Asian Journal of Criminology最新文献

While public attitudes toward the police have been extensively researched in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan over the past three decades, no comparative study has documented the similarities and differences in how citizens’ confidence in the police is sustained in these East Asian democratic societies. Additionally, research into the simultaneous impact of instrumental, expressive, and normative models on public assessment of police in Asian societies remains limited. Given the introduction of Western policing philosophies into East Asian societies since the 1990s, there is reason to believe that these models may vary in their relevance in Japanese, South Korean, and Taiwanese contexts. This study utilizes convenience sampling-based online survey data collected in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan in 2022, with 2248 completed questionnaires for in-depth analyses. The results show that Taiwan has the highest level of confidence in the police, followed by Japan and South Korea, respectively. Notably, adherence to procedural justice, police effectiveness, and residential stability significantly increase citizen confidence in the police across all three countries. While the likelihood of sanctions for wrongdoers tends to increase Japanese confidence in their police, the perception of safety concern and distributive justice positively impacts confidence in the police among Taiwanese citizens.

This study examines the effectiveness of court-appointed lawyers in comparison to private attorneys within China’s criminal justice system, focusing on the “Lawyers for All” program. Utilizing data from Guangdong courts between 2018 and 2021 and covering five types of crimes, the research employs propensity score matching to evaluate sentencing lengths and probation rates. The findings indicate that defendants represented by court-appointed lawyers typically receive shorter sentences than those with private counsel, but they are less likely to be granted probation. Additionally, an innovative metric—“actual time served in prison”—suggests a reduced incarceration period for defendants with court-appointed attorneys. The study proposes that the collaborative role of court-appointed lawyers within the Chinese courtroom workgroup potentially influences these outcomes, contrasting with the adversarial nature of private attorneys. This analysis contributes to the broader understanding of legal representation in authoritarian regimes, highlighting the unique dynamics within China’s legal system.

Health and victimization have been documented as the robust covariates for offending, but limited research examines the relationship among the three elements simultaneously. Drawing on survey data from a group of male incarcerated individuals in Taiwan (N = 472), this study utilizes multinomial logistic regression to test whether health and victimization attribute to discern the membership among chronic, intermittent, and one-time offenders. Net of controls, results reveal that worse physical and mental health is associated with persistent offending. In addition, chronic offenders are more likely to experience more property victimization than one-time offenders. Our findings imply that consideration for preventing individuals from persistent offending by treating offenders with better care for health and victimization may generate additional beneficial effects. The so-called chronic offenders should be deemed to be the chronic victims or the chronic unhealthiness. The criminal justice policymaking based on the demonization of chronic offenders is desperate for change.

This study explores the smuggling and trafficking of North Korean migrants in China (NKMC), focusing on their migration motives, victimization types, and contributing factors, alongside suggestions for prevention and mitigation strategies. Although the sample size is modest and non-random (N=58), the insights gathered offer a poignant glimpse into the lived experiences of this specific subgroup of migrants who navigated from North Korea to China and subsequently to South Korea. Interviews were conducted with former NKMC residing in South Korea. Participants were recruited through purposive snowball sampling. The primary reasons for leaving North Korea were economic hardships (70.7%) and survival (12.1%). In China, more than 72% of female migrants were sold into marriage, while 21% were coerced into the sex trade. Contributing factors to victimization included economic hardship, a shortage of marriageable women, illegal status, and fear of deportation. Additionally, language barriers, geographical unfamiliarity, and stringent information control policies exacerbated the vulnerability of NKMC to exploitation. Addressing it as a criminal justice issue may be more effective than a human rights approach.

Kolberi constitutes a form of cross-border labor prevalent in the western regions of Iran, wherein individuals engage in the transportation of various goods across borders to generate income. Despite the fact that government institutions and the border guard police consider Kolberi illegal, a large number of border residents are engaged in this job. A part of this group is made up of adolescents, on whom this research is focused. The researchers adopt a Cultural Criminology approach to understand how adolescents get involved in Kolberi. To gather information, the research employed a combination of interviews, document analysis, and virtual data, while thematic analysis was utilized to examine the findings. Our findings reveal that the dialectical interaction between the political economy of border, border culture, and the adolescent Kolbers’ subculture contribute to the formation of adolescents Kolberi and the reproduction of Kolberi within the border community. In this way, adolescents Kolberi is an illustrative exemplar of the development of cultural criminology of border.

To facilitate effective community supervision to reduce recidivism, Chinese penal authorities have collectively adopted the policy of restraining orders (RO), which aim to monitor selected offenders and restrict their activities while serving their sentences. Despite the burgeoning literature on its normative underpinnings in the context of Chinese community corrections (CCC), research has yet to empirically examine how RO works in practice and what it implies for both CCC in particular and Chinese penalty in general. Drawing on observational and interview data from various actors involved in the implementation of RO, we show how restraining orders function beyond the ostensible objectives of strengthening surveillance and ensuring orderly communities. More importantly, RO policy works to screen out a particularly risky group of offenders for targeted control, either through individualized treatment or appropriate self-governance, which is subsequently framed as “rehabilitative control” in Chinese penal governance. The evidence further reveals that while RO implementation is responsive to victims’ needs and mobilizes community actors, it symbolizes a modernist approach to Chinese social control described as “penal responsivity.” The use of ROs within the CCC to actually govern specific offenders (rather than merely as a tool of strict supervision) suggests emerging ends of Chinese justice that are increasingly geared toward collective interests, social harmony, and community stability, and that is, above all, directed by the Party-state.

There are two significant difficulties in building a general criminal justice theory. First, different from criminology theories, criminal justice produces multiple outcomes at different levels. Second, the scopes of existing theories largely originate from Western contexts and data, few including cross-cultural variation. This paper outlines a unified theory to explain multiple criminal justice outcomes at the system, institutional, and individual levels across cultures under a paradigm shift from the current “monotonic paradigm” to a more general “comparison paradigm.” The new paradigm logically contains the existing paradigm while broadening research questions and scope of criminal justice studies. It constructs a new set of concepts and propositions, presenting an effort toward a general causal criminal justice theory.

Criminology has been changing in a fragmental paradigm, which explains how the discipline emerged, evolved, and developed. Accordingly, four periods are recognized: “outgrowth,” “emergence,” “dispersion,” and “increasing micro-criminologies/accelerating” period. Meanwhile, the increasing micro-criminologies based on the fragmental paradigm have changed the dominant pattern of criminology from theorization to conceptualization and transformed it from empirical theories into critical perspectives. The fragmental paradigm also acts in the form of two contractionary and expansionary models to combine and disseminate the traditional and current trends at two levels of integrative and global criminologies. Finally, the present paper explores the advantages and challenges of fragmental paradigm and by introducing an archipelago template for a better explaining and understanding the paradigm and concludes that fragmentation of criminology can be viewed as a chance for developing the discipline, particularly in the light of new areas like Asian criminology in the era of new micro-criminologies of the third millennium.

The past two decades have witnessed the emergence of empirical studies exploring the relationships between legal and extra-legal factors and judicial attitudes and behavior in China. Nonetheless, few studies have assessed Chinese judges’ occupational experiences across genders. This study examines gender disparities in professional attitudes among Chinese judges. Relying on survey data collected from 485 judges in a northern Chinese province, this study assesses whether female and male judges differ in their responsiveness to litigants and turnover intention. Multivariate regression models reveal that gender differences exist in judges’ responsiveness and turnover intention, with female judges less likely to show responsiveness to litigants and quit their jobs. Besides gender, judges’ job satisfaction and stress and relationships with litigants are also linked to their responsiveness and turnover intention. Implications for policy and research are discussed.

Research using the 11-scenario police integrity instrument designed by Klockars et al. document a range of factors influencing the willingness to report a fellow officer for police crime and police misconduct. A consistent quandary within this scholarship is that while some findings are consistent, when disaggregated by scenario type, there are wide variations obscuring patterns that may allow for targeted interventions improving police integrity. This study applies support vector machines (SVMs) to construct predictors for 608 responses to the Police Integrity Instrument from police officers enrolled in a police university for in-service training in China. Results confirm that while perceptions of seriousness remain the most successful predictors of the self-reported willingness to report a fellow officer, perceptions of seriousness associated with ethical dilemmas display high survivability suggesting targeted interventions may be an effective pathway towards improving police integrity.