International Journal of Law Crime and Justice最新文献

This article aims to examine the actual severity of criminal sanctions on identity theft imposed by Shanghai courts, which entails an analysis of the effects of eight factors on the probability of imprisonment, probation and the length of imprisonment/detention in 507 Shanghai courts' judgements. Since the Supreme People's Court promulgated the Judicial Interpretation on sanctioning identity theft crimes in 2017, the severity of criminal punishment substantially increased. Judges seemed to have considerable discretion to deviate from the sentencing criteria set by the Criminal Code and the 2017 Judicial Interpretation. Judges' discretion indicates a gap between formal criminal law and its enforcement. A more coordinated legal framework of personal information protection that contains criminal law, administrative law and civil law might be more effective in fighting identity theft. It could be meaningful to adjust the existing sentencing criteria and give judges full play to explore the sensitiveness of personal information.

While sentencing consistency is a major principle of most of the justice systems, some features of sentencing disparities remain understudied. The purpose of the current study is to examine regional variation in aggravation assessment of child sexual abuse (CSA). We use data of CSA convictions given in Finnish district courts (n = 909). Multilevel regression modeling is used as the analytic method to assess whether the variation persists even after controlling for the offense characteristics.

The descriptive results show that there are remarkable differences between courts. The results from the multilevel regression analysis suggest that the between-court variation in convictions is not fully explained by the observed offense characteristics, as the variation persists even after controlling for these. While the current results are suggestive of between-court sentencing disparities, the source for this variation remains speculative. More research is needed on data allowing for both between- and within-court analyses.

This article sorts out the research from the past decade on corporate compliance in China. Chinese scholars have studied corporate compliance from different disciplines and perspectives. In terms of research methods, the study of corporate compliance should adopt the dogmatics approach to provide a stable theoretical framework for the construction of the compliance system. In terms of research direction, future research needs formal thinking to delimit the institutional boundaries of criminal compliance. As for unit imputation mode, corporate compliance does not solely depend on any certain mode. No vicarious responsibility, strict responsibility or organizational responsibility constitutes the institutional foundation of compliance. Before China's legislation is amended, compliance should serve as a factor to exclude or reduce corporate responsibility so as to encourage corporate compliance.

Restorative services can develop from the bottom-up, as community-led schemes, or from the top-down, as institutionally or organisationally-led programmes. This paper examines the challenges both types of service face, drawing on interviews with practitioners, service commissioners, and academics working across England, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and Sierra Leone. The findings suggest that restorative projects face significant challenges: bottom-up projects often lack the resources that come with institutional recognition and may struggle to achieve the acceptance and integration into other state services. If they do achieve this integration, they risk alienating the communities from which they emerged. Top-down projects may enjoy greater funding security and have the benefit of institutional acceptance, but often struggle to engage community members because they lack the on-the-ground legitimacy. Overall, we find that both are important; both fill a ‘space’ of need, and both contribute to the continued development and integration of restorative work.

Australian coroners have several functions in death in custody investigations – they fulfil judicial, pastoral, preventative and data collection roles. We interviewed six coroners from three Australian states to investigate coroners' perspectives on current issues in deaths in custody. In this paper, we present the results of our research on three key areas of interest: Indigenous deaths in custody; recommendations that are commonly made but not implemented; and the role of the coronial process in death in custody investigations. Our sample size was small, however the coroners we interviewed provided some important insights on these issues. A key finding of this research is that official statistics on the number and rate of Indigenous deaths in custody may be inaccurate. Coroners expressed particular concern about the adequacy of mental health care of people in custody, and they were supportive of alternative approaches to death investigations that involved restorative approaches.