergraduate course which was the first university course in Italy intended for the training of operators to carry out an activity which calls for being able to manage modern investigative, security and control strategies; 2) it dealt with the teaching of criminology and it is useful to emphasise that, in Italy, criminology has a difficult time freeing itself from similar disciplines (legal medicine, criminal law, sociology, psychology), even while knowing that it has to maintain a good relationship with them; and 3) it dealt with one of the first on-line courses activated at the Faculty “Ruffilli”. The case study describes and critically analyses the implementation of the online criminology course.

During the summer of 2014, an explosive arrest was splashed across Midwestern newspapers: a young gay black man in a conservative county in Missouri and the accusations against him quickly became a flashpoint for racial and sexual politics—leading some critics to charge that HIV-specific criminal laws target gay black men. This chapter draws on an original dataset of convictions under HIV-specific criminal laws in six states to evaluate whether the enforcement of HIV exposure and disclosure laws has discriminatory effects. Findings show that victim characteristics—rather than defendant demographics—shape uneven patterns in the application of the law. This victim impact flips expected patterns of discrimination on their head, resulting in more convictions among heterosexual and white defendants; at sentencing, black defendants are punished more severely, women are treated more leniently, and men accused of not disclosing their HIV status to women are punished more harshly than those accused by men. This chapter digests these trends using the tools of sociology, epidemiology, and criminology to offer a specific diagnosis for reform.

This book examines whether more international legal instruments and procedures would be helpful while probing the actions that states can take in tandem to the large and increasingly elaborate international human rights legal system. It combines research in anthropology, criminology, economics, history, law, political science, psychology, and sociology with practical insight from the people in the field who are engaged in human rights promotion. Its goal is to develop a strategy for stewardship that could help make human rights more of a reality. Part I of the book considers what is known about why people (notably leaders of governments and their envoys) commit human rights abuses. Part II deals with the international human rights legal system that has emerged over the last six decades. Part III explores what governments themselves are doing to advance human rights abroad.

The chapter introduces the research aims, conceptual framework, and methodology of the book. Departing from the story of the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) as a global civil society achievement, and previous research into how global and local civil society disagreed on their support for the ICC’s intervention into the conflict in northern Uganda (where the latter pointed to how it jeopardized ongoing peace talks) the chapter lays out the central aim of the book: to explore how the role of international human rights NGOs in international criminal justice yields empirical insight into the meaning of punishment at the global level of analysis. It identifies three separate yet interrelated sets of analytic questions guiding the inquiry: (i) What are the roles of NGOs in international criminal justice? (ii) What characterizes punishment ‘gone global’? and (iii) How is international criminal justice constituted by and of ‘the global’? The chapter situates the analysis through a brief background section on the development and institutions of international criminal justice, and contextualizes the ICC’s intervention in Uganda. It delineates the theoretical orientations for the study’s conceptual framework and contribution to a sociology of punishment for international criminal justice, drawing on a range of literatures across criminology, sociology, international relations, and international law. It then describes the organization of the book and its relation to the research strategy, before addressing the study’s methodology of a multi-sited network ethnography, its empirical data, and ethical considerations.