The transmission of crime as work in Turkey: Identification and strategic mutuality

Bourdieusian criminology has produced useful concepts such as the street-criminal field, capital and habitus. In employing these concepts, this article demonstrates the importance of the criminal role model-image, such as the respected career criminal, as an ego-ideal among lower class youths who identify with these role models, acquiring bodily and mental criminal dispositions using the results of ethnographic research conducted in a run-down district in Ankara, the capital of Turkey. Focusing on a non-Western context with an original theoretical articulation, this article further suggests that the affective relationship between these disadvantaged lower class youths and respected older criminals lubricates the youths’ formation of criminal habitus and likewise constitutes a ‘strategic mutuality’ flowing through certain practices in the street-criminal fields. The original finding lies in revealing a strategic affinity transmitting knowledge of criminal techniques and skills across generations, and further making crime as work a reliable source of income for disadvantaged youths.

Possible Reliance: Protecting Legally Innocent Johnson Claimants

The writ of habeas corpus presents the last chance for innocent defendants to obtain relief from invalid convictions and sentences. The writ constitutes a limited exception to the finality of judgments. Given the role finality plays in conserving judicial resources and deterring criminal conduct, exceptions created by habeas must be principally circumscribed. Since the Supreme Court’s invalidation of the Armed Career Criminal Act’s residual clause in Johnson v. United States, the federal courts of appeals have attempted to develop a test that protects the writ from abuse by Johnson claimants. This Note first contributes a new understanding of the resulting circuit split. Currently, circuits construe the split to be about a Johnson petitioner’s burden of proof at the jurisdictional stage. However, circuits actually disagree on the standard a petitioner must meet to establish the court’s subject-matter jurisdiction. This Note identifies two standards. The sole-reliance standard requires petitioners to show that the sentencing court relied solely on the residual clause, while the possible-reliance standard requires petitioners to show that the court may have relied on the residual clause. Both standards must be shown by a preponderance of the evidence. This Note then deploys this reconceptualization of the circuit split to advance new arguments in favor of imposing the possible-reliance standard at the jurisdictional stage. The possible-reliance standard protects the innocent, preserves the finality of judgments, and conforms with Supreme Court habeas jurisprudence and congressional intent expressed in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.

Prisons, Deterrence, and Incapacitation

Modern control theory doubts the effectiveness of criminal sanctions to affect the crime rate substantially. This view is contrasted with the expectations of the criminal career perspective, a leading view on the nature of crime and the role of the criminal justice system in controlling crime by deterrence and incapacitation. The contrast is illustrated with differing expectations about how age is related to crime (including serious offending), the importance of the versatility effect for offending, and evidence about how changes in incarceration levels are expected to be related to crime rates. On all counts, the results of competent contemporary research support the expectations of the general theory of crime over the expectations of criminal career/career criminal traditions. The research on statistical modeling and offender typologies in the criminal careers tradition has not provided consistent or replicated results demonstrating that criminal sanctions effectively incapacitate or deter offending. Control theory is inconsistent with mass incarceration, with the belief that increasing severity of sanctions reduces crime rates either by incapacitation or by deterrence, and notes that crime tends overwhelmingly to decline with age for all offenders beginning in early adulthood.

Developing a conceptual model for insider threat

This paper sets out 99 case studies of insider attacks that took place in the UK. The study involved interviewing investigators, heads of security, information technologists, law enforcement, security officers, human resource managers, line managers, and coworkers who knew the insider. The analysis elucidates how to identify insiders and pathways to these attacks. It also highlights examples of archetypal insiders, in addition to the ‘disgruntled employee’ (e.g., ‘the show off’, ‘the career criminal’, ‘the addict’, etc.). In contrast to other studies, this study highlights multiple pathways to an attack. A conceptual model is set out that considers indicators (both physical and cyber) that might be monitored in an insider risk detection programme. The model stressors need to continuously seek out methods to close down opportunities as well as to monitor behavioural change. It also elucidates potential deterrence and prevention strategies for organisations to consider in an ethical and legal manner.

Justice-Involved Women

Women are the fastest growing sector of the incarcerated population. Community reentry is challenging for both men and women. However, pathways out of crime and reintegration have been found to be more complex for women. This article uses empowerment and narrative theories as conceptual frameworks and to contextualize the findings of this exploratory study. The findings indicate that self-identifying as persistent offender and/or career criminal, together with marginalization (ethnicity, poverty, and education) impact redemptive narratives of justice-involved women and their ability to create successful lives after incarceration. Using regression models, this study aimed to create a holistic model that integrated both micro and macro factors to better understand the complexities for community reintegration for justice-involved women. It sought to frame the experience of reintegration and the desistance process with a feminist lens, drawing greatly from community reentry literature in an era of mass incarceration.

DR. SMILES AND THE “COUNTERFEIT” GENTLEMEN: SELF-MAKING AND MISAPPLICATION IN MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN

On the morning of 15 May 1855, career criminal Edward Agar and his associate, William Pierce, walked away from the London Bridge Station of the South-Eastern Railway Company with over £14,000 in stolen gold. The bullion was the property of the City of London merchants, whose intention had been to ship the bars via train to Dover and then on to Calais by ferry. Security was comprehensive and the success of Agar's en route interception was made possible only through labor-intensive planning and meticulous execution. It was the type of job in which the thief specialized. Even before what would become known as the “Great Bullion Robbery,” Agar's criminal diligence and self-drive had provided him with the monetary resources to establish himself in the wealthy, middle-class suburb of Cambridge Villas, where he enjoyed a reputation as a consummate gentleman. Throughout Agar's planning of the bullion heist, his neighbors remained entirely unaware that his home was headquarters to an extensive criminal ring.

Prison Homicide: An Extension of Violent Criminal Careers?

This study investigated prison homicide perpetrators through the lens of the career criminal perspective. Prison homicide, while a rare event, has critical implications for the prison environment. Despite its importance as a form of institutional violence that must be addressed, only four studies in the past five decades have explored the characteristics of homicide perpetrators/victims, the motives, and circumstances of the crime. The goal of the current study was to develop a better understanding of prison homicide by examining 54 perpetrators who committed 37 inmate homicides over 40 years in a mid-Western state prison system. Results showed that prison homicides typically involved a younger male inmate perpetrator, acting independently, murdering an older inmate, in his cell, by stabbing or beating the victim during an altercation. Perpetrators, in comparison with victims and prisoners in general, had a record indicating more prior community homicides, elevated institutional risk scores, and higher rates of serious and assaultive prison misconduct, all indicative of prior community and prison maladjustment. Consistent with career criminal research, prison homicide perpetrators constitute a small but distinct subset of habitually deviant criminals that perpetrate high rates of criminal and violent behavior regardless of context.

Is Burglary a Violent Crime? An Empirical Investigation of the Armed Career Criminal Act’s Classification of Burglary as a Violent Felony

Traditionally considered a non-violent property offense, burglary is nonetheless classified as a violent crime under the federal Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA). The ACCA, a three-strikes law that provides a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years, is triggered when an offender, who has been previously convicted for a crime classified under the ACCA as either a “violent felony” or “serious drug offense,” is convicted at the federal level for any felony committed while in possession of a firearm. The present study investigated the ACCA’s classification of burglary as violent through analysis of National Crime Victimization Survey data for the period of 2009 to 2014. Results showed that burglary is overwhelmingly a non-violent offense. The national incidence of actual violence or threats of violence during a burglary was 7.9%. At most, 2.7% of burglaries involved actual acts of violence. Legislative reform of the ACCA classification to match the empirical description of burglary is discussed.

History of Criminology

A comprehensive survey of criminology, in all its variants, manifestations, and historical antecedents, has yet to be written. Several reasons can be adduced why the effort has yet to be undertaken. The first results from a professional orientation shared by all scientific endeavors. The most immediate imperative of science is to begin accumulating knowledge of the phenomena it wishes to comprehend. This mandate produces a professional orientation toward expertise. The premium placed on the esoteric over the general requires the scholarly community to direct the profession toward the dissection of smaller aspects of the larger, more complicated subject matter. It is presumed that documenting its own history is a secondary concern better left to historians. An additional impediment is an artifact of the field’s canon being fed by contributions from a wide spectrum of disciplines through the years, from political science, psychology, and biology to moral philosophy and economics and everything beyond. These peculiarities of an undisciplined emerging discipline present challenges for any historian attempting to determine the working identity of the study of crime and its control. Combining the multiple strands and facets of the field is a challenge not to be dismissed lightly; nevertheless, offering an outline of the field’s development is certainly not an impossible task. The bibliographic format, and the larger bibliographic effort of which this article is but a small part, offers an ideal opportunity to attempt a compilation of criminology’s history. The approach followed here will mimic that of an introductory criminology text, with a few modifications. Each theoretical school will be represented in the sequence in which it appears in the historical record, roughly considered, as seen in the publication of foundational works. The theoretical school that supersedes the earlier contributions will then be introduced. There are only two minor departures from the textbook-like formula. First, the article begins with a section dedicated to introducing a body of work that is about the field of criminology. Increasing attention has been given of late to chronicling its history. Second, a section is included that considers pre-professional criminology. These writings address the question of crime and its control prior to the field cohering around a professional identity. Because the article endeavors to provide a history capturing the seminal works in its canon readers interested in learning of recent theoretical developments beginning in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g., career criminal research, life-course theory, self-control/general theory of crime, bio-social criminology) are encouraged to consult entries dealing with these topics found elsewhere in the Oxford Bibliographies Online collection. [Please note that many of the works cited here were originally published at much earlier dates.]

Specialization in offending: A comprehensive review of criminological theories and empirical studies

Policy makers, legislators, and law enforcement practitioners generally believe that criminals do specialize in offending. However, they commit only one type of crime throughout their criminal career. Criminal laws, crime prevention programs, and criminal investigation techniques have been shaped by this assumption. On the other hand, a perennial debate amongst criminologists and researchers shows whether criminals have a tendency of specialization or versatility. Some theorists claim that there is one underlying reason for deviance; thus, offenders commit all available crimes. Whereas, others argue that offenders commit crimes for different reasons and needs. As a result, they have a tendency of specialization. Conversely, developmental criminologists claim both specialization and versatility. In this paper, we will start by explaining the theoretical assumptions and results of empirical studies regarding the effects of age, gender, peers, and crime types on offence specialization. Later, we will discuss the assumptions of the theories in the light of the related researches. Finally, we will present various policy and the research recommendations of this study.