Featured Articles

This article explores how Frontex border policing is organized and performed at the level of the everyday. Based on ethnographic research in the Aegean Sea and interviews with Frontex and Hellenic Coast Guard officers, it details the mundane workings of ‘early detection’—a bordering practice that ...

This article utilizes the sociology of punishment, particularly the work of Gresham Sykes in 1958, to develop an understanding of the particular pains of police custody for children, drawing on the first comprehensive study in England and Wales to review the police custody process as a whole from ...

Collective memory of atrocities is a fractured and disputed terrain. In this article, we empirically explore the complex process of translating violent events that took place in Medellín during the 1980s and 1990s into collective memory. It examines the conflict between Medellín inhabitants’ ...

Much has been written about the search for carnivalesque release in late-modern society, but relatively less attention has been paid to the harms experienced within this practice. Based on mixed-methods qualitative research including observational fieldwork at a large, multi-day camping festival in ...

This article explores the causes, forms and consequences of the resilience of treason as a capital offence. Though generally overlooked by the literature on the death penalty, treason has been the second most common capital offence—after murder—in states’ law books in the post-WWII world and has ...

Research has found that participation in transitional justice (TJ) is associated with increased social capital and decreased well-being. This article extends this scholarship by examining how TJ mechanisms affect the social capital and well-being of the people who implement them via interviews with ...

In December 2015, the criminal offence of coercive control was introduced in England and Wales. Whilst, in this legislation, this concept is presumed to be gender-neutral, there is widespread agreement that coercive control is gendered. Using empirical data gathered in one police force area in the ...

Once feted, Hong Kong has recently become a centre of civil unrest. In this paper, we situate these emergent politics through a case study of corruption and everyday life in Kowloon Walled City, a mainland Chinese enclave in British Hong Kong, which developed notoriety as a freestanding grey ...

Romance fraud is a crime where the fraudster must strike a balance between the romantic and financial aspects of the communication for their criminal intent to remain hidden. This discourse analytic research examines the setup of information early in the interaction, the use of visceral language ...

Nordic noir is a popular crime genre associated with a region (Scandinavia), a narrative style (unpretentious/socially critical) and a particular aesthetic look (dark/foreboding). Renowned for its psychologically complex characterization and gloomy Mise-en-scène, and spanning best-selling crime ...

Scholarship on security has recently seen a shift from traditionally state-centric, elitist and objectivist conceptions of ‘security’ towards human-centred perspectives, which put emphasis on forms of ‘vernacular’ and ‘everyday’ security, and promote bottom-up empirical inquiries to further our ...

In the United Kingdom, as in other jurisdictions, the language of vulnerability and ‘safeguarding’, protection and care is becoming increasingly prevalent, often dovetailing with punitive rationales and practices. Drawing from empirical material collected during a study on police–immigration ...

This article examines 10 capital cases of men of colour sentenced to death in England and Wales for intimate murders of white British women during 1900–39. It argues that such cases enable analysis of the prevailing emotional norms of this era and the ways in which these were shaped by race, gender ...

This study examines the conditions under which increased immigration rates serve as a catalyst for right-wing politically motivated crime across 16 German regions. The main objective is to focus on regional immigration rates as a potential trigger for threat perceptions by not only testing their ...

Thinking about and operationalizing societal impacts have become defining characteristics of university-based research, especially in the United Kingdom. This paper reflects on this unfolding shift in the conceptualization and practice of research with particular regard to criminology. It traces ...

Visual criminology has established itself as a site of criminological innovation. Its ascendance, though, highlights ways in which the ‘ocularcentrism’ of the social sciences is reproduced in criminology. We respond, arguing for attention to the totality of sensorial modalities. Outlining the ...

The privatization of punishment is a well-established phenomenon in modern criminal justice operations. Less understood are the market and technological forces that have dramatically reshaped the creation and sharing of criminal record data in recent years. Analysing trends in both the United ...

The Domestic Abuse, Stalking and Honour Based Violence (DASH) form is a standardized risk assessment implemented across most UK police forces. It is intended to facilitate an officer’s structured professional judgment about the risk a victim faces of serious harm at the hand of their abuser. Until ...

Yarn bombing involves the display of knitted or crocheted items in public space, often without permission. This article draws on interviews with yarn bombers in the North West of England and considers who the yarn bombers are, their motivations and experiences and their views on the legal status of ...

What is a criminal justice atmosphere? Defined as that connecting individuals within and to the spaces they occupy or move through, the study of criminal justice atmospheres can add to thinking within criminology about space, affect and the aesthetic. Examination of criminal justice atmospheres ...

This article explores the role of socio-cultural factors in violence against women and girls, focusing on child sexual abuse (CSA) and sexual violence (SV) in British South Asian communities. Using examples from 13 in-depth interviews with survivors, the researchers examine (1) how abusers gain ...

Like all other social sciences, criminology is characterized by an ethnocentrism that often excludes non-Western scholarship. ‘Asian criminology’ and ‘Southern criminology’ are relatively new paradigms that seek to rectify this by problematizing criminological knowledge production and incorporating ...

This paper considers the recent phenomenon of the vehicle-ramming attack (VRA): i.e. the act of purposely driving a vehicle into pedestrians and populated vehicles. It documents the recent (2015–2017) rise in the prevalence of ramming attacks and how these incidents challenge some of the ...

This article discusses police stop and search within British Muslim communities and reports the analysis of statistical data collected by the Crime Survey of England and Wales between 2006 and 2011. The primary aim of the article is to determine the extent to which Crime Survey data support or ...

In the second part of his article on Scandinavian exceptionalism, John Pratt identified certain developments that might undermine the exceptional status of Scandinavian prisons and penal culture. A major problem looming on the horizon, according to Pratt, was the effects of globalization on ...

The UN Sustainable Development Goals address a number of criminological issues. This article accounts for why criminologists should contribute to this agenda in a way that might benefit the international development community. We acknowledge a heightened risk of crime in parts of the Global South ...

Based on three years of ethnographic research undertaken in London amongst a loose network of what British Transport Police term ‘serious graffiti vandals’, this article considers how we might conceive theoretically of the interrelationships between graffiti writing, urban space and social control. ...

Criminologists are increasingly turning their attention to the intersections between immigration and crime control. In this article, we describe and discuss four regulatory practices whereby Norwegian police combine criminal law and immigration law in different ways vis-à-vis migrant women involved ...

The suitability of ‘out of court resolutions’ (restorative justice and community resolutions) in cases of domestic abuse is theoretically contentious and empirically under-researched. This study investigated the nature and extent of out of court resolutions for domestic abuse using the Freedom of ...

Colonial and settler colonial dispossession is performed through various forms of violence, justified by cultural, historical, religious and national imperatives. In this paper, I define one of these forms of violence as the occupation of the senses, referring to the sensory technologies that ...

New technologies have changed the way we produce and relate to images. Three socio-cultural trends and associated offender motivations stand out when understanding why offenders record their crimes. First, some pictures and films are inspired by the rise of amateur and rape pornography and recorded ...

Based on a Scottish case study, this article offers a critical reflection on criminal justice and the impact agenda. It will argue that the pathway to impact requires criminologists to interrogate more fully the inter-relationships between criminal justice as (1) political strategy; (2) ...

This article argues that research into preventive and pre-emptive crime control in the United Kingdom has marginalized the historical persistence of the power to arrest and convict on justified suspicion of intent. It traces the genesis of this power in statute law (particularly the Vagrancy Act of ...

This paper explores the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing incident and how members of the general public, through the online community Reddit, attempted to provide assistance to law enforcement through conducting their own parallel investigations. As we document through an analysis of user ...

Despite extensive research on rape and sexual violence, there exists an important gap in knowledge around older victims. This gap exists in relation to national statistics (the Crime Survey for England and Wales has an upper age limit of 59 for intimate violence), and by both criminologists and ...

This article focuses on the violent acts of Tag-Mehir (Price Tag), a group of Israeli citizens that injure, attack, vandalize and violate Palestinian individuals, communities and property. The paper discusses the criminalities of Tag-Mehir by reporting statistics on their crimes and juxtaposing ...

Issues of vital criminological research and policy significance abound in the global South, with important implications for South/North relations and for global security and justice. Having a theoretical framework capable of appreciating the significance of this global dynamic will contribute to ...

In this article, we draw upon data derived from an ethnographic field study of covert policing to shed light on the occupational culture of those officers engaged in the targeted surveillance of the public. Although many of the attitudes and working practices of covert officers mirror those offices ...

This paper presents the first criminological analysis of an online social reaction to a crime event of national significance, in particular the detection and propagation of cyberhate on social media following a terrorist attack. We take the Woolwich, London terrorist attack in 2013 as our event of ...

The empirical material produced by proceedings at International Criminal Tribunals and selected US courts-martial comprise one of few available sources on the lives and experiences of individual perpetrators of sexual war violence. In this article I explore primary court actors’ narratives about ...

The study examines the range of crimes in which solicitors become involved as primary offenders (mainly fraud) or on behalf of others (criminal planning and money laundering) and critically reviews the factors in their personal and working environment that may promote or inhibit such crimes and the ...

Despite the growing number of reported cases of rape and sexual assault against women in India, there is an insufficient understanding of the perspectives and responses of the Indian Criminal Justice System in general and the judiciary in particular. By employing a framework of ‘complainant ...

This article examines the growth of ecological awareness, alongside the emergence of environmental sustainability initiatives, within criminal justice institutions around the world. To date, such developments have received little empirical analysis from criminology scholars. Internationally, this ...

As border policing is no longer circumscribed to external borders and increasingly performed inland, in Britain migration work relies on the assistance of a range of unorthodox partners, including the public. The unearthing of the ‘community’ as a crucial partner to police a myriad of public safety ...

The article critically examines the peculiar co-existence of the securitization of the border and the growing presence and prominence of human rights and humanitarian ideals in border policing practices. Concretely, it focuses on Frontex, the agency tasked with management of EU’s external borders. ...

On 2 November 2004, Mohammad Bouyeri murdered the Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh. At his trial, Bouyeri proclaimed that he acted out of a religious duty. Van Gogh’s killing provoked fierce debate in the Netherlands over its meaning and significance and once again the question of violent religious ...

This article presents an introductory yet critical overview of autoethnographic research in criminological contexts. Drawing on experiences of participant observation with heroin and crack cocaine users and dealers, as a former user and dealer of these drugs myself, the article demonstrates how the ...

Applying Robert Sampson’s (2012) work on interdependent spatial patterns in a new setting, we link structural characteristics of the neighbourhood to public beliefs and worries about neighbourhood violence via two intermediate mechanisms: (1) collective efficacy and (2) neighbourhood disorder. ...

Drawing on the 2011 United Kingdom riots, this article explores contestation over the meaning of riots. Is rioting criminality and looting, or are there political aspects to the act? For those advocating a political element, there is difficulty in reconciling how an apparently spontaneous act can ...