Asian Journal of Criminology最新文献

Amidst concerns from both Chinese and Anglo-American scholars regarding the deployment of technical investigative measures, questions have emerged about their potential misuse and the resulting impact on judicial procedure fairness, which encompasses procedural participation, equality, transparency, rationality, timeliness, and finality. This study explores procedural fairness issues in China’s criminal justice system by focusing on applying technical investigative measures in drug-related cases. We have gathered a sample of 800 verdicts of drug-related criminal cases with 1134 defendants from China Judgments Online. Employing logistic regression analysis, we investigated the influence of extra-legal and legal factors on applying technical investigative measures. Our research reveals that these factors significantly impact the utilization of technical investigative measures. Variables such as the defendant’s occupation, education, domicile, and ethnicity substantially influence the decision to deploy technical investigations. Furthermore, factors like the defendant’s crime type, severity, involvement in co-offending, and prior criminal records also affect the application of these measures. The results indicate that investigative agencies consider certain extra-legal factors when applying technical investigative measures that may result in potential misuse and consequently may affect the fairness of China’s judicial procedures. This study holds significant potential to inform and catalyze reforms within China’s criminal justice system.

In this study, we use 1980–2019 longitudinal age-arrest data from Taiwan and applied the age-period-cohort-interaction (APC-I) model (Luo & Hodges, 2022) to examine the stability or change in the age-arrest distributions across five offenses. We focus on two research questions: (1) whether the shape of age-arrest curves in Taiwan diverges from the Hirschi and Gottfredson’s (HG) invariant premise after accounting for period and cohort effects; and (2) whether any observed period or cohort effects on age patterns vary depending on offense type. Findings indicate overall consistency in the shape of Taiwan’s age-arrest distributions after adjusting for period and cohort effects, which are characterized by relatively older peak ages and symmetrical spread-out distributions that diverge considerably from HG’s invariant projection and prototypical US age-arrest patterns. In addition, we find that period effects have contributed to higher arrest rates in recent years, and cohort effects have impacted somewhat the shape of Taiwan’s age-arrest distributions. These findings, along with recent cross-sectional evidence from Taiwan, South Korea, and India (Steffensmeier et al., 2017; 2019; 2020), further confirm that the aggregate age-crime relationship is robustly influenced by country-specific processes and historical and social transformations.

The police legitimacy literature is grounded predominantly in studies from the Global North. In these contexts, technology and economic resources allow policing institutions to exercise significant reach in ways that mitigate the challenges to service delivery posed by distance and geography while the bureaucratic state relationally distances these same institutions from the public. This scholarship tends to take these governmental ‘fixes’ as given. In Global South contexts, these fixes are less reliable. The complexities of policing in dispersed states—rural, remote, and island—are frequently mentioned within scholarship. However, the question of how spatial relations impact police legitimacy and services largely remains a passing concern. In this paper, we argue that in the Global South, spatial relations are important elements contributing to police legitimacy. This argument is made by reframing the rural and remote policing literature to explore how spatial archipelagic features influence how policing by the state occurs. This work is used as our analytical scaffold in two case studies of the Solomon Islands and Tonga that illustrate how space influences local views of police. We argue that space is a key contextual characteristic that needs to be considered within future police legitimacy research and theorisation.

This study applied Wikström’s Situational Action Theory (SAT) of crime causation to Japanese people in their 30 s–40 s (N = 320). Participants in an internet survey were presented with three criminogenic scenarios—traffic crime, individualistic white-collar crime, and corporate white-collar crime—and were asked to rate the likelihood of them committing a crime in these scenarios. They were also asked to evaluate their morality, moral context, and degree of temptation in each scenario, as well as their tendency for self-control, interdependent view of self, and independent view of self. The results supported SAT in that the moral context positively and morality negatively predicted the likelihood of committing a crime. However, the results were inconsistent with SAT’s assertion that other variables influenced those with low morality more than those with high morality. Further, the tendency to have an interdependent view of self affected the likelihood of committing a crime in some scenarios. This result indicates that in some situations, some people are more influenced by expectations of their behavior from their surroundings, in addition to their morality. Future empirical studies of SAT are needed to examine the influence of self-control on criminal phenomena using the ability to exercise self-control in certain situations that conform to the concept of self-control advocated by SAT. Morality is also a crucial concept in the SAT. Therefore, future research should examine how the morality of trying to fulfill social role expectations and previously assessed morality influence the likelihood of committing a crime.

Although prior research has widely tested the public’s perceived fairness of the criminal justice system, such as the police, the court, and the prosecutor’s offices, such research is mainly conducted within Western contexts. Empirical research conducted in the Chinese context remains relatively limited. Based on survey data randomly collected from Guangzhou, China, this study rigorously examines the linkage between victimization, including physical victimization and property victimization, and the perceived fairness of the criminal justice system. It also examines the mediating effect of the perception of neighborhood safety on this linkage. The study finds that people’s property victimization experience, rather than the physical victimization experience, would negatively and significantly influence their trust in the fairness of the criminal justice system. Such a negative effect was partially mediated by people’s perception of neighborhood safety, and the direct effect was found to be stronger than the indirect effect. Based on these findings, policy implications are explored in this study.

Community policing plays an important role in Japanese policing. One prefecture in Japan installed a security box to facilitate community-based crime prevention activities, encouraging interactive partnerships with community neighbours. This study aimed to determine the time-course impact of the implementation of the security box on fear of crime. A questionnaire survey was conducted before, immediately after, and a few years after the implementation of the security box at two different locations. A series of analyses revealed that (1) the number of respondents who knew about the security box, passed by the security box, and saw security advisors staffed at the security box increased from immediately after the introduction to three and a half years after the introduction, (2) levels of fear of crime increased from Wave 1 to Wave 3, and (3) the security box was not associated with levels of fear of crime. Although this study did not provide empirical support for the effects of the security box on lowering fear, many respondents expect its effectiveness in improving neighbourhood safety and community crime prevention; moreover, it is necessary to determine its long-term impact.

The concept of organizational justice refers to employee perceptions about whether the employing organization treats workers in a fair and just manner. Policing research has shown that officers’ organizational justice views are associated with various salient outcomes (e.g., job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and misconduct). No research has been published on the relationship of justice views and the life satisfaction of police officers. The current preliminary study explored how distributive and procedural justice were related to life satisfaction based on self-reported survey data from 827 police officers from the state of Haryana in India. Factor analysis suggested that two variables represent procedural justice: one focused on the perceived fairness of procedures for evaluation and the other focused on the perceived fairness of the procedures for promotion decisions. Only one factor was needed for distributive justice. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis indicated that all three justice variables had significant positive associations with life satisfaction. The results suggest that enhancing distributive and procedural justice views of officers should increase the level of reported satisfaction with life.

The study analyzed long-term changes in Japanese crime rates and their relationship with policing and labor market conditions, focusing on the increase in crime rates around 2000. The study used yearly prefectural panel data from 1978 to 2018 and estimated econometric models to explore the factors related to the crime rate. Fixed effects models were used to control for unobservable heterogeneity across prefectures. We addressed the endogeneity problem in the number of police officers with the instrumental variable approach, employing the number of traffic fatalities and the number of firefighters as instruments. Instrumental variable estimation revealed that increasing the number of police officers reduced the crime rate. We also confirmed that crime decreased when the labor market was tight and that increasing minimum wages reduced crime. The model’s variables largely explain crime rate declines since 2002 but do not account for increased crime up to 2002. Policing and labor market conditions do matter in crime rates. In Japan, the number of local police officers increased against the explosion of crime around 2000. Such policing significantly reduced crime after 2002. At the same time, increasing job opportunities and income from legal work also contributed to the decline. In contrast, crime expansion until 2002 was not attributed to the model’s variables, so we need further research.