The SAGE Handbook of Criminological Research Methods

Conducting research into crime and criminal justice carries unique challenges. This Handbook focuses on the application of 'methods' to address the core substantive questions that currently motivate contemporary criminological research. It maps a canon of methods that are more elaborated than in most other fields of social science, and the intellectual terrain of research problems with which criminologists are routinely confronted. Drawing on exemplary studies, chapters in each section illustrate the techniques (qualitative and quantitative) that are commonly applied in empirical studies, as well as the logic of criminological enquiry. Organized into five sections, each prefaced by an editorial introduction, the Handbook covers: • Crime and Criminals • Contextualizing Crimes in Space and Time: Networks, Communities and Culture • Perceptual Dimensions of Crime • Criminal Justice Systems: Organizations and Institutions • Preventing Crime and Improving Justice Edited by leaders in the field of criminological research, and with contributions from internationally renowned experts, The SAGE Handbook of Criminological Research Methods is set to become the definitive resource for postgraduates, researchers and academics in criminology, criminal justice, policing, law, and sociology.

Regulating Prostitution: Controlling Women's Lives'

The chapter argues that the women who compose the majority of street prostitutes in Great Britain are currently subject to an interlocking system of regulation that variously defines them as criminal offenders, threats to public health, victims of child abuse, and vulnerable women who must be compelled under the threat of punishment to seek welfare help. Each label or approach to the street prostitute involves a set of interventions aimed at changing or working with different aspects of the women's lives. This produces an interlocking system of regulation, because the interventions are not mutually exclusive. A street prostitute can be defined as both a victim and an offender and as both a patient in need of medical help and a threat to public health. This comprehensive system of regulation means that a street prostitute faces not only a wide range of criminal justice dispositions, but also mandatory participation in programs in which her relationships and the choices she makes in her life outside of prostitution are subject to scrutiny and intervention. Given that street prostitutes are mostly poor women seeking economic survival in a profession that makes them vulnerable to victimization, the current regulatory system is an attempt to control a small group of poor women regarding their choices and relationships as they struggle to survive poverty. Whereas in the 1980s in Great Britain, a woman involved in street prostitution may have faced only a fine, now she is subject to a more extensive range of criminal justice actions accompanied by various government interventions designed to remake her life.

Governing Prostitution: New Formations, Old Agendas

Recent governmentality literature distinguishes between government from above and government “from below” in an attempt to avoid “top-down” analyzes of state-centered government and to acknowledge the multiple and diverse ways in which the governance is achieved. By analyzing key shifts and changes in the regulation of prostitution in the UK in the last three decades, it is possible to complicate the distinction between the two modes of government. Whilst some writers highlight the ways in which government from above and below become increasingly blurred, this article argues that although the agendas and modes of government from above and below are difficult to disentangle, the effects on sex workers are not. Regulation remains rooted within coercive and punitive state-centered criminal justice responses, even though organizations “from below” may well be the very organizations tasked by the state with carried out those responses.

Criminology: A Sociological Introduction

This sociological introduction provides a much-needed textbook for an increasingly popular area of study. Written by a team of authors with a broad range of teaching and individual expertise, it covers almost every module offered in UK criminological courses and will be valuable to students of criminology worldwide. It covers: - key traditions in criminology, their critical assessment and more recent developments; - new ways of thinking about crime and control, including crime and emotions, drugs and alcohol, from a public health perspective; - different dimensions of the problem of crime and misconduct, including crime and sexuality, crimes against the environment, crime and human rights and organizational deviance; - key debates in criminological theory; - the criminal justice system; - new areas such as the globalization of crime, and crime in cyberspace. Specially designed to be user-friendly, each chapter contains boxed material on current controversies, key thinkers and examples of crime and criminal justice around the world with statistical tables, maps, summaries, critical thinking questions, annotated references and a glossary of key terms, as well as further reading sections and additional resource information as weblinks.

Court Based Psychiatric Assessment: A Case for an Integrated and Diversionary Public Health Role

This article describes a follow-up study of 232 individuals who underwent psychiatric assessment by a Criminal Justice Mental Health Team (CJMHT) in 2001/2002, and also draws upon in-depth interviews conducted with 26 of the cohort. At assessment many people are identified with substance misuse problems, as homeless and with a history of psychiatric contact but in the main their problems are of insufficient severity to merit diversion to psychiatric hospital. The study mapped service contact, housing and offending in the 12 months following assessment and compared this to the 12 months prior to assessment, and found increased levels of service contact but also increased levels of offending and no decrease in homelessness. Thus assessment by the CJMHT brought few discernible advantages for the majority of clients. This was also the perception of the 26 clients who were interviewed. Their own perceptions of their lifestyle and the support that they deemed most valuable are described to identify means of enhancing the efficacy of court assessment.

Sentencing and public confidence : results from a national Australian survey on public opinions towards sentencing

This paper examines the critical issue of public confidence in sentencing, and presents findings from Phase I of an Australia-wide sentencing and public confidence project. Phase I comprised a nationally representative telephone survey of 6005 participants. The majority of respondents expressed high levels of punitiveness and were dissatisfied with sentences imposed by the courts. Despite this, many were strongly supportive of the use of alternatives to imprisonment for a range of offences. These nuanced views raise questions regarding the efficacy of gauging public opinion using opinion poll style questions; indeed the expected outcome from this first phase of the four phase sentencing and public confidence project. The following phases of this project, reported on elsewhere, examined the effects of various interventions on the robustness and nature of these views initially expressed in a standard ‘top of the head’ opinion poll.

Occupational Access and Wage Discrimination

This article presents a study on the quantification of the level of occupational access and wage discrimination in Great Britain. The traditional approach to quantifying the level of sex discrimination is to distinguish gender differences in productive characteristics from the unequal treatment of characteristics according to gender. The role of inter- versus intra-occupational effects in determining the magnitude of wage differences between men and women was examined. The econometric results provided estimates of the wage differential in six broad occupational classifications together with an aggregate picture of how important the occupational distribution of females is in explaining their lower average wage. In summary, the results of the study suggest that the vast majority of the male and female wage differential arises from intra-occupation effects. The results provide evidence to suggest that occupational segregation is not a major contributor to the observed male/female wage differential.

How should Australia regulate voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide?

The purpose of this paper is to provide a basis from which to start an informed and rational dialogue in Australia about voluntary euthanasia (VE) and assisted suicide (AS). It does this by seeking to chart the broad landscape of issues that can be raised as relevant to how this conduct should be regulated by the law. It is not our purpose to persuade. Rather, we have attempted to address the issues as neutrally as possible and to canvass both sides of the argument in an even-handed manner. We hope that this exercise places the reader in a position to consider the question posed by this paper: How should Australia regulate voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide? In line with the approach taken in the paper, this question does not take sides in the debate. It simply asks how VE and AS should be regulated, acknowledging that both prohibition and legalisation of such conduct involve regulation. We begin by considering the wider legal framework that governs end of life decision-making. Decisions to withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatment that result in a person’s death can be lawful. This could be because, for example, a competent adult refuses such treatment. Alternatively, stopping or not providing treatment can be lawful when it is no longer in a person’s best interests to receive it. The law also recognises that appropriate palliative care should not attract criminal responsibility. By contrast, VE and AS are unlawful in Australia and could lead to prosecution for crimes such as murder, manslaughter or aiding and abetting suicide. But this is not to say that such conduct does not occur in practice. Indeed, there is a body of evidence that VE and AS occur in Australia, despite them being unlawful. There have been repeated efforts to change the law in this country, mainly by the minor political parties. However, apart from a brief period when VE and AS was lawful in the Northern Territory, these attempts to reform the law have been unsuccessful. The position is different in a small but increasing number of jurisdictions overseas where such conduct is lawful. The most well known is the Netherlands but there are also statutory regimes that regulate VE and/or AS in Belgium and Luxembourg in Europe, and Oregon and Washington in the United States. A feature of these legislative models is that they incorporate review or oversight processes that enable the collection of data about how the law is being used. As a result, there is a significant body of evidence that is available for consideration to assess the operation of the law in these jurisdictions and some of this is considered briefly here. Assisting a suicide, if done for selfless motives, is also legal in Switzerland, and this has resulted in what has been referred to as ‘euthanasia tourism’. This model is also considered. The paper also identifies the major arguments in favour of, and against, legalisation of VE and AS. Arguments often advanced in favour of law reform include respect for autonomy, that public opinion favours reform, and that the current law is incoherent and discriminatory. Key arguments against legalising VE and AS point to the sanctity of life, concerns about the adequacy and effectiveness of safeguards, and a ‘slippery slope’ that will allow euthanasia to occur for minors or for adults where it is not voluntary. We have also attempted to step beyond these well trodden and often rehearsed cases ‘for and against’. To this end, we have identified some ethical values that might span both sides of the debate and perhaps be the subject of wider consensus. We then outline a framework for considering the issue of how Australia should regulate VE and AS. We begin by asking whether such conduct should be criminal acts (as they presently are). If VE and AS should continue to attract criminal responsibility, the next step is to enquire whether the law should punish such conduct more or less than is presently the case, or whether the law should stay the same. If a change is favoured as to how the criminal law punishes VE and AS, options considered include sentencing reform, creating context-specific offences or developing prosecutorial guidelines for how the criminal justice system deals with these issues. If VE and AS should not be criminal acts, then questions arise as to how and when they should be permitted and regulated. Possible elements of any reform model include: ensuring decision-making is competent and voluntary; ascertaining a person’s eligibility to utilise the regime, for example, whether it depends on him or her having a terminal illness or experiencing pain and suffering; and setting out processes for how any decision must be made and evidenced. Options to bring about decriminalisation include challenging the validity of laws that make VE and AS unlawful, recognising a defence to criminal prosecution, or creating a statutory framework to regulate the practice. We conclude the paper where we started: with a call for rational and informed consideration of a difficult and sensitive issue. How should Australia regulate voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide?

A distributional analysis of the native-immigrant wage gap : the importance of employment discrimination

It is well documented that immigrants earn less than natives in the United States, and various attempts have been made to determine whether these earnings differentials reflect underlying differences in skill or ethnic discrimination in the labor market. The earnings of immigrants and ethnic minorities is an extensively studied area focusing on the economic integration of immigrants (e.g., Chiswick (1978), Lalonde and Topel (1993), Borjas (1995)). Yet, the role of occupational segregation as a mechanism for discrimination is yet to be addressed (to our knowledge). Discrimination can be effective at either of two stages in the earnings process – in the assignment of earnings to people within occupational groups (henceforth referred to as wage discrimination) or in the allocation of people to occupations (henceforth referred to as employment discrimination). While it would be premature to attribute the underlying cause to discriminatory hiring policies of employers, it would be of social-political and economic interest to investigate the possibility.

A critical appraisal of responses to Maori offending

This article critically analyses the role that criminological theory and specific policy formulations of culture play in the New Zealand state’s response to the over-representation of Māori in the criminal justice system. Part one provides an overview of the changing criminological explanations of, and responses to, Māori offending in New Zealand from the 1980s onwards and how these understandings extended colonialist approaches to Māori and crime into the neo-colonial context. In particular, we chart the shift in policy development from theorising Māori offending as attributable to loss of cultural identity to a focus on socio-economic and institutional antecedents and, finally, through the risk factors, assessment, and criminogenic needs approaches that have gained prominence in the current policy context. In part two, the focus moves to the strategies employed by members of the academy to elevate their own epistemological constructions of Māori social reality within the policy development process. In particular, the critique scrutinises recent attempts to portray Indigenous responses to social harm as “unscientific” and, in part, responsible for the continuing over-representation of Māori in New Zealand’s criminal justice system. The purpose of this analysis is to focus the critical, criminological gaze firmly on the activities of policy makers and administrative criminologists, to examine how their policies and approaches impact on Māori as an Indigenous people.