American Journal

(Source: British Journal of Criminology - recent issues)

(Source: British Journal of Criminology - recent issues)

(Source: British Journal of Criminology - recent issues)

(Source: British Journal of Criminology - recent issues)

(Source: British Journal of Criminology - recent issues)

Prison ethnographers have tended to downplay the epistemological and methodological dilemmas relating to identity and positionality, which have been more commonly rehearsed in anthropological and sociological ethnographies. This paper explores these issues through a reflexive interrogation of a study of prisoner identities and social relations in two male prisons, with a particular focus on race/ethnicity, class and gender. Drawing from interactions with two prisoners as case studies, it applies Walkerdine et al.’s (2001) psycho-social analytical frame to illustrate how the subjectivities and biographies of researchers are implicated in the dynamics of prison research encounters and analysis. In doing so, it considers the epistemological implications of reflexive practice for interpr...

It is 21 years since the publication of the author's Flashpoints: Studies in Public Disorder. In this book, and in subsequent publications, David Waddington and his colleagues have outlined and refined the so-called Flashpoints Model of Public Disorder, which has underpinned separate analyses of orderly and disorderly crowd events in Britain, Europe, Asia, Australasia, and North and South America. The model has had its critics and detractors—the most recent being Paul Bagguley and Yasmin Hussain, who level several criticisms at the model in their book, Riotous Citizens: Ethnic Conflict in Multicultural Britain, an analysis of the 2001 Bradford riot. This paper not only addresses these criticisms, but uses Bagguley and Hussain's own account as the basis of a re-analysis of the Bradfor...

This paper attempts to answer the question: why do the police use deadly force in a democratic country? Police shootings in India are better known as encounters, a term that refers to a specific type of police contact—a spontaneous, unplanned ‘shoot-out’ between the police and alleged criminals, in which the criminal is usually killed, with few or no police injuries. The police use of deadly force remains largely unquestioned or unaccountable. This paper explores the wider structural and systemic factors that create conditions in which killing ‘hardened’ criminals seems to be the last resort for the police to gain some control in the fight against crime. Wider cultural and specifically police sub-cultural factors that make police killing of alleged criminals b...

Nearly every study of police corruption hypothesizes that public experience of police corruption undermines the moral standing of the police. However, scarcely any studies actually test the hypothesis. My aim in this empirical study is to compare the effects of three dimensions of police corruption on perceptions of police trustworthiness, procedural justice and effectiveness. These three dimensions of corruption are personal experience, vicarious experience and subjective evaluations of police anti-corruption measures. The data come from a survey of people living in Accra, Ghana. The findings show that both vicarious experiences of corruption and satisfaction with reform measures explain assessments of police trustworthiness, procedural justice and effectiveness, but that personal experie...

In this paper, we examine the influence of the ‘anti-snitching code’ on attitudes towards reporting criminal victimization among the homeless. Using research data from a study of criminal victimization, we analyse how gender structures attitudes towards crime reporting, creating what we term a ‘chivalry exception’ to the ‘anti-snitching code’. In essence, the chivalry exception is a form of benevolent sexism that embodies the belief that women are inherently vulnerable and thus in need of greater protection. This exception is rejected by many women, some of whom reject it as symbolic of female vulnerability, whereas others remain fearful of retaliatory violence. These findings have larger implications for future efforts to address failures to report crim...