Asian Journal of Criminology最新文献

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.

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.