International Journal of Law Crime and Justice最新文献

Policing in England Wales is currently experiencing a large uplift in police recruitment. This has been due to the Government's target to uplift officers by 20,000. As a result, police forces are implementing large scale, sustained recruitment drives. These are accompanied by positive action schemes to address deficits in officer representation. Current statistics now indicate that representation in forces is rising slowly, as these initiatives are employed. There is little literature that examines the impact of positive action on existing police officers' perceptions, despite the initiative's relative proliferation. Procedural Justice theoretical literature is utilised to situate this in the research context.

This study represents 17 theoretically informed, long form, phenomenological interviews conducted with serving officers in a uniform, response policing environment. The interviews were semi-structured, open ended and participant led, allowing the officers to present and explore their own thoughts and feelings about positive action, developed through their lived experience in an active police role. These interviews were conducted in an operational environment, from an insider-outsider perspective with total privacy. Officers openly discussed how they felt about the implementation of such policies and procedures.

The findings indicate that a taboo exists with regards to the discussion of positive action processes in the police workplace. A juxtaposition also exists between the existence of positive action initiatives and the theme of meritocracy amongst the police officers. Officers strongly refuted the need for positive action to remedy issues with representation, but similarly criticised the current representation levels within forces. Theoretically this indicates an informational gap between police implementation of positive action interventions, and the perceived need for them to exist at all amongst rank and file. Implications for the study's findings are explored and possible remedies discussed.

The tension between formality and informality is intrinsic to the implementation of criminal law. Criminal procedures in fact always happen on a continuum between formality and informality, where the different actors involved (police officers and other street-level bureaucrats, prosecutors, judges, experts, defense lawyers, etc.) continuously perform and negotiate (in)formality. This special issue explores these “politics of (in)formality” in different criminal law settings and from different disciplinary perspectives. The different empirical contributions explore the continuum between formality and informality as well as practices of informalization in two different levels of the criminal justice system: police investigations and court proceedings.

Previous studies found a positive relationship between prior violent victimization experience and substance use among adolescents based on general strain theory. However, there is limited knowledge on the link between violent victimization and vaping, which is a relatively new method of substance use. Therefore, the current study applies general strain theory to examine the relationship between violent victimization and vaping. Three types of vaping, nicotine, marijuana, and flavor only, are examined in correlation with violent victimization, utilizing data from the 2019 cohort of the Monitoring the Future study (MTF). The findings suggest that students with violent victimization experience are more likely to engage in vaping. Also, students with stronger negative emotions, weaker social bonds, and more unstructured time with peers are more likely to vape. The current study provides empirical evidence on using general strain theory to explain vaping behavior among students. Applicable policies are also discussed.

A growing number of studies have argued that public participation in criminal justice has become increasingly important in recent years; however, empirical data on the prevalence and determinants of participation in criminal justice are limited. Therefore, this study conducted a preliminary exploration of the prevalence and determinants of criminal justice participation experience and intention using data from 848 Japanese adults. This study defined the concept of criminal justice participation based on the notion of political participation used in political sciences. The results demonstrated that only 10.5% of the respondents had experienced at least one of the nine examined activities (e.g., participating in demonstrations and posting their thoughts on SNS). In addition, the mean of each intention item ranged from 1.46 to 2.04 on a five-point Likert scale. Moreover, experience and intention were not significantly affected by demographic variables, except for gender, with men showing higher experience and intention to participate.

Magistrates' courts are the workhorses of English and Welsh criminal process. Efficient processing of high caseloads in these courts depends on a cohesive network of co-operation among the parties. That co-operation depends on a culture of perceived informality among courtroom personnel, whilst proceedings are actually subject to nuanced uses of legal and procedural provisions. Those nuances are obscured by the seemingly informal way that the workgroup operates to keep magistrates’ courts functioning so that they can manage high volume caseloads.

Here I argue that the veil of informality that falls over magistrates' court proceedings undermines defendants' abilities to participate in proceedings. Data gathered through observation of magistrates’ court proceedings and follow up interviews with lawyers highlighted that the courtroom workgroup operates as a network perpetuating co-operative behaviours. That data suggests defendants cannot properly participate because a strong culture of workgroup co-operation both informalises the proceedings and obscures their complexity.

Through a framework that combines literature's observations on traffickers' policy-based representations with International Relations (IR) theories, this paper explores the representations of traffickers and anti-trafficking government goals in policies of the United Kingdom's (UK), Scottish and Northern Irish governments. Policies were found to mostly subscribe to a Realist's viewing of human trafficking, emphasising criminal choices. Still, and despite their growing tendency to focus on a wider range of traffickers, their dominant narrative tends to revolve around trafficking stereotypes, often ignoring the full spectrum of traffickers' identities to promote total human trafficking elimination. This discourse may overstate Britain's trafficking problem, sustaining state legitimacy and intervention and narrowing down the scope of anti-trafficking efforts. Conclusively, to ensure a more effective anti-trafficking response, the UK needs to set more feasible goals and based on an in-depth knowledge of traffickers strive to further enrich the policy-promoted human trafficking narrative.

While extensive studies have identified the influence of social perception and victims' self-blame as factors responsible for underreporting of rape, fewer studies have explored victims' interaction with police officers and possible impacts this could have on victims' reporting behavior. Therefore, this study explores rape victims’ interaction with officers of the Nigerian Police in the course of seeking justice. Twenty-seven victims of rape who interacted with police and six key informants working in women advocacy groups were interviewed in a qualitative study. Findings indicated that participants perceived police officers to have engaged in victim-blaming, slut-shaming, lack of empathy, refusal to cooperate with counsel, and delaying investigative processes. Evidence from the study suggests that police officers manifest influence from social stereotypes and rape scripts in their perception of rape victims. The study suggests the deployment of a special anti-sexual violence unit within the police, consisting of well-trained and skilled personnel in sexual crimes.

It is now well recognised that victims of sexual offences may recount events differently at different times and to different audiences and that variations, gaps or ‘inconsistencies’ are not necessarily indicative of lying or unreliability. Incorporating this knowledge into the criminal trial now forms part of the wider reform agenda in a number of jurisdictions, including via recommended jury directions. This is now expressly reflected in provisions like s 54D of the Jury Directions Act 2015 (Vic) – introduced in 2017 – which provides for an educative direction on how the jury should (and should not) consider differences in the complainant's account. Drawing on rare access to sexual offence trial transcripts, this article reports on the findings of an analysis of 33 rape trials finalised in the County Court of Victoria between 2013 and 2020. We found that complainants were still regularly cross-examined, and the quality of their evidence challenged, on the basis of differences in their accounts. We found little evidence that the availability of a jury direction has shifted the defence practice of evoking the ‘lying complainant’ by pointing to ‘inconsistences’ in their evidence.