Browse

Convict criminology is the study of criminology by those who have first-hand experience of imprisonment. This is the first single-authored account of this unusual perspective. It begins with an overview of the idea that direct experience of incarceration furnishes a criminologist with distinctive resources to analyse and critique ideas about crime, punishment, law and order. The book goes on to critically evaluate the emergence of the perspective within the USA. Key figures, such as Frank Tannenbaum and John Irwin, are identified, and their particular contributions to criminology are discussed before the accounts move across the Atlantic to Europe. The Russian anarchist theorist, Peter Kropotkin, is identified as the first ‘convict criminologist’ on the basis of his 19^th century study of French and Russian prisons that combined his own experiences of incarceration with extensive empirical studies. The author, by drawing on his own experience of imprisonment in the early 1980s, demonstrates how such experience can be developed academically to widen the horizons of criminology. Taking inspiration from feminist intersectional scholarship his account foregrounds gender, race, colonialism and class as central features of men’s penal experience. The reflexive autobiographical style of the book offers methodological insights, creative theoretical synthesis and a compelling narrative.

Welcome to the dead end of the city shadows in Valdemingómez on the outskirts of Madrid: a lawless landscape of drugs and violence where the third world meets the Wild West. Having had three national research proposals rejected, Briggs and Monge entered this area with no institutional support or formal funding. With only patience, some cigarettes and a mobile phone, they slowly gained the trust of those who live and visit one of Europe's most problematic ghettos, and collected images and testimonies from drug addicts, gypsies, residents, police, and harm-reduction staff. The result is this disturbing but moving account of how a forgotten population of people survive in a desolate misery having fallen casualty to various social, political and economic processes, and as a consequence, internalize and reproduce this suffering through destructive forms of drug use which compromises their own health and wellbeing. The text also charts how neoliberal governance and rampant corruption have produced this area of spatial inequality: a place which lacks infrastructure, decent public health and is controlled by oppressive urban social control structures which are charged with intervening on this haven for organised crime, drug dealing, and brutal forms of violence. Briggs and Monge two-year study use the words and photos from these peoples’ personal stymies and their work is testament to what is possible beyond the realms of increasingly bureacratised academic research structures and biased funding calls.

The trade in counterfeit goods is growing. Recent EU studies on Fast Moving Consumer Goods indicate that 6.5% of all sports(wear) goods, 7.8% of cosmetics and 12.7% of luggage/handbags sold in the EU are in some way counterfeit. The WTO has an oft-repeated estimate of 7% of all global commerce as counterfeit. The World Economic Forum goes further, suggesting that counterfeiting and piracy cost the global economy an estimated $1.77 trillion in 2015, which is nearly 10% of the global trade in merchandise. Much work and popular scrutiny has examined flows of counterfeit goods. However, there remains a general lack of information on the financing of the counterfeit trade. Drawing upon cross-disciplinary research, the book offers a unique account into the financing of the trade in counterfeit goods. Focusing on tangible goods, it addresses the ways in which capital is secured to allow counterfeiting businesses to be initiated and sustained, how entrepreneurs and customers settle payments, the costs of conducting business in the counterfeiting trade, and how profits from the business are spent and invested. The book covers the UK context, whilst also considering the distinctly transnational nature of the trade.

This book contextualises, evaluates, and problematises the (lack of) legal and regulatory organisation involved in the many processes of food production, distribution, and consumption. Turning a criminological gaze on the conditions under which food is (un)regulated, this book encompasses a range of discussions on the problematic conditions under which food (dis)connects with humanity and its consequences on public health and well-being, nonhuman animals, and the environment, often simultaneously. Influenced by critical criminology, social harm approach, green criminology, corporate criminology, and victimology, while engaging with legal, rural, geographic, and political sciences, the concept of food crime fuses diverse research by questioning issues of legality, criminality, deviance, harm, social justice, ethics, and morality within food systems. Evident problems range from food safety and food fraud, to illegal agricultural labour and state-corporate food crimes, to obesity and food deserts, to livestock welfare and genetically modified foods, to the role of agriculture in climate change and food waste, to food democracy and corporate co-optation of food movements. Theorising and researching these problems involves questioning the processes of lacking or insufficient regulation, absent or ineffective enforcement, resulting harms, and broader issues of governance, corruption, and justice. Due to the contemporary corporatisation of food and the subsequent distancing of humans from foodstuffs and food systems, not only is it important to think criminologically about food, but the criminological study of food may help make criminology relevant today.

Indigenous Criminology is the first book to explore a distinctly Indigenous approach to criminology. It is based on comparative research across the settler colonial states of Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States. The book draws on critical Indigenous and decolonial literature to argue for the importance of prioritising Indigenous knowledge in understanding contemporary Indigenous over-representation in the criminal justice system. Indigenous Criminology sets out the significance of colonialism as a key foundational concept to developing a critical Indigenous criminology. It analyses how colonialism impacts on the current operations of criminal justice. The book explores a number of explicit issues including the policing, sentencing and punishment of Indigenous people. It considers the impact of crime control specifically on Indigenous women and discusses the effects on Indigenous people of globalisation and crime control. The book concludes with a reflection on critical issues in the development of an Indigenous criminology, including the need to take seriously the voices of Indigenous peoples and the rights embedded in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

This book helps to reveal what questions need asking in criminology and how to best answer them. Philosophical criminology asks big questions about how we get on with one another and what happens when we do not. This accessible book in the New Horizons in Criminology series is the first to foreground this growing area. Criminology cannot be properly considered without the basic premises and ideas which arise in philosophy. The book is structured around six philosophical ideas concerning our relations with others. The six ideas which are discussed are values, morality, aesthetics, order, rules and respect. Building on the author’s theoretical and empirical research, the book considers the boundaries of criminology and the scope for greater exchange between criminology and philosophy. The book is illustrated using examples from a range of countries, and provides a platform for engaging with important topical issues using philosophical and theoretical insights.

Revisiting the ‘Ideal Victim’ is a collection of academic responses to the late Nils Christie’s (1986) seminal piece on the ‘ideal victim’ in which he addressed the socially constructed concept of an idealised form of victim status or identity. Highlighting the complex factors informing the application or rejection of victim status, Christie foregrounded the role of subjective and objective perspectives on personal and societal responses to victimisation. In sum, the ‘ideal victim’ is: “a person or category of individuals, who – when hit by crime – most readily are given the complete and legitimate status of being a victim” (1986: 18, original italics). This concept has become one of the most frequently cited themes of victimological (and, where relevant, criminological) academic scholarship over the past thirty years. In commemoration of his contribution, this volume analyses, evaluates and critiques the current nature and impact of victim identity, experience, policy and practice in light of Christie’s framework. Demonstrating how the very notion of what constitutes a ‘victim’ has undergone significant theorisation, evaluation and reconceptualization in the intervening three decades, the academic contributors in this volume excellently showcase the relevance of this ‘ideal victim’ concept to a range of contemporary victimological issues. In sum, the chapters critically evaluate the salience of Christie’s concept in a modern context while demonstrating its influence over the decades..

What impact have the unprecedented and rapid changes to the structure of education in England had on school governors and policy makers? And what effect has the intensifying media and regulatory focus had on volunteer school governors? Jacqueline Baxter takes the 2014 ‘Trojan Horse’ scandal, in which it was alleged that governors at 25 Birmingham schools were involved in the ‘Islamisation’ of secular state schools, as a focus point to examine the pressures and challenges in the current system. Informed by her twenty years’ experience as a school governor, she considers both media analysis and policy as well as the implications for the future of a democratic system of education in England.

As our interactions with others become ever more mediated by various forms of electronic communication, the relationship between crime and technology is becoming an increasingly important topic for both theoretical and practical studies of criminology. This book analyses digital communications as they play a part in contemporary homicide, drawing on a range of cases from the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the world — cases where killers confessed on social media, for example, or where their actions were traced using their digital communications. Offering a groundbreaking conceptual framework for people studying this issue, the book will be of great value to criminologists, students, and police officers.

This is the first book to provide a critical criminological perspective on sport and the connections between sport and crime. Part of the New Horizons in Criminology series, it draws on the inter-disciplinary nature of criminology and incorporates emerging perspectives like social harm, gender and sexuality, and green criminology. Written from an international perspective, it covers topics including sports scandals and the possibility of crime prevention through sport. American football, boxing, soccer and sumo are all examined. The book considers both Sports Law and the Sociology of Sport and will be essential reading to students and academics in these fields. As well as running an argument about the need for a broad inter-disciplinary criminology and criminologically informed sports policies, it also serves as resource in setting out work from other disciplines that might contribute.

This book develops an interactionist urban political ecology approach to urban environments across Africa. Individual chapters focus on: analyzing the findings of planners and scholars on Africa’s urban environmental problems; interrogating urban environmental histories; engaging with the physical-material settings and cultural beliefs surrounding them; recovering the political-environmental urban visions of African writers and artists; and building from everyday environmentalism and community activism. The book highlights alternative readings of Africa’s urban environments via case study segments on Nairobi, Lusaka, Zanzibar, Dakar and Cape Town, along with material on a variety of other cities. The primary practical, policy- and planning-oriented argument is that efforts to ‘improve’ urban environments in Africa will fail without engagement with and (re)building from the reality of diverse and complex perspectives on those environments. That leads to a more theoretical argument for radical incrementalism, following the South African urbanist Edgar Pieterse, within an interactionist urban political ecology framework. Despite the diversity of cities and environments, cities in Africa share the hot pot of environmental politics – and that demands a critical, comparative approach. The book argues for greater dialogue with ‘rural’ political ecology, a deeper historical backdrop and recognition that everyday environmentalism takes many forms in the city. In such a manner Africanized and pluralized interactionist urban political ecology could genuinely lead to broader ways for rethinking urban theory on what constitutes a city and a radical re-imagination of possibilities for producing cities around the world that are more just and genuinely socio-environmentally sustainable.