Introduction

Author(s):  
Robert J. Antony

The central concerns of this book are crime and law enforcement in Guangdong province in south China during the mid-Qing dynasty, roughly the years from 1760 to 1845. The author’s focus is on bandits, sworn brotherhoods, and local law enforcement. Specifically, this study is divided into three parts: one, preventive measures and protective strategies; two, crimes, criminals, and community; and three, state and local law enforcement. The first part addresses the interactions of state and local communities in developing protective measures against banditry. The second part analyzes the activities, composition, and organization of bandit gangs and sworn brotherhoods in Guangdong. The third part examines in detail the policies, especially the adoption and application of laws, employed by the Qing government for suppressing these criminal associations and curbing their activities. This study, therefore, focuses on collective predatory crime and the legal responses of the state to those crimes. My purpose is to fill a hiatus in the existing scholarship on Chinese social history by examining mid-Qing Guangdong through the perspective of crime and law enforcement.

Author(s):  
Dean A. Dabney ◽  
Richard Tewksbury

Chapter 2 presents the methods of the current study. Three fieldwork projects in two cities are explained, including one researcher’s embeddedness with a plain-clothes, street crime unit, one researcher’s 10 month inclusion with a narcotics investigation unit, and one author’s 18 months of participant observation with a major city’s homicide investigation unit. Additionally, in-depth interviews with 15 federal, state and local law enforcement authorities were conducted. These three sources of data are integrated and triangulate the data used for the analysis.


Author(s):  
David Alan Sklansky

Criminal law and immigration law, once separate fields of governance in the United States, are rapidly growing less distinct. Immigration crimes now account for a majority of all federal prosecutions; deportation is widely seen as a key tool of crime control; immigration authorities run the nation’s largest prison system; and state and local law enforcement officers work hand-in-hand with federal immigration officials. This article traces these trends and assesses their significance. The rise of an intertwined regime of “crimmigration” law has generally been attributed to some combination of nativism, overcriminalization, and a cultural obsession with security, but it also exemplifies, and has helped to reinforce, a crucial and underappreciated development in U.S. legal culture—a rising tendency to treat legal rules and legal procedures as interchangeable tools, to be brought to bear pragmatically and instrumentally on an ad hoc basis. Ad hoc instrumentalism of this kind has genuine strengths, but it also raises significant concerns about the rule of law and political accountability. The accountability concerns, in particular, are exacerbated by two other features of our newly merged system of immigration enforcement and criminal justice: its bureaucratic opacity and its selective application.


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