British Journal of Criminology - current issue

Auditable Community: The Moral Order of Megan's Law

Levi, R. — 2008-08-18

Criminological research identifies the turn to community as part of a broader move away from the welfarist social. Yet, while we now have significant research on how community is made governmental within crime prevention strategies, we know less about how the zone of community is itself rendered governable—how neoliberal programmes delimit and control the moral order of the community they are said to promote. This paper focuses on the community notification of sex offenders in the United States, often known as Megan's Law. Drawing on research that identifies the increasing role of audit technologies for achieving control within organizations, this paper explores how Megan's Law similarly relies on a logic of audit to identify, manage and control the symbolic zone of community.

Black Drug Dealers In A White Welfare State: Cannabis Dealing and Street Capital in Norway

Sandberg, S. — 2008-08-18

This study is based upon ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with ethnic minority cannabis dealers at a street drug market in Oslo, Norway. Three dealers’ socio-biographies are presented and used to illustrate three groups of dealers, and three ideal–typical trajectories to street drug dealing. The first trajectory emerges from migration and early experiences in war-inflicted countries. The second emerges from an increasing drug habit and early socialization in established criminal networks, and the third from an alternative search for identity. The analysis is based on the concept ‘street capital’, inspired by Pierre Bourdieu. This theoretical framework highlights the embodied character of cultural knowledge, the importance of early socialization, and the practical rationality involved when young people start dealing illegal drugs.

Chivalry, 'Race' and Discretion at the Canadian Border

Pratt, A., Thompson, S. K. — 2008-08-18

A thorough-going ambiguity surrounds the very meaning of racial profiling at the border. This ambiguity, including in particular the slippage between race/nationality, effectively enables both official denials of racial profiling as well as the continued play of racialized risk knowledges at the border. In this paper, we take this ambiguity seriously and trace the dynamic and heterogeneous configurations of racialized knowledges that constitute border risks and that shape the broad discretion of frontline border control officers in Canada. This discretion, emboldened by the crime–security nexus, is itself shaped by a protectionist logic that represents the nation as ‘damsel in distress’, border officers as her guardians and the border as the thin blue line in need of constant vigilance.

Masculinity, Rurality And Violence

Carrington, K., Scott, J. — 2008-08-18

The assumption that the size, anonymity and weakened social controls of urban living generates social conflict, disorganization and higher rates of crime and violence has been an article of faith in much criminological and social scientific inquiry since the nineteenth century (i.e. Tönnies 1897; Shaw and McKay 1931; Levin and Lindesmith 1937; Nisbet 1970; Baldwin and Bottoms 1976; Felson 1994). The paper challenges this article of criminological faith and questions the utility of urban centric criminological theorizing about the causes of violence in rural settings. Drawing on descriptive data that show that rural men present a relatively high risk of inflicting harm upon themselves and others, this paper explores the larger socio-criminological question as to why this might be. The question is examined in relation to the processes of community formation that shape the everyday architecture of rural life. We explore how that architecture has historically valorized violent expressions of masculinity grounded in a relationship between men's bodies and the rural landscapes they inhabit—but how the legitimacy of these violent expressions are being challenged by sweeping social, economic and political changes. One psycho-social response to these sweeping social changes to rural life, we conclude, is a resort to violence as a largely strategic practice deployed to recreate an imagined rural gender order.

The Recidivism of Offenders Given Suspended Sentences in New South Wales, Australia

Weatherburn, D., Bartels, L. — 2008-08-18

The suspended sentence has been described as the ‘Sword of Damocles’ and praised as a means of exploiting the deterrent effects of prison while avoiding some of its human and financial costs. The deterrent value of suspended sentences is said to derive from the fact that the consequences of reoffending during the period of a suspended sentence are ‘known and certain’, whereas those attending a breach of probation are not. Past research, however, has shown that suspended sentences do little to reduce the use of imprisonment and, in some cases, actually increase it. Studies purporting to show the deterrent effectiveness of suspended sentences, on the other hand, have been few in number and methodologically weak. In this article, we use propensity matching to compare the effect of suspended sentences on recidivism to that of supervised bonds. We find no difference in rates of reconviction following the imposition of these sanctions. The implications of this finding for the UK system of suspended sentences are discussed.

'A Want of Order and Good Discipline': Rules, Discretion and the Victorian Prison. By Richard W. Ireland (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007, 302pp. {pound}45.00) * Punish or Treat? Medical Care in English Prisons 1770-1850. By Peter McRorie Higgins(Victoria: Trafford, 2007, 283pp. {pound}14.99)

Johnston, H. — 2008-08-18

Intimacy and Responsibility: The Criminalisation of HIV Transmission. By Matthew Weait (London and New York: Routledge-Cavendish, Glasshouse, 2007, 233pp. {pound}19.95 pb)

Cowling, M. — 2008-08-18

US Foreign Policy And The War on Drugs. By Cornelius Friesendorf (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007, 230pp. {pound} 75.00)

Ruggiero, V. — 2008-08-18

Out of Sight: Crime, Youth and Exclusion in Modern Britain. By Robert McAuley (Cullompton: Willan Publishing, 2007, 196pp. {pound}42.00)

Goldsmith, C. — 2008-08-18

Regulating the Night: Race, Culture and Exclusion in the Making of the Night-Time Economy. By Deborah Talbot (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, 164pp. {pound}50.00 hb)

Hadfield, P. — 2008-08-18

Issues in Green Criminology: Confronting Harms Against Environments, Humanity and Other Animals. By Piers Beirne and Nigel South, eds (Willan, 2007, 317pp. {pound}51.99 hb, {pound}22.99 pb)

Wyatt, T. — 2008-08-18

Genetic Policing: The Use of DNA in Criminal Investigations. By Robin Williams and Paul Johnson (Willan Publishing, 2008)

Heffernan, L. — 2008-08-18