Asian Journal of Criminology最新文献

Existing corporate crime research, grounded in Western assumptions of dispersed ownership and independent regulation, has inadequately addressed the distinctive mechanisms of malfeasance within South Korea’s family-controlled conglomerates, known as ‘chaebols’. This article investigates the structural, institutional, and cultural logics of corporate crime under the chaebol system through the 2003 SK Group accounting scandal. Drawing on academic literature, judicial archives, and media reports, our analysis reveals a tripartite dynamic. Structurally, cross-shareholding and concentrated family control, coupled with symbolic governance facades, particularly in the absence of robust external oversight, help explain transparency failures and risk-laden misconduct. Institutionally, the politico-business symbiosis of South Korea, reinforced by resource dependence, elite cohesion, and revolving-door dynamics, fostered regulatory capture and selective enforcement. Rather than simple failure, this reflects a patterned permissiveness in which oversight is selectively withdrawn and misconduct tolerated. Culturally, Confucian norms of hierarchy and loyalty align with Scott’s cultural-cognitive pillar, rendering paternalistic leadership legitimate and whistleblowing deviant. Such norms help rationalize state leniency, embedding elite impunity within collective narratives of growth and stability. Thus, this article proposes an integrated “structural-institutional-cultural coupling” framework to reveal how corporate crime is systematically reproduced through the interplay of concentrated power, institutional tolerance, and cultural legitimation; it concludes with policy recommendations including strengthening corporate criminal liability, restricting presidential pardons, and advancing governance restructuring to enhance corporate accountability and legal robustness. By challenging the applicability of mainstream Western theories, this research offers a new theoretical lens for understanding corporate governance and crime in South Korea and comparable contexts.

Research on imprisonment and noncitizens has predominantly focused on the United States and Europe. Limited attention has been paid to disparities between citizens and non-citizens within prison systems in regions like Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Expanding these research efforts to explore other regional contexts around the world is particularly important in an era of increasing globalization and cross-border migration. This study addresses this gap by examining the proportion of foreign nationals held in prison in 13 countries in Asia and 23 Latin America and Caribbean countries. Using data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime from 2015 to 2019, it tests the hypothesis that foreign citizens in these countries may face a disproportionately higher risk of incarceration. This study endeavors to clarify drivers of high risk of incarceration, examining sociocultural, economic and institutional factors. Preliminary findings suggest that citizenship-based disparities in incarceration exist among Asian, Latin American, and Caribbean countries, and that nations with more equitable criminal justice systems, marked by a lower proportion of foreign nationals in prison, tend to exhibit lower levels of democratization, income inequality, and ethnic fractionalization, but higher levels of GDP per capita. The results highlight the need for much more detailed research into the relationships between incarceration and citizenship between countries to discover the sources of variability and to design appropriate policies for equitable criminal justice systems.

Public participation is critical in shaping criminal justice policy. Criminal Justice Participation (CJP) refers to behaviors that may influence policy, including participation in online petitions and demonstrations. A previous comparative study showed that the proportion of individuals who had engaged in CJP was higher in the US compared to Japan. However, no such comparisons have been made within Asian societies. Against this backdrop, the current study compared Japan and South Korea. Analysis of data from 309 Japanese and 300 Korean participants revealed that (1) the proportion of people who had engaged in at least one CJP behavior in the past year was 11.3% in Japan, compared to 56.3% in South Korea. Furthermore, no psychological variables showed significant associations with CJP in Japan, while, in South Korea, internal efficacy and external efficacy toward courts showed significant associations. These results indicate that, even among countries within the same Asian region, differences exist in both the prevalence and correlates of CJP, suggesting that the simple East vs. West dichotomy is inadequate.

Court judgments, particularly in multilingual or low-standardization jurisdictions, remain an underutilized resource for empirical legal studies. This study develops an automated pipeline for creating structured data from Macau’s criminal court judgment files—documents presented in both Chinese and Portuguese—by leveraging a modern large language model (LLM) to parse and extract key variables. Validation against human-coded benchmarks shows high agreement with manual annotations, underscoring its reliability. We also address selection bias arising from nonrandom publication practices and outline strategies, such as instrumental-variables approaches and double machine learning, to enhance the robustness of statistical inference based on our dataset. The findings highlight the feasibility of transforming unstructured court records into analytically rich structured data, advancing computational criminology and empirical legal studies in Macau and more broadly.

Previous research has overlooked the dynamic shifts in public trust in the police. This study investigates the changing patterns of it in China from 2013 to 2023, a decade marked by the state-led legal reform known as Comprehensive Law-based Governance. Drawing on six waves of nationally representative data from the Chinese Social Survey (CSS), we employ the age-period-cohort-interaction (APC-I) model to disentangle age, period, and cohort effects. Results reveal three key findings. First, trust follows a U-shaped age trajectory, decreasing during early adulthood and rising later. Second, trust in the police has steadily increased since 2013, suggesting a positive period effect associated with ongoing legal reforms. Third, generational differences are striking: the Pre-Cultural Revolution Generation reports persistently high but stable confidence throughout the period; the Cultural Revolution and Social Reform Generations exhibit lower and declining trust; and the Law-based Governance Generation demonstrates the highest and increasing trust levels. These results emphasize how legal reforms may be leveraged to bolster institutional legitimacy and reshape public perceptions across generations. This study advances policing scholarship by incorporating temporal dimensions into the evaluation of public trust and provides broader insights into state-society relations in contemporary China.

While technological evolution and societal digitalization promote human civilization in ways, they also open the “Pandora’s box” by creating malleable opportunities for “future crimes”. Recognizing the malleability of future crimes, the articles in this special issue offer novel and evidence-based insights on two broader themes: future crimes and regulatory responses to future crimes. Future crime studies span several trending topics, such as artificial intelligence (AI)-driven analysis of cyber fraud networks, temporal shift of stalking victimization, dating apps and cyberstalking victimization, and online dating sexual harassment. Studies on regulatory responses cover a few cutting-edge fields, including AI-powered robotic policing, police use of facial recognition technology, and AI-empowered responsive regulation. These studies underscore the salience of embracing forward-looking perspectives in understanding future crimes and regulatory responses amid ever-changing technologies and digitalizing society.

The integration of service-oriented professionals, such as social workers, into the Chinese Community Corrections (CCC) epitomizes the blossoming of penal welfarism and the formation of the rehabilitation ideal in modern Chinese penality. While much research has studied varying impacts of rehabilitation delivered by social workers, little is known about the emotional lives of Chinese service providers who are tasked with implementing these rehabilitation programs in the CCC. To advance the literature on the CCC-based rehabilitation, we examine how social workers perform emotional labor when rehabilitating offenders. This study is based on data from an ethnographic study of urban community corrections in China. Our analysis reveals that social workers develop strategies to manage their emotions by adhering to their professional identity as benevolent caregivers while swimming against a labyrinth of bureaucratic and political streams. We term this process “strategic benevolence,” which is fraught with ambivalence yet morally rewarding. Our findings underscore the importance of addressing emotional dilemmas to fulfill the rehabilitative aspirations of the nascent CCC.

Since the 2010s, organised crime groups in Southeast Asia have increasingly engaged in industrial-scale cyber scams, often perpetrated in areas with limited governance through dedicated compounds staffed by labour trafficking victims. The estimated annual global losses to scams perpetrated through these compounds (most notably so-called “pig butchering” romance scams) exceed tens of billions of US dollars. Meanwhile, they continue to embrace a range of transformative technologies such as artificial intelligence, deepfakes and cryptocurrencies. Focusing on the situation in Myanmar, this article explores the use of large language models for open-source intelligence gathering and network construction, achieving time and cost reductions of an estimated 96.6% and 99.5% respectively compared to manual research methods. We show that this method is effective in uncovering the complex ecosystem of individuals, armed groups, crime syndicates, complicit government officials, special economic zones and other related entities sustaining these industrialised fraud operations. Computing and drawing insights from centrality measures and multivariate quality assignment procedures, we note that the network remains resilient and prone to crime displacement even amid a rise in law enforcement action since 2024. We motivate this LLM-assisted network-driven approach as a useful methodological augmentation to wider horizon scanning efforts designed to anticipate the future directions of complex crimes. By providing dynamic, temporal and holistic insights into criminal infrastructures and how they have adapted to past disruptions, we explore how such analyses provide additional perspectives and contextual grounding for environmental foresight work, particularly for crimes situated within a complex interplay of conflict, geopolitics, digital technologies and unparalleled profits.

The recruitment of female police officers in Chinese societies is experiencing a notable increase. Understanding these officers’ perspectives on work-related stress and work–family conflict is thus vital for advancing knowledge of policing practices in contemporary China and offering insights into police management and practices. Using conservation of resources (COR) theory, this qualitative study investigates self-reported work-to-family and family-to-work conflict among female police officers in three Chinese societies: mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Twenty-eight semi-structured interviews were conducted, transcribed, and analysed using thematic analysis. The findings reveal three primary themes: (a) manifestations of stress, (b) resource loss in work–family conflict, and (c) resource conservation through work, family, and coping strategies. The results of this study bear significant implications for social and organisational policy and practice, informing the development of strategies to mitigate work-related stress in policing, with an emphasis on contextual and gender considerations.