Routledge Studies in Crime and Society – serie

Criminology, the discipline that informs our understanding of crime and justice, is facing an identity crisis. Long dominated by sociology’s view of crime and its causes, criminology has recently witnessed the rise of a new cadre of academics who feel free to explore other explanations. Fairness and Crime: A Theory offers a comprehensive new perspective on criminal behavior that will reinvigorate the field and help us understand why we consider some acts criminal as well as why and how society should respond to those acts.In this book, Mark S. Davis connects the challenges of understanding crime and administering justice to common norms that guide behavior in everyday life. He contends that the exchanges society defines as criminal work basically the way all other exchanges, and when offenders rob banks, bilk investors, or fabricate scientific data, they engage in a violation of fairness norms. Davis offers a theory that is informed by insights from game theory research, anthropology, law, industrial/organizational psychology, personality/social psychology, and sociology. He utilizes examples drawn from everyday life to illustrate the theory’s concepts in detail.Fairness and Crime: A Theory provides a platform from which to explore the purposes of the criminal justice system. What are we trying to accomplish when we prosecute criminal suspects? While one answer is that we are trying to vindicate the moral order and deter future offending, another is that we are attempting to restore equity for victims caused by offenders’ exploitative or retaliatory behavior. Davis contends that addressing unfairness is what the criminal justice system should be about. In rehabilitation, we should be trying to inculcate fairness norms where they are absent or where they have been compromised.

The Criminalisation and Exploitation of Children in Care explores the results of a recent qualitative study, which focused on multi-agency responses to children and young people in residential and foster care who were at risk of criminalisation and/or exploitation and abuse.Recent high-profile reports have highlighted an urgent need for effective multi-agency work to tackle the issues of criminalisation and exploitation of children and young people in care. However, progress to date has been slow, and it is clear that there is still some way to go before effective multi-agency working becomes widespread. In response, this book draws upon the experiences and perspectives of practitioners from a sample of co-located Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hubs, as well as the latest research, theory and policy developments in the field. In doing so, it explores both the benefits and challenges of multi-agency working and concludes with recommendations for future policy and practice.This timely study will be of great interest to students and scholars of criminology, criminal justice, policing studies, social work, health and childhood studies. It will also be a valuable tool for practitioners and policymakers in the criminal, youth justice and social service arenas.

Justice, Indigenous Peoples, and Canada: A History of Courage and Resilience brings together the work of a number of leading researchers to provide a broad overview of criminal justice issues that Indigenous people in Canada have faced historically and continue to face today. Both Indigenous and Canadian scholars situate current issues of justice for Indigenous peoples, broadly defined, within the context of historical realities and ongoing developments.By examining how justice is defined, both from within Indigenous communities and outside of them, this volume examines the force of Constitutional reform and subsequent case law on Indigenous rights historically and in contemporary contexts. It then expands the discussion to include theoretical considerations, particularly settler colonialism, that help explain how ongoing oppressive and assimilationist agendas continue to affect how so-called "justice" is administered. From a critical perspective, the book examines the operation of the criminal justice system, through bail, specialized courts, policing, sentencing, incarceration and release. It explores legal frameworks as well as current issues that have significantly affected Indigenous peoples, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, human rights, resurgence and identity. This unique collection of perspectives exposes the disconcerting agenda of historical and modern-day Canadian federal government policy and the continued denial of Indigenous rights to self-determination. It is essential reading for those interested in the struggles of the Indigenous peoples in Canada as well as anyone studying race, crime and justice.

In recent years, western societies have experienced a fundamental transformation in the way crime is understood and dealt with. Against the backdrop of a current great interest in narratives in criminology, this book draws on a narrative perspective to explore this transformation.Drawing on data from Germany, the book focuses on changing narratives of youth crime in recent decades and the exact narratives that have been used, abandoned, invented or criticized in order to instil particular understandings of crime and measures to act against it. The author draws upon a wide range of sources, including debates on youth crime in six parliaments from 1970 to 2012; articles on youth crime in four police and six social work journals from 1970 to 2009; and case studies with 15 young defendants who were interviewed before and after their trial and whose trial was observed. In doing so, the author reconstructs narratives over several decades and, overall, reveals a fascinating and multifaceted scope of narratives of youth crime. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of youth crime and justice, as well as criminology, sociology, politics and social work more broadly.

The concept of deviance is complex, given that norms vary considerably across groups, times, and places. Society tends to primarily recognize traditional portraits of deviants such as street-offenders and drug addicts. The label "deviant" is commonly cast upon society’s undesirables, but this socially constructed image often overlooks subtler—and arguably more dangerous—deviance. Physician malfeasance is an especially problematic form, given that medical professionals garner trust, autonomy, and prestige from society, which allows them to operate outside of the public eye. This book responds to a growing number of concerns regarding deviant physician actions such as physically and sexually abusive behaviors, fabricating medical findings and records, and taking advantage of patients (e.g., filing fraudulent Medicaid claims). It explores theoretical explanations for physician deviance, and goes on to consider potential responses such as Medicaid Fraud Control Units, the Questionable Doctors database, and the ability of doctors to police themselves. The unique perspective offered in this book informs discussions of white-collar crime and deviance and has important implications for researchers, policymakers, and students involved in criminal justice and public policy.

Who are the perpetrators of modern slavery? Why do they exploit others? What might be done to stop exploitation recurring? These are the questions answered in this book. Reporting on the first primary study of modern slavery offenders, the book depicts the findings of in-depth interviews with people accused of, and convicted for, committing modern slavery offences. The different forms that modern slavery takes are explained chapter by chapter: organized crime, people smuggling, labour exploitation, domestic servitude, sham marriage, the trafficking of adults for sexual exploitation and child sex trafficking. Using case studies to illuminate the perspectives of those deemed perpetrators, we show that few modern slavery offenders conform to stereotypes of people traffickers.Through an interpretive analysis of offenders’ life stories, we reveal the points in the past and present where interventions could have prevented victims from becoming trapped in exploitation. We show that while national governments and international bodies often appear resolute in their efforts to tackle modern slavery and people trafficking, they have also obscured their own roles in compounding the plights of those at the sharp ends of globalization. In racializing the actions of sex traffickers, grooming gangs, and organized criminals, the modern slavery agenda has mystified the roles market dynamics, the absence of workers’ rights, and immigration controls play in generating vulnerabilities to exploitation.This book will be of interest to a wide range of students, policymakers and practitioners concerned with modern slavery, human trafficking, border control and immigration, globalization and inequality, as well as the more disciplinefocused criminological audiences concerned with why people commit crimes, what should be done about them and the, often paradoxical, consequences of social control across borders. Given the book’s strong focus on narrative, psychosocial and social network methodologies, it will also appeal to audiences across the social sciences concerned with applying these novel approaches to difficult to reach populations.

It is generally accepted that men commit more crimes than women. The widespread acceptance of this view is based primarily on the number of convictions with most jurisdictions reporting considerably fewer incarcerated women/girls than men/boys. This manuscript argues however that decisions made by the various stakeholders that play a role in the incarceration of men are inherently gendered. These decisions are based on patriarchal perceptions and stereotypes related to the familial roles of men and women, and by extension their motivations or offending. Few studies have sought to explore the nature of these perceptions, and the effect these may have on incarceration patterns. Indeed, this form of inquiry remains absent from the research agenda of Caribbean criminologists. Using qualitative data from Barbados, this book analyses the extent to which these factors are taken into consideration not only by the police and members of the judiciary, but by examining the gendered decisions made by shop managers and proprietors in cases involving shoplifting, it seeks to analyse the extent to which these factors are taken into consideration before incidents reach the justice system. Critically, this book seeks also to juxtapose these assumptions against testimony from men incarcerated at Her Majesty’s Prison. The large proportion of males in Caribbean prisons when compared to their female counterparts necessitates an investigation into the factors that may contribute to differential treatment as they move through the justice system. Using data from Barbados, the present study seeks to fill this need.

Research on cybercrime has been largely bifurcated, with social science and computer science researchers working with different research agendas. These fields have produced parallel scholarship to understand cybercrime offending and victimization, as well as techniques to harden systems from compromise and understand the tools used by cybercriminals. The literature developed from these two fields is diverse and informative, but until now there has been minimal interdisciplinary scholarship combining their insights in order to create a more informed and robust body of knowledge. This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to research on cybercrime and lays out frameworks for collaboration between the fields. Bringing together international experts, this book explores a range of issues from malicious software and hacking to victimization and fraud. This work also provides direction for policy changes to both cybersecurity and criminal justice practice based on the enhanced understanding of cybercrime that can be derived from integrated research from both the technical and social sciences. The authors demonstrate the breadth of contemporary scholarship as well as identifying key questions that could be addressed in the future or unique methods that could benefit the wider research community. This edited collection will be key reading for academics, researchers, and practitioners in both computer security and law enforcement. This book is also a comprehensive resource for postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students undertaking courses in social and technical studies.

Domestic violence does not discriminate and is prevalent throughout the word regardless of race, age or socio-economic status. Why, then, do reactions and response differ so widely throughout the world? While some countries work diligently to address the matter through prevention and training, others take a ‘hands-off’ approach in their response. This book is one of the first to investigate domestic violence on a global scale and provides best practices gleaned from various countries around the world to paint a detailed picture of how police response to domestic violence is currently being conducted and provide training bodies with up-to-date information to enhance current curricula.Domestic Violence in International Context brings together expert scholars native to twelve different countries to examine the history and scope of domestic violence and how it is being addressed, repressed or ignored in their thirteen respective countries. Their specialised knowledge and unique data come together to create a series of snapshots that will guide nations, societies and communities worldwide in formulating effective strategies to prevent, intervene and combat this epidemic, and examine partnerships and programmes already in place.This book is essential reading for practitioners, policy makers, and human rights organisations, as well as students and scholars of criminology, social work, sociology and law.

Drawing on empirical research conducted with police in the UK and Romania, Child Trafficking in the EU explores the way in which the ‘who’ and ‘how’ we police and protect as trafficker and trafficked is related to Western notions of innocence, guilt, childhood, and of the status of ‘deserving’ victim. This book progresses a new theoretical space by linking its analysis to sociologies of mobility, marginalisation and the pluralised rendering of criminalised and victimised ‘others’. This book explores core contextual themes surrounding the commission, response to and origins of child trafficking, and presents empirical research into the investigation of child trafficking within the EU, situating the authors’ findings against broader social, cultural, political, policy and judicial contexts. The authors conclude with a synthetisation of the key themes and arguments to situate pan-EU child trafficking within political, criminal justice, organisational, cultural, and social contexts, and consider the degree to which such criminality can be can adequately addressed by current and emerging approaches given such enduring and persistent structural issues. This book will be of interest to scholars and students within the fields of criminology, sociology, political science and law, as well as a key resource for practitioners and activists.

The last twenty years have seen an explosion in the development of information technology, to the point that people spend a major portion of waking life in online spaces. While there are enormous benefits associated with this technology, there are also risks that can affect the most vulnerable in our society but also the most confident. Cybercrime and its victims explores the social construction of violence and victimisation in online spaces and brings together scholars from many areas of inquiry, including criminology, sociology, and cultural, media, and gender studies.The book is organised thematically into five parts. Part one addresses some broad conceptual and theoretical issues. Part two is concerned with issues relating to sexual violence, abuse, and exploitation, as well as to sexual expression online. Part three addresses issues related to race and culture. Part four addresses concerns around cyberbullying and online suicide, grouped together as ‘social violence’. The final part argues that victims of cybercrime are, in general, neglected and not receiving the recognition and support they need and deserve. It concludes that in the volatile and complex world of cyberspace continued awareness-raising is essential for bringing attention to the plight of victims. It also argues that there needs to be more support of all kinds for victims, as well as an increase in the exposure and punishment of perpetrators. Drawing on a range of pressing contemporary issues such as online grooming, sexting, cyber-hate, cyber-bulling and online radicalization, this book examines how cyberspace makes us more vulnerable to crime and violence, how it gives rise to new forms of surveillance and social control and how cybercrime can be prevented.

Money is the most frequently means used in the legal system to punish and regulate. Monetary penalties outnumber all other sanctions delivered by criminal justice in many jurisdictions, imprisonment included. More people pay fines than go to prison and in some jurisdictions many of those in prison are there because of failure to pay their fines. Therefore, it is surprising how little has been written in the Anglophone academic world about the nature of money sanctions and their specific characteristics as legal sanctions.In many ways, legal innovations related to money sanctions have been poorly understood. This book argues that they are a direct consequence of the changing meaning of money. Considering the ‘meaninglessness’ of modern money, the book aims to examine the history of changing conceptions in how fines have been conceived and used. Using a set of interpretative techniques sensitive to how money and freedom are perceived, the genealogy of the penal fine is presented as a story of constant reformulation in response to shifting political pressures and changes in intellectual developments that influenced ideological commitments of legislators and practitioners.This book is multi-disciplinary and will appeal to those engaged with criminology, sociology and philosophy of punishment, socio-legal studies, and criminal law.

Technological developments move at lightening pace and can bring with them new possibilities for social harm. This book brings together original empirical and theoretical work examining how digital technologies both create and sustain various forms of gendered violence and provide platforms for resistance and criminal justice intervention. This edited collection is organised around two key themes of facilitation and resistance, with an emphasis through the whole collection on the development of a gendered interrogation of contemporary practices of technologically-enabled or enhanced practices of violence. Addressing a broad range of criminological issues such as intimate partner violence, rape and sexual assault, online sexual harassment, gendered political violence, online culture, cyberbullying, and human trafficking, and including a critical examination of the broader issue of feminist ‘digilantism’ and resistance to online sexual harassment, this book examines the ways in which new and emerging technologies facilitate new platforms for gendered violence as well as offering both formal and informal opportunities to prevent and/or respond to gendered violence.

Circles of Support and Accountability is a voluntary initiative that assists people with convictions for sexual offences to resettle in the community. People leaving prison with such convictions often have difficulties in resettling. They carry the burden of the conviction itself, which may be both stigmatising and isolating, and they are the subject of sex offender register requirements, parole and other supervisory conditions.Circles of Support and Accountability in the UK started over ten years ago and have slowly spread across the country. They work closely with the police and probation services but rely entirely on volunteers prepared to give up their time to work with people often otherwise shunned by communities. Circles offer support to the person concerned but also hold them accountable for their future behaviour. They aim to ensure there are ‘no more victims’.This book is based on original research and provides a close-up picture of how these Circles of Support and Accountability work in practice. It brings together for the first time the voices of all the participants, from the offenders and the volunteers through to the Coordinators who link the volunteers to the professionals in the form of the police and probation services.The research was commissioned by Circles UK and funded by the Wates Foundation and the University of Leeds, School of Law.

Sex offenders remain the most hated group of offenders, subject to a myriad of regulations and punishments beyond imprisonment, including sex offender registries, chemical and surgical castration, and global positioning electronic monitoring systems. While aspects of their experiences of imprisonment are documented, less is known about how sex offenders experience prison and community corrections spaces – and the implications of their status on their treatment and safety in such environments.Violence, Sex Offenders, and Corrections critically assesses what is meant by the term ‘sex offender’, and acknowledges that such meanings are socially constructed, situated, and contingent. The book explores the person, crime, penal space, sexual orientation, legislation, and the community experiences of labelled sex offenders as well as the experiences of correctional officers working with said custodial populations. Ricciardelli and Spencer use conceptions of gender and embodiment to analyze how sex offenders are constituted as objects of fear and disgust and as deserving subjects of abjection and violence.

Despite high crime rates among men in the Caribbean, rising rates of violence against women in the region, and a significant number of Caribbean nationals incarcerated abroad due to drug smuggling, existing research has yet to offer explanations that are tailored to the unique Caribbean societies and the individuals in them. This edited volume adds to the existing body of scientific, empirical and theoretical work on crime (victimization), and criminal justice in the Caribbean, with a specific focus on impacts of post-colonialism and gender. To investigate these impacts on a developing Caribbean criminology, the contributions in this volume focus on how impacts of post-colonialism, associated racial stereotypes, and/or gender throughout the Caribbean impact on (a) types of offending, (b) victimization, and (c) criminal justice system responses and policies. Bringing together a broad range of experts, this book sheds light on key criminological topics in the Caribbean, including victimization, risk factors for offending, subcultures of violence and particularly gendered violence, and the role of motherhood within matrifocal societies. It is essential reading for those engaged with Caribbean - or decolonial - Criminology and those engaged with comparative and international studies in crime and justice more generally.

This book draws upon interviews with teenage young people to explore their perspectives on risk and harm in ‘youth sexting culture’. It focuses specifically on digital sexual image-sharing among young people. It contextualises the findings in terms of the wider literature on youth sexting and the broader theoretical and conceptual debates about the phenomenon in public and academic spheres. The book explores young people’s attitudes toward and experiences of non-consensual sexting and privacy violations. It analyses the broader sociocultural context to youth sexting and discusses issues such as victim-blaming, social shaming and bullying within youth sexting culture. It reflects upon the nature of predominant approaches to responding to youth sexting (both legal and educational/pedagogic) and identifies what young people want and need when it comes to addressing risk and harm, based upon what the evidence shows about their situated realities and lived experiences.Public and academic discourse surrounding youth sexting, and the legal and educational policy responses to the phenomenon have developed and changed over recent years. The field is increasingly contested and there are ongoing debates about how to protect young people from harm while respecting their rights as individuals and encouraging them to develop into ethical sexual citizens, including within digital environments. This book presents empirical data to show how risk and harm in youth sexting culture is predicated upon a denial of rights to sexual and bodily integrity, autonomy and legitimacy.

Skinheads go beyond the societal stereotype of hate mongers, bigots, and Neo-Nazis. The community of skins also includes traditional skins (those that adhere to the original philosophy of the British movement in 1969), Skinheads Against Racial prejudice (SHARPS), and gay skins, female skins and Neo-Nazi or Racist/Nationalist skins. Skinhead History, Identity, and Culture covers the history, identity, and culture of the skinhead movement in Europe and America, looking at the total culture of the skins through a cross-sectional analysis of skinheads in various countries.Authors Borgeson and Valeri provide original research data to cast new light into the skinhead community. Some of the data is ethnographic, drawing on face-to-face interviews with skins of all kinds, while other data is compiled from the Internet and social media about various skinhead groups within the United States, Europe, and Australia. The book covers the history of the subculture; explores the unique cultures of female, gay, and Neo-Nazi skins; and explores manifestations of the culture as represented on the Internet and in music. The work discusses how skinheads derive their values and morals and how they fit into the larger social structure.

This book brings together academics and advocates to explore an emerging issue: the use of technology by perpetrators of domestic and family violence. Of interest too is critique of government and non-government activities in this arena and how technology can be harnessed to respond to harm.Domestic and family violence (DFV) is widely recognised as an important social issue, impacting the safety and wellbeing of victim/survivors and their children, and on a broader scale, threatening risk and security on global levels. This book provides insights drawn from research and practice in the Global South and Global North to provide an evidence base and real-world solutions and initiatives to understand, address and ultimately prevent technology-facilitated domestic and family violence and how technology can be used to effect positive change and empower victim/survivors and communities.Technology and Domestic and Family Violence will be of great interest to students and scholars on victimology, criminology, social work, law, women’s studies, sociology and media studies. It will also be a valuable reference for practitioners, government and non-government advocates working on issues around domestic violence.

Immigration and School Safety utilizes a multidisciplinary approach to expose the complex relationship between immigration and school safety in the United States. It addresses not only individual, intrapersonal, and environmental factors but also distant-level conditions that are relevant to the experiences of immigrant children and connected to school safety. Twenty-five percent of all youth in U.S. schools have at least one immigrant parent, and that percentage is expected to increase to 33 percent by 2040.A wide array of factors, including but not limited to laws, public and political discourses, educational policies, interpersonal relationships, socioeconomic status, English language proficiency, citizenship, legal status, family characteristics, race and ethnicity, generational status, nationality, religion, and gender, contribute to the marginalizing experiences of children of immigrants at school. With the rapid growth of students in immigrant families in U.S. schools, any effort to address school violence and implement school safety policies must consider barriers associated with the unique educational experiences of that segment. This book highlights the often overlooked importance of immigration as a mediating factor in explaining both violence and victimization and provides a blueprint for integrating immigration and criminology theories into evidence-based efforts toward ensuring safety for all students.The authors demonstrate that immigration matters significantly in school violence and safety concerns and illustrate why research that integrates immigration with criminology theories is needed to understand the causes and correlates of school violence. The book will appeal to a wide array of individuals, including academics, educators, policymakers, practitioners, social workers, parents, and stakeholders who are committed to addressing educational disparities and inequities associated with immigration and school safety.

The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780429352775 has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.No city environment reflects the meaning of urban life better than a public place. A public place, whatever its nature—a park, a mall, a train platform or a street corner—is where people pass by, meet each other and at times become a victim of crime. With this book, we submit that crime and safety in public places are not issues that can be easily dealt with within the boundaries of a single discipline. The book aims to illustrate the complexity of patterns of crime and fear in public places with examples of studies on these topics contextualized in different cities and countries around the world. This is achieved by tackling five cross-cutting themes: the nature of the city’s environment as a backdrop for crime and fear; the dynamics of individuals’ daily routines and their transit safety; the safety perceptions experienced by those who are most in fear in public places; the metrics of crime and fear; and, finally, examples of current practices in promoting safety. All these original chapters contribute to our quest for safer, more inclusive, resilient, equitable and sustainable cities and human settlements aligned to the Global 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Sexual Violence on Trial provides a contemporary critical examination of the investigation, prosecution and cultural contexts of sexual violence. It draws on Northern Ireland as a case study, while also drawing on experiences from other jurisdictions across the United Kingdom and island of Ireland. Public and academic debates concerning the high-profile ‘Belfast/Rugby Rape Trial’ and the subsequent Gillen review of the arrangements to deliver justice in serious sexual offence cases have been mirrored at a global level with movements such as #MeToo and #TimesUp. This book brings together the perspectives of practitioners and academics to discuss contemporary challenges surrounding the societal and legal framing of sexual violence. It examines key aspects of the criminal justice process including the challenges of supporting victims; of responding to a range of forms of sexual violence such as rape, peer abuse, intimate partner violence and forced-to-penetrate cases; as well as alternative perspectives and future reforms. It also considers broader debates including balancing the interests of victims and defendants; the impact of cultural myths and stereotypes; the challenges of the digital age; models of consent; legal representation for victims and anonymity and publicity surrounding trials.Written by leading authorities in the field, Sexual Violence on Trial will be of great interest to students and scholars of Criminology, Law and Sociology.

This edited collection brings together essays that explore personal debts to government. Intensive collection efforts by governments in need of revenue often cause hardship, whether it is the poor in the United States going to jail because of unpaid fines, low-income English people being evicted because they paid their council taxes but could then not pay their rent, or poor former students having tax refunds or social benefits taken by the government when they have defaulted on their student loans. Student loans, fines and fees arising from the justice system, benefit overpayments and unpaid taxes have all ballooned in the past decade, but no other volume comprehensively addresses the various ways in which governments have become privileged creditors, using their power to collect debts owed to them by their citizens. With each essay emphasizing a particular kind of debt to government, the book focuses on what happens when citizens cannot pay the debts they owe to their governments. Contributors offer pragmatic options to facilitate a movement to soften the stance of governments toward those who owe them money. The insights in this collection will be of relevance to students and academics in criminology, sociology, public policy, and economics, as well as policymakers and government officials interested in effecting change in this area.

This book systematically investigates the capital punishment of girls and women in one jurisdiction in the United States over nearly four centuries. Using Connecticut as an essential case study, due to its long history as a colony and a state, this study is the first of its kind not only for New England but for the United States. The author uses rich archival sources to look critically at the gendered differential in the application of the death penalty from the seventeenth century until the abolition of capital punish-ment in Connecticut in 2012.In addition to analyzing cases of executions, this monograph offers an innovative focus on women and girls who escaped judicial execution with death sentences that were avoided, reversed, reprieved, or commuted. The book fully describes the impact of the rise and fall of witchcraft allegations during the last half of the seventeenth century, the clash between the deg-radation of slavery and Enlightenment ideals that was the provocation for the de facto end of female capital punishment in the New Republic, the introduction of two degrees of murder, which effectively provided an es-cape hatch from the gallows, and a detailed look at the unique case of Lydia Sherman, whose sentence to life in prison under the Connecticut murder statute of 1846 emphatically confirmed the unofficial state exemption of females from the gallows. Pivotal cases since 1900 are also examined.The book will attract attention from a broad audience interested in criminology, criminal justice, capital punishment, women’s studies, and legal history. Anti-death penalty advocates, law school activists, public defenders, capital punishment litigators, and jurists will also find the book useful.Winner of the Association for the Study of Connecticut History 2020 Homer D. Babbidge Jr. Award for the best monograph on a significant aspect of Connecticut’s history published in a calendar year.

There is tremendous controversy across the United States (and beyond) when a police officer uses deadly force against an unarmed citizen, but often the conversation is devoid of contextual details. These details matter greatly as a matter of law and organizational legitimacy. In this short book, authors Jon Shane and Zoë Swenson offer a comprehensive analysis of the first study to use publicly available data to reveal the context in which an officer used deadly force against an unarmed citizen. Although any police shooting, even a justified shooting, is not a desired outcome—often termed "lawful but awful" in policing circles—it is not necessarily a crime. The results of this study lend support to the notion that being unarmed does not mean "not dangerous," in some ways explaining why most police officers are not indicted when such a shooting occurs. The study’s findings show that when police officers used deadly force during an encounter with an unarmed citizen, the officer or a third person was facing imminent threat of death or serious injury in the vast majority of situations. Moreover, when police officers used force, their actions were almost always consistent with the accepted legal and policy principles that govern law enforcement in the overwhelming proportion of encounters (as measured by indictments).Noting the dearth of official data on the context of police shooting fatalities, Shane and Swenson call for the U.S. government to compile comprehensive data so researchers and practitioners can learn from deadly force encounters and improve practices. They further recommend that future research on police shootings should examine the patterns and micro-interactions between the officer, citizen, and environment in relation to the prevailing law. The unique data and analysis in this book will inform discussions of police use of force for researchers, policymakers, and students involved in criminal justice, public policy, and policing.

This book systematically investigates the capital punishment of girls and women in one jurisdiction in the United States over nearly four centuries. Using Connecticut as an essential case study, due to its long history as a colony and a state, this study is the first of its kind not only for New England but for the United States. The author uses rich archival sources to look critically at the gendered differential in the application of the death penalty from the seventeenth century until the abolition of capital punish-ment in Connecticut in 2012.In addition to analyzing cases of executions, this monograph offers an innovative focus on women and girls who escaped judicial execution with death sentences that were avoided, reversed, reprieved, or commuted. The book fully describes the impact of the rise and fall of witchcraft allegations during the last half of the seventeenth century, the clash between the deg-radation of slavery and Enlightenment ideals that was the provocation for the de facto end of female capital punishment in the New Republic, the introduction of two degrees of murder, which effectively provided an es-cape hatch from the gallows, and a detailed look at the unique case of Lydia Sherman, whose sentence to life in prison under the Connecticut murder statute of 1846 emphatically confirmed the unofficial state exemption of females from the gallows. Pivotal cases since 1900 are also examined.The book will attract attention from a broad audience interested in criminology, criminal justice, capital punishment, women’s studies, and legal history. Anti-death penalty advocates, law school activists, public defenders, capital punishment litigators, and jurists will also find the book useful.Winner of the Association for the Study of Connecticut History 2020 Homer D. Babbidge Jr. Award for the best monograph on a significant aspect of Connecticut’s history published in a calendar year.

Non-Commercial digital piracy has seen an unprecedented rise in the wake of the digital revolution; with wide-scale downloading and sharing of copyrighted media online, often committed by otherwise law-abiding citizens. Bringing together perspectives from criminology, psychology, business, and adopting a morally neutral stance, this book offers a holistic overview of this growing phenomenon. It considers its cultural, commercial, and legal aspects, and brings together international research on a range of topics, such as copyright infringement, intellectual property, music publishing, movie piracy, and changes in consumer behaviour. This book offers a new perspective to the growing literature on cybercrime and digital security. This multi-disciplinary book is the first to bring together international research on digital piracy and will be key reading for researchers in the fields of criminology, psychology, law and business.

Millions of pounds are spent every year trying to tackle human trafficking, modern slavery and child sexual exploitation. These are apparently threats perpetrated by ‘criminal masterminds’, spreading at a dizzying rate and approaching epidemic proportions – or so the story goes. Amid all the bold rhetoric and sweeping claims, there is very little robust research to help understand these problems and inform evidence-based policy and practice. In this book, readers are invited to delve inside the murky world of human trafficking. It focuses on the internal (domestic) trafficking of children for sexual exploitation. It is based on far-reaching analysis of six of the earliest and largest such investigations in the United Kingdom (UK), including the infamous Derby and Rochdale cases that sparked nationwide concerns about ‘street grooming’ and ‘Asian sex gangs’. Innovative methods, analytical rigour and truly extraordinary data underpin the research: a nuanced and sometimes unsettling exploration of the offender and victim networks, their characteristics, structure, activity and dynamics and the problems they pose for investigation and prosecution. The results paint a picture of a sprawling and dynamic system of grooming and abuse that is deeply embedded in complex webs of social relations and interactions. This book challenges accepted wisdom, debunks myths and introduces new and fundamentally different ways of thinking about trafficking and its prevention. An accessible and compelling read, this book is for academics, policymakers, practitioners and others interested in serious and organised crime.

It is generally accepted that men commit more crimes than women. The widespread acceptance of this view is based primarily on the number of convictions with most jurisdictions reporting considerably fewer incarcerated women/girls than men/boys. This manuscript argues however that decisions made by the various stakeholders that play a role in the incarceration of men are inherently gendered. These decisions are based on patriarchal perceptions and stereotypes related to the familial roles of men and women, and by extension their motivations or offending. Few studies have sought to explore the nature of these perceptions, and the effect these may have on incarceration patterns. Indeed, this form of inquiry remains absent from the research agenda of Caribbean criminologists. Using qualitative data from Barbados, this book analyses the extent to which these factors are taken into consideration not only by the police and members of the judiciary, but by examining the gendered decisions made by shop managers and proprietors in cases involving shoplifting, it seeks to analyse the extent to which these factors are taken into consideration before incidents reach the justice system. Critically, this book seeks also to juxtapose these assumptions against testimony from men incarcerated at Her Majesty’s Prison. The large proportion of males in Caribbean prisons when compared to their female counterparts necessitates an investigation into the factors that may contribute to differential treatment as they move through the justice system. Using data from Barbados, the present study seeks to fill this need.