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Many people watching UK television drama National Treasure will have made their minds up about the guilt or innocence of the protagonist well before the end of the series. In episode one we learn that this aging celebrity has ‘slept around’ throughout his long marriage but when an allegation of non-recent sexual assault is made he strenuously denies it.

The post What if they are innocent? Justice for people accused of sexual and child abuse appeared first on OUPblog.

This month, we are celebrating the tenth anniversary of Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice. Apart from being an occasion for celebration too good to pass up, it is also a good opportunity to take stock of the last ten years and look to what the next ten might hold.

The post A “quiet revolution” in policing appeared first on OUPblog.

At the time of its creation, the Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence, targeted at ‘dangerous offenders’ considered likely to commit further serious offences, elicited little parliamentary debate and even less public interest. Created by the Labour government’s Criminal Justice Act 2003, the sentence was subsequently abolished by the Conservative-led coalition government in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012.

The post The politics of the ‘prisoners left behind’ appeared first on OUPblog.

The following extract is excerpted from Urban Legends: Gang Identity in the Post-Industrial City. The chapter, titled ‘Learning to Leisure’ traces the leisure lives of a group of young men from Langview, a deindustrialised working-class community in Glasgow.

The post (Getting a) Malling: Youth, consumption and leisure in the ‘new Glasgow’ appeared first on OUPblog.

Criminological knowledge originating in the global North is drawn upon to inform crime control practices in other parts of the world. This idea is well established and most criminologists understand that their efforts to engage with policy makers and practitioners for the purpose of generating research impact abroad can have positive and negative consequences.

The post The ethics of criminological engagement abroad appeared first on OUPblog.

It is difficult to imagine a more disempowering place than a solitary confinement cell in a maximum security prison. When opportunities for meaningful human engagement are removed, mental health difficulties arise with disturbing regularity. In the United States, where prisoners can be held in administrative segregation for years on end, stories of psychological disintegration are common.

The post Psychological deterioration in solitary confinement appeared first on OUPblog.

The media has a key role to play in the construction of our knowledge of crime and policing. In the post-war decades, they argue the representation of policing in the UK reflected the general social consensus. The dominant image here is Jack Warner playing George Dixon in the popular UK TV series Dixon of Dock Green that ran from 1955 to 1976. George Dixon came to represent the archetypal ‘British Bobby’, a pillar of the community who was widely respected. The homely and reassuring values that Dixon represented were summarized in his catchphrase ‘Evenin’ all’.

The post Watching the true detectives appeared first on OUPblog.

Picture the scene.
Scene 1: A group of wildly drunk young men smash a local business to smithereens, systematically destroying every inch, before beating the owner within an inch of his life.
Scene 2: A group of power-crazed men (and one woman), driven by an aggressive culture of hyper-competitiveness, commit economic crime on an epic scale.

The post Reframing gangs appeared first on OUPblog.

Every few months, a new report announces the breakdown of the British immigration system. In January, the Committee of Public Accounts issued a searing review of the Home Office’s migration policy. Three months earlier, the National Audit Office released a near-identical critique.

The post Prisons built to expel appeared first on OUPblog.

Amidst the images of burning vehicles and riots in Ferguson, Missouri, the US President, Barack Obama, has responded to growing concerns about policing by pledging to spend $75 million to equip his nation’s police with 50,000 Body Worn Videos. His initiative will give added impetus to an international movement to make street policing more transparent and accountable. But is this just another example of a political and technical quick fix or a sign of a different relationship between the police and science?

At the heart of the shift to Body Worn Video is a remarkable story of a Police Chief who undertook an experiment as part of his Cambridge University Masters programme. Rialto Police Department, California serves a city of 100,000 and has just over one hundred sworn officers. Like many other departments, it had faced allegations that its officers used excessive force. Its Chief, Tony Farrar, decided to test whether issuing his officers with Body Worn Video would reduce use of force and complaints against his officers. Instead of the normal police approach to issuing equipment like this, Farrar, working with his Cambridge academic supervisor, Dr Barak Ariel, designed a randomised field trial, dividing his staff’s tours of duty into control – no video – and treatment – with video. The results showed a significant reduction in both use of force and citizen complaints.

Why is this story so different? A former Victoria Police Commissioner described the relationship between the police and research as a “dialogue of the deaf”. The Police did not value research and researchers frequently did not value policing. Police Chiefs often saw research as yet another form of criticism of the organisation. Yet, despite this, research has had a major effect on modern policing. There are very few police departments in the developed world that don’t claim to target “hot-spots” of crime, an approach developed by a series of randomised trials.

However, even with the relative success of “hot-spot policing”, police have not owned the science of their own profession. This is why Chief Farrar’s story is so important. Not only was Farrar the sponsor of the research, but he was also part of the research team. His approach has allowed his department to learn by testing. Moreover, because the Rialto trial has been published to both the professional and academic field, its lessons have spread and it is now being replicated not just in the United States but also in the United Kingdom. The UK College of Policing has completed randomised trials of Body Worn Video in Essex Police to test whether the equipment is effective at gathering evidence in domestic violence investigations. The National Institute of Justice in the United States is funding trials in several US cities.

This is the type of approach we have come to expect in medicine to test promising medical treatments. We have not, up to now, seen such a focus on science in policing. Yet there are signs of real transformation, which are being driven by an urgent need to respond to a perfect storm created by a crisis of legitimacy and acute financial pressures. Not only are Chiefs trying to deal with the “Ferguson” factor, but they also have to do so against a backdrop of severe constraint.

As the case of Body Worn Video has shown, science can provide a means to transform policing as long as police are prepared to own and adopt the science. But for Body Worn Video not to be an isolated case, policing will need to adopt many of the lessons from medicine about how it was transformed from eighteenth century barber surgeons to a modern science-based profession. This means policing needs an education and training system that does not just teach new recruits law and procedure, but also the most effective ways to apply them and why they work. It means that police leaders will need to target their resources using the best available science, test new practices, and track their impact. It will require emerging professional bodies like the College of Policing to work towards a new profession in policing, in which practice is accredited and expertise is valued and rewarded.

Obama’s commitment to Body Worn Video will not, of itself, solve the problems that Ferguson has so dramatically illustrated. The Rialto study suggests it may help – a bit. However, the White House announcement also included money for police education. If that is used wisely and police leaders grasp the opportunity to invest in a new science-based profession, then the future may be brighter.

Headline image credit: ‘Day 126 – West Midlands Police – CCTV Operator’ by West Midlands Police. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr

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The theme of the American Society of Criminology meeting this November is “Criminology at the Intersections of Oppression.” The burden of violence and victimization remains markedly unequal. The prevalence rates, risk factors, and consequences of violence are not equally distributed across society. Rather, there are many groups that carry an unequal burden, including groups disadvantaged due to race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, sexual identity, place of residence, and other factors. Even more problematically, there is an abundance of evidence that there are marked disparities in service access and service quality across sociocultural and socioeconomic groups. Unfortunately, even today this still extends to instances of outright bias and maltreatment, as evidenced by ongoing problems with disproportionate minority contact, harsher sentencing, and barriers to services.

However, there is promising news, because advances in both research and practice are readily attainable. Regarding research, there are a number of steps that can be taken to improve our existing state of knowledge. To give just a few examples, we need much more research on hate crimes and bias motivations for violence. Hate crimes remain one of the most understudied forms of violence. We also need many more efforts to adapt violence prevention and intervention programs for diverse groups. The field has still made surprisingly few efforts to assess whether prevention and intervention programs are equally efficacious for different socioeconomic and sociocultural groups. Even after more than 3 decades of program evaluation, only a handful of such efforts exist. Program developers should pay more systematic attention to ensuring that materials that use diverse images and settings. However, it is also important to note that cultural adaptation means more than just superficial changes in name use or images.

Regarding practice, what is needed is more culturally appropriate approaches. In many cases, this means more flexible approaches and avoiding a “one size fits all” approach to services. Most providers, I believe, have good intentions and are trying to avoid biased interactions, but many of them lack the tools for more culturally appropriate services. One specific tool that can help is called the ‘VIGOR’, for Victim Inventory of Goals, Options, and Risks. It is a safety planning and risk management tool for victims of domestic violence. It is ideally suited for people from disadvantaged groups, because, unlike virtually all other existing safety plans, it has places for social and community issues, financial strain, institutional challenges, and other issues that affect people who experience multiple forms of disadvantage. The safety plan does not just focus on physical violence. The VIGOR has been tested with two highly diverse groups of low-income women, who rated it as better than all safety planning they had received.

The VIGOR also offers a model for how other interventions can be expanded and adapted to consider the intersections of oppression with victimization in an effort to be more responsive to all of the needs of those who have sustained violence. With greater attention to these issues, there is the potential to make a real impact and help reduce the burden of violence and victimization for all members of society.

Dr. Hamby attended an Author Meets Critics session at the ASC annual meeting yesterday morning. The session was chaired by Dr. Claire Renzetti, co-editor of the ‘Oxford Series of Interpersonal Violence’.

The post Violence, and diverse forms of oppression appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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On 31 December 1941, August Vollmer hosted the first meeting of the National Association of College Police Training Officials at his home. The organization initially focused on developing standardized curricula for university-based policing programs, but soon expanded its scope to include the more general field of criminology. In 1958, the American Society of Criminology (ASC) name was officially adopted.

Vollmer, first police chief of Berkeley, CA and founder of the first school of criminology at the University of California Berkeley, is generally regarded as the father of modern policing.

O.W. Wilson, himself a prominent figure in modern policing, perhaps summed up Vollmer’s influence best in a 1953 article in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology: “August Vollmer, police administrator and consultant, student, educator, author, and criminologist, will be recorded in American police history as the man who contributed most to police professionalization by promoting the application of scientific principles to police service.”

While Vollmer’s focus on science was largely on forensic and physical sciences, in part because of a lack of social science research on the police at the time, he was one of the first to recognize that the police could partner with scientists and other outsiders to increase their effectiveness and efficiency. He embodied the idea of infusing policing with research and scientific knowledge that is the hallmark of efforts to make policing more evidence-based today.

We can only speculate on how Vollmer would run a police department today. But based on his strong belief that officers should be well-educated and exposed to the latest research findings through extensive training throughout their careers, we might assume he would embrace close collaboration between police and social scientists and the use of findings from rigorous studies to guide police practice. Today, our evidence base outside of the hard sciences is far larger. The Evidence-Based Policing Matrix, for example, includes nearly 130 methodologically rigorous studies of the crime control effectiveness of policing strategies.

As O.W. Wilson’s quote suggested, Vollmer not only incorporated research into policing, but he also was one of the first to straddle the line between science and practice through his work as a police chief and university professor. Vollmer’s interest in the link between universities and policing inspired that New Year’s Eve meeting in 1941, which eventually led to the formation of the ASC, now the largest professional organization devoted to criminology in the world.

The initial close link between the ASC and police education quickly dissipated, however. Many of the police practitioners and professors initially involved in the creation of the ASC began to feel as though the organization had become too sociological and concerned with questions of crime causation and uninterested in police practice. As Willard Oliver describes in his History of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS), the International Association of Police Professionals was established by former ASC members in 1963 to focus more on police education. The organization eventually expanded its focus to the entire criminal justice system and took on its current name of ACJS. Thus, while Vollmer was instrumental in the creation of the ASC, his followers soon abandoned the organization in favor of ACJS. As a result, police practitioners have traditionally been more involved in the Annual Meetings of the ACJS, which has had a section on policing for more than 20 years.

Recently, a group of scholars and practitioners brought together by Cynthia Lum of George Mason University have begun the critical work of highlighting policing as an important part of criminology and the ASC. In May of this year, the ASC approved a new Division of Policing, with membership open to any ASC member. We encourage members to consider joining the Division when renewing (or beginning) their ASC membership for 2015.

As Anthony Braga, Cynthia Lum, and Edward Davis described in a recent article in The Police Chief, a major goal of the Division is to build strong partnerships between police and researchers that will ideally increase the number of completed research studies and improve translation of research findings into police practice. The Division thus marks a return to the roots of the ASC and Vollmer’s vision of a policing profession consistently using the best science and research to guide policy and practice.

Even without a formal Division in place, policing presentations have become a major component of the ASC conference. A guide to policing sessions of interest at the Annual Meeting next week includes more than 120 panels with policing presentations. This number should only increase in future years with the Division’s efforts, and ideally the number of police practitioners presenting at ASC will increase exponentially.

We invite everyone attending the 70th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology to join us at the inaugural event for the Division of Policing to be held 20 November 2014 from 4:00-5:30pm.

The event will include opening remarks from San Francisco District Attorney and former Police Chief George Gascón. Wesley Skogan of Northwestern University will then provide a brief history of police research and introduce a distinguished group of police researchers and practitioners who will each speak briefly about their vision for the future of policing research.

It seems especially appropriate that this kick-off event for the Division will take place at the Marriott Marquis San Francisco, less than 15 miles away from 923 Euclid Avenue in Berkeley, Vollmer’s former home and the birthplace of the ASC.

The post Back to the future with the ASC’s new Division of Policing appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Women are involved in many organized illegal activities, albeit in small numbers. Editors Rosemary Gartner and Bill McCarthy of The Oxford Handbook on Gender, Sex, and Crime have compiled important information about women’s involvement in organized crime. Here they’ve adapted some information from “Organized Crime: The Gender Constraints of Illegal Markets” by Valeria Pizzini-Gambetta (Chapter 23).

(1) Most organized crime falls into one of two distinct types – illegal industries and mafias — both of which are dominated by males. Illegal industries supply illegal commodities through networks that vary in shape and size according to the circumstances of the trade. Mafias are club-like groups defined by ritual entry, a territorially-based hierarchical structure, and the supply of extra-legal governance to illegal markets. Both types of activity have been dominated by men, but there are many historical examples where women also participated, particularly in illegal industries.

(2) There is historical evidence of mixed-gender groups of criminals. Several mixed-gender groups of criminals roamed the Netherlands and the German territories in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some pirate groups in the Far East were also mixed-gender marauding communi­ties. In the early nineteenth century, Chinese pirates were ruled by the widow of their late general for several years. They formed a nation at sea, in which junks were gender-mixed, with female captives and family members on board. Buccaneer and pirate communi­ties in the Caribbean golden age were essentially gender-exclusive; nevertheless, a handful of women entered the world of sea piracy through love relationships, cross-dressing, and kinship.

(3) Female entrepreneurs have been involved in running illegal businesses in the modern period. Marcellina Cardena, Marie Debrizzi, and Stephanie St. Clair were part of the gender and racial blend that animated gambling in Harlem until the 1930s. These so-called “bankers” needed only cash and a network of policy vendors to conduct illegal gambling. They hired other women to go door to door to take dime bets in exchange for a small percentage of the win from both bankers and winners. Women have also played important roles in the drug trade. In Latin America, Eva Silverstein (arrested in 1917), Sadie Stock (arrested in 1920), and Maria Wendt (arrested in 1936) were part of international rings of traffickers that imported opium and its derivatives from China and Mexico for export to the United States and Europe. More recently, Mahalaxmi Papamani and her network of Tamil female neighbors managed an important share of the drug retailing market in Mumbai in the 1980s.

(4) Although less common, women have also formed gender-exclusive crime groups. The “Forty Elephants” was an all-female group that flourished in the shadow of The Elephant and Castle male gang in London throughout the nineteenth century and well into the 1950s. The young women of this group specialized in shoplifting in the West End. Their sorority was hierarchical and a “queen” was in charge of distributing targets among the group members.

(5) Women often play “traditional” female roles in organized crime. Women have been relatively less involved as active offenders in mafias; instead, traditional female roles remain the most important resource for this type of organized crime. Intelligence gathering, turf monitoring, and hiding illegal commodities or weapons are tasks that can be accom­plished as part of women’s ordinary daily routines. In most groups, women are trusted auxiliaries in a number of capacities at times that are critical for the functioning of the group’s operations.

Headline image: Person in the Shadows with handgun, on natural wooden background. © Alexei Novikov via iStockphoto.

The post Five facts about women’s involvement in organized crime appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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By Mark Austin Walters

Hate crimes are offences that are motivated by hostility, or where some form of demonstration of hostility is made, against the victim’s identity. Such crimes can have devastating impacts, both on those directly victimised and on other community members who fear they too may be targeted. While much has been written about the impacts of hate crime victimisation, there has been little which has focused on how the criminal justice system can effectively address the consequences of hate — other than through criminalising and punishing offenders.

A relatively new theory and practice of criminal justice is that of “Restorative Justice” (RJ). RJ seeks to bring the “stakeholders” of an offence together via inclusive dialogue in order to explore what has happened, why it happened, and how best those involved in the offence can repair the harms caused. There is now a substantial body of research into the effectiveness of RJ for violent and non-violent offences. Yet there has been little attention paid to whether such a process can effectively address crimes motivated by identity-based prejudice.

The harms caused by prejudice-motivated crime can relate both to the individual traumas experienced by victims, and the structural harms faced by many marginalised communities. The individual and structural harms caused by hate crime are not easily remedied. The current approach to combating hate crime via criminalisation and enhanced penalties, while important symbolically to the combatting of hate crime, does little to directly repair harm or challenge the underlying causes of hate-motivated offending.

In order to understand more about the reparative qualities of Restorative Justice for hate crime an empirical study of RJ projects was conducted where practices were used to address the causes and consequences of hate crime offences. The 18 month project involved 60 qualitative interviews with victims, restorative practitioners, and police officers who had participated in a restorative practice. In addition, 18 RJ meetings were observed, many of which involved face-to-face dialogue between victim, offender, and their supporters. One such project, administered by the Hate Crimes Project at Southwark Mediation Centre, South London, used a central restorative practice called Community Mediation, which employs a victim-offender or family group conferencing model. The cases researched involved “low-level” offences (including crimes aggravated by racial, religious, sexual orientation, and disability hostility) such as causing harassment, violence, or common assault, as well as more serious forms of violence including several cases of actual bodily harm and grievous bodily harm.

In the Southwark Hate Crimes Project, the majority of complainant victims (17/23) interviewed stated that the mediation process directly improved their emotional wellbeing. Further exploration of the process found that the levels of anger, anxiety, and fear that were experienced by almost all victims were reduced directly after the mediation process. Victims spoke at length about why the dialogical process used during mediation helped to improve their emotional wellbeing. First and foremost, participants felt they could play an active role in their own conflict resolution. This was especially important to most victims who felt that they had previously been ignored by state agencies when reporting their experiences of victimisation. Many noted that they were finally being listened to and their victimisation was now being taken seriously.

It was of utmost importance to victims that the perpetrator signed an agreement promising to desist from further hate incidents. In terms of desistance, 11 out of 19 separate cases of ongoing hate crime incidents researched in Southwark ceased directly after the mediation process had taken place (participants were interviewed at least six months after the mediation process ended). In a further six cases incidents stopped after the community mediator included other agencies within the mediation process, including schools, social services, and community police officers.

Unfortunately, the positive findings reported from Southwark were not repeated for the restorative policing measures used for low-level offences by Devon and Cornwall Police. Just half of the 14 interviewees stated that they were satisfied with the outcome of their case, where an alternative restorative practice, called Restorative Disposal was used. There were several reasons for lower levels of harm reparation at Devon and Cornwall, most of which were directly linked to the (lack of) restorativeness of the intervention. For example, several participants felt pressured by the police to agree to the intervention which had direct implications for the voluntariness of the process – a key tenet of restorative justice theory and practice.

Collectively, these results suggested that where restorative justice is implemented by experienced practitioners committed to the values of “encounter,” “repair,” and “transformation” it could reduce some of the harms caused by hate. However, where Restorative Justice was done “on the quick” by facilitators who were not equipped with either the time or resources to administer RJ properly, victims will be left without adequate reparation for the harms they have endured.

Another key factor supporting the reparative qualities of restorative practice, is reconceptualising the central notion of “community”. It is important to understand the complex dynamics of “community” by recognising that it may have certain invidious qualities (that are causal to hate-motivated offences) as well as more benevolent virtues. Equally, “community” may provide a crucial conduit through which moral learning about “difference” can be supported and offenders can be reintegrated into neighbourhoods less likely to reoffend.

Although the notion of community is an elusive concept, it is important for the future use of restorative practices for practitioners to view community organisations as important components of local neighbourhoods. These organisations (including neighbourhood policing teams, housing associations, schools, colleges, and social services) have an important role to play in conflict resolution, and must work together using a multi-agency approach to addressing hate crime. Such an approach, if led by a restorative practitioner, allows the various agencies involved in tackling hate victimisation to combine their efforts in order to better support victims and manage offenders. Hence, Restorative Justice may have scope to not only mitigate against the traumas of direct victimisation but also some of the structural harms that marginalised groups continue to experience.

Dr Mark Austin Walters is a Senior Lecturer in Criminal Law and Criminal Justice at the University of Sussex, and the Co-Director of the International Network of Hate Studies. He is the author of Hate Crime and Restorative Justice: Exploring Causes and Repairing Harms, which includes a full analysis of the impacts of hate crime, the use of restorative justice, multi-agency partnerships and the importance of re-conceptualising “community” in restorative discourse in cases involving “difference”. A full text of the book’s introduction ‘Readdressing Hate Crime’ can be accessed online.

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By David Skarbek

On 11 April 2013, inmate Calvin Lee stabbed and beat inmate Javaughn Young to death in a Maryland prison. They were both members of the Bloods, a notorious gang active in the facility. The day before Lee killed Young, Young and an accomplice had stabbed Lee three times in the head and neck. They did so because Lee refused to accept the punishment that his gang ordered against him for breaking “gang rules.” Lee didn’t report his injuries to officials. Instead, he waited until the next day and killed Young in retribution.

While this might seem to provide evidence that gangs are inherently violent, that’s not so. The story is more complicated. Gangs enforce a variety of rules that they design to establish order. Lee violated these rules by giving his cellmate—who had a dispute with a rival gang—a knife. Many inmates would see this as encouraging violence, which gangs seek to control. The situation provides a glimpse at a major role played by prison gangs. They don’t form to promote chaos, but to limit spontaneous acts of violence.

Many people are surprised to learn about the extent to which gangs regulate inmate life. Not only do many inmates feel they must join a gang, but gangs even issue written rules about appropriate social conduct. These include who you may eat lunch with, which shower to use, who may cut your hair, and where and when violence is acceptable. One gang gives new inmates a written list of 28 rules to follow. Many gangs even require new inmates to provide a letter of introduction from gang members at other prisons. Moreover, gangs also encourage cooperation within their group by relying on elaborate written constitutions. These often include elections, checks and balances, and impeachment procedures.

Fence and lights. © JordiDelgado via iStockphoto.

Besides setting rules, prison gangs promote social order by adjudicating conflict. Inmates can’t turn to officials to provide this when dealing in illicit goods and services. An inmate can’t rely on a prison warden to resolve a dispute over the quantity or quality of heroin. They can’t turn to officials if someone steals their marijuana stash.

In short, prison gangs form to provide extralegal governance. They enforce property rights and promote trade when formal governance mechanisms don’t. The provide law for the outlaws.

Yet, gangs’ dominance today stands in stark contrast with the historical record. In California, the prison system existed for more than a century before prison gangs emerged. If gangs are so important today, then why didn’t they exist for more than 100 years?

A major cause of the growth of prison gangs is the unprecedented growth in the prison population in the last 40 years. The United States locks up a larger number and proportion of its residents than any other country. This amounts to about 2.2 million people (707 out of every 100,000 residents). With such large prison populations, officials can’t provide all the governance that inmates’ desire. Mass incarceration thus creates fertile conditions for the rise of organized prison gangs.

David Skarbek is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. He is the author of The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System, which is available on Oxford Scholarship Online. Read the introductory chapter ‘Governance Institutions and the Prison Community’ for free for a limited time.

Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO) is a vast and rapidly-expanding research library, and has grown to be one of the leading academic research resources in the world. Oxford Scholarship Online offers full-text access to scholarly works from key disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, science, medicine, and law, providing quick and easy access to award-winning Oxford University Press scholarship.

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By Caitie-Jane Cook

Thursday sees the start of the British Society of Criminology annual conference, this year held at the University of Liverpool. The three-day conference (10-12 July 2014, preceded by a postgraduate conference on the 9th) will see academics from across the globe come together to discuss an expansive range of topics, from prisons and policing to hate crime and community justice, and I, for one, cannot wait to attend.

The theme for this year’s conference is Crime, Justice, Welfare: Can the Metropole Listen?, with participants aiming to “examine the counter-hegemonic potential of criminology, […] explore how it might give ‘voice’ to those that stand outside the dominant narratives of the metropole, [and challenge the] practices that serve to marginalise different ways of thinking about, and engaging with, an alternative criminological enterprise.”

With an expansive programme of sessions to be staged in the award-winning and Grade II listed Foresight Centre, the conference is sure to be a highlight in the 2014 criminology calendar. Here are some of the key sessions we’re looking forward to and we think you should be too:

• Keynote speeches from Professors Raewyn Connell (University of Sydney), Chris Cunneen (James Cook University), and Didier Fassin (Princeton University)
• Border Criminologies – Mary Bosworth chairs a session addressing links between immigration, trafficking, and cross-border detention
• Police Culture and Diversity – A roundtable discussion on contemporary developments in diversity, 15 years on from the MacPherson Report.
• Launch of the BSC Victims Network – an event to mark the formation of the BSC’s sixth specialist network in March 2014, which sets out to bring together those who have interests around victims of crime and social harm, survivors, and resilience.

The British Society of Criminology conference isn’t the only thing in Liverpool that has a lot to offer. For those with some time to spare outside the conference, make sure that you make the best of the city named European Capital of Culture in 2008.

If a conference session has piqued your interest, or you’d like to fit in some last minute research, scour the shelves of the Liverpool Central Library, home of the famous Picton Reading Room and fully renovated in 2013. Of course, you can’t mention Liverpool without The Beatles – take a trip to the Casbah Coffee Club, where it all began, or learn all about the Fab Four at The Beatles Story dockside museum. Or, you could find out more about the city itself at the Museum of Liverpool, winner of the Council of Europe Museum Prize for 2013.

Find out more about the conference by visiting the official website or visiting the British Society of Criminology’s official website. Those on Twitter can keep up-to-date with the conference by following the official account @livuni_bsc2014 and hashtag #bsc2014. Conference attendees can visit the OUP stand for the duration of the conference to pick up copies of the British Journal of Criminology and to claim an exclusive delegate discount on a range of titles.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Caitie-Jane Cook, otherwise known as ‘CJ’, is Marketing Executive for Law titles at OUP.

Oxford University Press is committed to developing outstanding resources to support students, scholars and practitioners in all areas of the law. OUP publishes a wide range of law journals and online products. Follow our law teams on Twitter at @OUPIntLaw, @BStonesPolice, and @blackstonescrim @OUPCommLaw, to find out more.

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‘Honor killings’ consistently make the headlines, from a Brooklyn cab driver convicted of conspiracy to a recent decapitation in Pakistan. However, it’s become increasingly difficult to sort fact from fiction in these cases. We asked Rosemary Gartner and Bill McCarthy, editors of The Oxford Handbook on Gender, Sex, and Crime, to pull together an essential grounding for this muddled subject matter. Here they’ve adapted some information from “Honor Killings” by Dietrich Oberwittler and Julia Kasselt (Chapter 33).

(1)   Honor killings are an extreme form of gendered domestic violence. Most involve young, single female victims and an assailant who is a male relative; however, they also include some types of intimate-partner homicides, as well as cases with male victims, victims outside the family, and female assailants. An honor killing is motivated by the desire to restore a social reputation that—in the killer’s perception—has been damaged by rumors about or the victim’s actual breach of conduct norms regulating female sexuality in the widest sense; the decision to use lethal violence is a collective family affair, rather than the action of an individual perpetrator. The underlying motive in all cases—irrespective of the victims’ gender—is the punishment or coercion of women.

(2)   The absence of reliable country-level data makes it impossible to ascertain the exact frequency of honor killings; recent estimates suggest that there may be as many as 5000 per year. Countries with reported high rates of honor killings score poorly in the international Human Development Index and the Gender Inequality Index and rank highly in the Failed State Index.

(3)   It is likely that the majority of perceived transgressions of honor do not provoke a murder. Research in a number of countries with people who differ in their religious affiliations finds that premarital sexual relationships and out-of-wedlock pregnancies often are dealt with nonviolently, mostly by negotiating compensation or marriage, despite strict honor codes.

(4)   Islam plays a prominent role in public debates on honor killings, yet honor killings are a pre-Islamic tribal tradition and an extra-judicial punishment that is not part of Sharia law. Honor killings occur among Christian minorities in Arab countries, as well as among the Sikh community in India (and among their respective immigrant communities in the West). They appear to be non-existent in some Muslim-dominate countries, such as Oman, and less frequent in others, such as Algeria and Tunisia. Nonetheless, some interpretations of Islamic law, such as those that promote the lawfulness of husbands’ physical violence against wives, the criminalization of pre- and extramarital sexual relationships, and the use of flogging or stoning if prosecuted as hadd (religious) crimes (which does not happen in most Muslim countries), may contribute indirectly to honor killings.

(5)   Findings from the World Values Survey highlight a notable split of orientations in many countries with high levels of honor killings: Democratic political values are commonly endorsed, but public opinion remains much more conservative when it comes to gender equality and sexual liberalization, with almost no trend toward more liberal views among younger age groups.

Dietrich Oberwittler and Julia Kasselt are the authors of “Honor Killings” in Chapter 33 of The Oxford Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Crime. Dietrich Oberwittler is a senior researcher in sociology at the University of Freiburg and Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law. Julia Kasselt is a Ph.D. candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law. Rosemary Gartner and Bill McCarthy are the editors of The Oxford Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Crime. Rosemary Gartner is Professor of Criminology and Sociology at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the co-author of three books: Violence and Crime in Cross-National Perspective (Yale, 1984), Murdering Holiness: The Trials of Edmund Creffield and George Mitchell (University of British Columbia Press, 2003) and Marking Time in the Golden State: Women’s Imprisonment in California (Cambridge, 2005). Bill McCarthy is Professor of Sociology at the University of California Davis. He is the co-author (with John Hagan) of Mean Streets: Youth Crime and Homelessness (Cambridge, 1997).

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By Megan O’Neill

It will not come as news to say that the public police are working under challenging conditions. Since the coalition government came to power in 2010, there have been wide-ranging and deep cuts to the funding of public services, the police included. This was the institution which once enjoyed a privileged position as the “go-to” service for political parties to improve themselves in the eyes of the electorate by being “tough on crime” through ever increasing police numbers. Numbers of police officers and staff rose year on year from 2000 to 2010, an increase of 13.7%. All that has now changed, and the most recent statistics show that the police service has now reduced in size by 11%, and is roughly equivalent to where it was in 2001. While police officers themselves cannot be made redundant, vacant positions are not being filled when officers leave or retire. Police and Community Support Officers (PCSOs) can be made redundant, and this has happened in a few areas, as well as vacancies not being filled. What does this mean for being “tough on crime”?

Well, to be honest, not much on face value. As any good first year Criminology student should be able to tell you, the overall crime rate has been falling more or less steadily since 1995. This drop in crime started before police numbers rose, and occurred in other countries as well where police numbers may not have changed to the degree they did in England and Wales. The cause for the drop in crime is the subject of much debate, and will not be pursued in depth here. However, what is clear is that the sheer number of police officers in a police force does not have a direct link with the amount of crime that area experiences. What is more important is what is done with those officers, and this is where my concern with the current state of policing lies.

While the last Labour government regularly pumped up the number of officers to redress their image of being soft on crime, they also made two significant changes to policing practice. One was the introduction of PCSOs in 2002 and the other was the national roll-out of Neighbourhood Policing in 2008. While both may have been derided in the beginning as being more for show than of any real substance, I feel both have made significant changes in the relationship of the police to many local areas and with this has come a reorientation to the police occupational culture itself. Research I have conducted on partnership work and PCSOs suggests that these changes have made some sections of the police more open to working with those outside of their organisation, has enhanced the commitment the police have to crime prevention and long-term problem solving, and has led to better information sharing and relationships between the police and local residents.

To be clear – I am not arguing that all is fine and well in policing. However, the situation we have now is far better than what was the case in the 1980s and 1990s. Rather than “community policing” referring to police officers in panda cars whizzing through residential areas, going from job to job, we now have officers and staff who walk their beats, get to know many of the people and places within it and have the time to attend to the “small stuff”. By this I mean the anti-social, low-level crimes and incivilities which may not set performance targets on fire, but which mean a great deal to the daily lives of thousands of people. Officers, usually PCSOs, can take the time to find out about these concerns and either address the matter themselves or find the most appropriate partner agency to do so (the staff of which they know by name and often have their numbers programmed into their mobile phones). In return, residents start to build trust in their local neighbourhood team, which may develop over time into information sharing of interest to constables and detectives.

However, all this is now in danger of being eroded. The budget cuts mean that the officers and staff who remain in neighbourhood teams have much heavier workloads, including the PCSOs. It is far more difficult now to attend to the “small stuff” and to conduct visible patrols. Partner agencies are also facing severe budget cuts and this will impact on their ability to work collaboratively with the police as they have fewer resources to share. This means that the police lose opportunities to make connections in their local communities and build valuable social capital. Residents are not getting the attention they desire from their local police and so will have fewer reasons to trust them. In addition to these losses to police practice and community relationships is a much less visible but no less significant loss – the reorientation of the police occupational culture. Police officers became more open to working with partners, PCSOs, residents and to consider long-term problem solving once they had experienced the benefits of doing so. Many of the traditional hostilities towards the “other” were reducing noticeably among the neighbourhood officers with whom I have conducted research. This widening of the police world view will, I fear, also be lost in the current budget structures. This is not a savings for policing – it is a very high cost indeed.

Dr Megan O’Neill is the Chair of the British Society of Criminology Policing Network, and a lecturer at the Scottish Institute of Policing Research, University of Dundee. She is the author of “Ripe for the Chop or the Public Face of Policing? PCSOs and Neighbourhood Policing in Austerity” (available to read for free for a limited time) in Policing.

The full article will be available this June in Policing, A Journal of Policy and Practice, volume 8.3. This peer-reviewed journal contains critical analysis and commentary on a wide range of topics including current law enforcement policies, police reform, political and legal developments, training and education, patrol and investigative operations, accountability, comparative police practices, and human and civil rights

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By Kathleen M. Heide, Ph.D.

There has been a resurgence of interest in girls who kill, following the report of two 12-year-old Wisconsin girls who stabbed another girl of the same age 19 times on 31 May 2014. The girls reportedly had planned to kill their friend following a birthday sleepover to demonstrate their allegiance to a fictionalized Internet character known as Slender Man. Despite the horror and the apparent senseless nature of the attack, all three girls had some good fortune. 

Although the victim had been left for dead, she miraculously lived. Had one of the stab wounds been a millimeter closer to a major artery by the heart, the victim would have bled to death. The victim crawled from the woods towards the street and cried for help. Had she not had the will to live and the good fortune of a passerby who heard her cries and took immediate action, the two assailants would have been facing murder charges instead of attempted murder charges. Under today’s sentencing laws, these two 12-year-old girls if convicted of premeditated murder in adult court could have spent the rest of their lives in prison.

The story sparked national attention given the age and gender of the assailants and the viciousness of the act. Questions quickly followed: Are murders by girls on the rise? Do girls who commit lethal violence differ from boys?

I have been evaluating juvenile homicide offenders and analyzing murder arrest trends in the United States for 30 years. My analyses of over 40,000 case of juveniles (ages 6-17) arrested nationally for murder and non-negligent manslaughter provide convincing evidence that the involvement of girls does not show an increasing trend over the years. On the average, the proportion of juveniles arrested for murder who were female since the mid-1970s has been about 8%. Stated another way, 92% of kids under 18 who are arrested for murder are boys. Analyses of victims, weapons used, co-defendant status, and circumstances indicate that there are significant differences (not due to chance) between boys and girls arrested for murder.

Do Not Cross, Crime Scene, Uploaded by Diego Grez. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Girls under 18 are significantly more likely than boys:

• To kill intimate partners
• To kill victims under age 5
• To kill family members
• To use a knife, personal weapon, or weapon other than a gun
• To kill a female victim
• To act alone
• To be involved in a conflict-related killings (e.g., argument)

Boys under 18 are significantly more likely than girls:

• To kill adolescents and adults
• To kill strangers
• To use a gun
• To kill male victims
• To be involved in crime-related killings
• To be involved in gang-related killings
• To use accomplices to kill

The Wisconsin stabbing brought attention once again to youth violence in the United States. While murders committed by juveniles under 18 have decreased substantially since 1993, when they reached record highs, it is no time for complacence. This tragic case underscores the importance of parents to be aware of their children’s activities and to monitor their Internet activities. While it is unknown what factors in concert propelled these girls to plot for months to kill their friend, one fact is known from their statements to the police: their belief in a homicidal mythical internet character was part of the near lethal equation.

Kathleen M. Heide, Ph.D. is a Professor of Criminology at the University of South Florida, Tampa, and author of Understanding Parricide: When Sons and Daughters Kill Parents (Oxford U. Press, 2013), Animal Cruelty: Pathway to Violence against People (Alta-Mira, 2004), Young Killers: The Challenge of Juvenile Homicide (Sage, 1999), and Why Kids Kill Parents: Child Abuse and Adolescent Homicide (Ohio State University Press, 1992).

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By Gavin Slade

The mafia never dies; the state can destroy mafiosi but not the mafia – such proclamations are common, especially among mafiosi, who believe the Thing, the Organization, is always out there ready to sanction them. Few law enforcement officials or criminologists are prepared to declare any mafia dead either. For the former, the mafia makes for a colourful enemy, while the latter would have a hard time knowing whether a mafia, as a secretive organization that attempts to sell protection and regulate illegal and legal markets, truly has died. Police departments can get extra funding and government support by playing up to the threat of a conspiratorial, hydra-headed mafia monster. Governments can blame shadowy mafia figures or immigrant alien conspiracies for problems of crime and violence and other failings, while ‘transnational organized crime’ can be invoked to demonize and justify meddling in other countries, particularly in the age of the ‘war on terror’.

Nevertheless, states do occasionally attack mafia-like organizations. There are numerous examples of anti-mafia policies from different countries all with varying levels of success. One such case is the post-Soviet republic of Georgia. An anti-mafia campaign launched there in 2005 has been heralded an overall success. This is curious given how weak the Georgian state is and the supposed embeddedness of organized crime in the post-Soviet part of the world. This leads to a puzzle then: what factors might weaken the strength of mafias and cause their decline, if not their death?

Many studies focus on state-centric factors to explain decline. Governments must make strategic decisions about when to attack the mafia as it may prove to be an expensive activity which reaps few gains in crime control or at the ballot box. In some countries, governments face violent backlashes if the mafia is challenged. In Brazil for example, the First Command of the Capital (the PCC, a prison gang that controls illegal markets on the streets) is able to virtually shut down the city of Sao Paolo if it chooses to oppose the state. Thus, mafias and states often simply exist in wary equilibrium of each other, often maintaining a negotiated connection through corrupt links on local levels. Still, at certain moments states can launch full out attacks on mafias, though success is rarely a given.

In Italy and the United States, anti-mafia legislation has enabled greater punitive measures against those who order the commission of crime and engage in patterned acts of racketeering. In Italy, law enforcement reform as well as civil society mobilization, emerging after the mob killings of the judges Falcone and Borsellino in 1992, has been relatively effective, at least in Sicily. These measures include new law enforcement techniques and heightened police coordination, including longer investigation times, the greater use of wire-tapping, entrapment, state’s witnesses, and confiscation of mafia assets and the criminalization of activities that aid the mafia. Such state policies have been recreated elsewhere, for example and most recently, in post-Soviet Georgia.

However, a simple emphasis on the policies of the state and the changes in the socio-economic environment does not account for the vulnerabilities or resilient qualities that decide whether a mafia survives or succumbs to state attack. In Georgia, I argue that, regardless of the state’s anti-mafia policy, internal contradictions within a group called the ‘thieves-in-law,’ a particularly fearsome mafia, was the real reason for the decline of this network of mafiosi there.
Strength in recruitment, for example, is a key variable in survival. Just like any organization mafias require a flow of high quality individuals to reproduce themselves. The thieves-in-law failed to do this. This failure was due to maladaptive institutional change in difficult conditions: wider criminal conflict in conditions of state-collapse led to quicker recruitment and lower quality human capital. The video embedded below discusses this in more detail.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Similarly, internal and external structuring of relations is vital for robust organization, effective adaptation, flows of information, and efficient monitoring and sanctioning. Yet the organization of criminal activities is often risky, and constantly changing in conditions of permanent insecurity and uncertainty. The thieves-in-law in Georgia did not negotiate the violent, difficult conditions of state collapse that occurred in Georgia in the 1990s at all well. It affected their ability to coordinate and regulate their network. All that was then required was the political will to go on the offensive against what was in fact disorganized crime.

The general conclusions from the Georgian case then are: rather than enjoying a vacuum of state power as we might expect, the mafia actually abhors one. Moreover, focusing on organizational vulnerabilities of organized criminals might aid our understanding of how best to tackle established and seemingly indestructible mafia groups, helping to explode the myth that the mafia is forever.

Dr Gavin Slade is an Assistant Professor in Criminology at the University of Toronto, Canada, having gained his PhD in Law from the University of Oxford in 2011. He is primarily interested in organized crime and prison sociology; in particular, criminological questions arising from post-Soviet societies, having lived and worked in Russia and Georgia for almost seven years. He maintains a broad interest in criminal justice reform in transitional contexts and has also worked on such issues in the non-governmental sector in Georgia. He is the author of Reorganizing Crime: Mafia and Anti-Mafia in Post-Soviet Georgia.

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By Heather Strang, Peter Neyroud, and Lawrence Sherman

There is a widely-repeated claim that victims of domestic abuse suffer an average of 35 incidents before the first call to the police.  The claim is frequently repeated by senior police officers, by Ministers, by government reports, by academics and by domestic abuse victim advocates.  It has certainly influenced police behaviour in deciding how to deal with domestic abuse calls.  Police are required to justify the proportionality of their arrest decisions, so if 35 were the right number in a presenting case, arrest will always be seen as proportionate: after all, culpability may not be clear this time but there have probably been at least 34 priors.

The question arises: where did this claim come from? Tracking down the evidence for this number proved to be an interesting chase back through publications over the past thirty years.  Repeatedly, publications cite the number with no reference to specific research demonstrating the finding, only to other publications citing the number.  Finally we traced an obscure Canadian government report about a 1979 study in a small city that reported on 53 women who had experienced domestic abuse to which police had responded.  These 53 were interviewed two years after the incident and represented 24% of all victims the researchers had sought to interview, a worryingly small response rate with a high risk of sampling bias.  They were asked how many times they had been assaulted prior to this particular call, from their earliest recollection until two years previously (a very difficult question to answer accurately): they were not asked how many times they had been assaulted before calling the police for the first time.  The women had a wide range of responses to the question, from zero to 312, and the average (not the median or the mode) was calculated to be 35.  Furthermore, these women reported being assaulted an average of three times in the two years after the incident – a number difficult to square with the reported average of 35 over an unspecified time period when police may or may not have been called for any or all or none of the prior incidents.

So 53 Canadian women, whose domestic abuse came to police attention in 1979, bear the entire weight of the claim so widely – and increasingly – relied on.

Domestic violence is a very serious problem for our society. Effective prevention and criminal justice interventions need the best data. We are certain that many women suffer years of misery before the police are called.  Some, perhaps most, may never call.  But we do not help by citing unreliable numbers about their suffering.  To cite a number as exact as ‘35’ lends a veneer of precision which is false and misleading: a ‘mythical’ number that gives the impression that governments, academics, police and the public generally know a lot more than we actually do.  We submit that mythical numbers need to be defeated by evidence-based discussion, informed by real data.  Victims of domestic abuse deserve no less when we discuss how best to help them.

Peter Neyroud CBE QPM is the editor of Policing, A Journal of Policy and Practice, and Resident Scholar at the Jerry Lee Centre for Experimental Criminology, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Dr. Heather Strang, is the Deputy Director of the Jerry Lee Centre for Experimental Criminology, and Deputy Director of the Police Executive Programme, Professor Lawrence Sherman, is the Wolfson Professor of Criminology, Director of the Institute of Criminology, Director of the Jerry Lee Centre for Experimental Criminology, and Director of the Police Executive Programme, University of Cambridge.

The full article will be available this June in Policing, A Journal of Policy and Practice, volume 8.2. This  peer-reviewed journal contains critical analysis and commentary on a wide range of topics including current law enforcement policies, police reform, political and legal developments, training and education, patrol and investigative operations, accountability, comparative police practices, and human and civil rights.

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by Teri Terry The very lovely Dr Elisabeth Carter Dr Elisabeth Carter has a BA in psycholinguistics, a Masters in criminology, and a PhD in sociology. WOW. Her recent book Analysing Police Interviews: Laughter, Confession and the Tape won the British Society of Criminology's Criminology book prize 2012.  Last Thursday I went to a Chiltern Writers talk by Elisabeth Carter which was touted as

By Kathleen M. Heide, Ph.D.

The mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut is a tragic event that is particularly painful as it comes at a time when people across the world are trying to focus on the upcoming holidays as the season of peace bringing good tidings of great joy.

Three factors about the Newtown school shooting are noteworthy. First, it was a mass murder. Second, it appears to have been precipitated by the killing of a parent (parricide). Third, it was committed by a 20-year old man. All of these factors are relevant in making sense of what appears to be inexplicable violence.

What drives a person to take an assault rifle into an elementary school and open fire on very young children and the teachers, some of whom died protecting them? Individuals in these cases are typically suicidally depressed, alienated, and isolated. They have often suffered a series of losses and are filled with a sense of rage. All too frequently they see themselves as having been wronged and want to play out their pain on a stage. The fact that mass shootings are routinely covered in depth by the media is not lost on them. They are typically aware that their name will go down in history for their destructive acts. Their murderous rampage is an act of power by an individual who feels powerless. Unable to make an impact on society in a positive way, the killer knows that he can impact the world through an act of death and destruction.

The fact that the first victim was reportedly the victim’s mother is significant. The first victims in other adolescent school shootings have also involved parents in some cases. My research and clinical practice has indicated that there are four types of parricide offenders.

• The first type is the severely abused parricide offender who kills out of desperation or terror; his or her motive is to stop the abuse. These individuals are often diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or depression.
• The second type is the severely mentally ill parricide offender who kills because of an underlying serious mental illness. These individuals typically have a longstanding history of severe mental illness, often along the schizophrenia spectrum disorder or might be diagnosed as having depression or bi-polar disorder with psychotic features.
• The third type is the dangerously antisocial parricide offender who kills his or her parent to serve a selfish, instrumental reason. Reasons include killing to get their parents’ money, to date the boy or girl of their choice, and freedom to do what they want. These individuals are often diagnosed as having conduct disorder if under age 18 and antisocial personality disorder if over age 18. Some meet the diagnostic criteria of psychopathy. Psychopaths have interpersonal and affective deficits in additional to antisocial and other behavioral problems. They lack a connection to others and do not feel empathy. They do not feel guilty for their wrongdoing because they do not have a conscience.
• The fourth type is a parricide offender who appears to have a great deal of suppressed anger. If the anger erupts to a boiling point, the offspring may kill in an explosive rage often fueled by alcohol and/or drugs.

Interestingly, most parents are slain by their offspring in single victim-single offender incidents. Multiple victims incidents are rare. In an analysis of FBI data on thousands of parricide cases reported over a 32 year period, I found that on the average there were only 12 cases per year when a mother was killed along with other victims by a biological child. In more than 85% of these cases, the matricide offender was a son.

The actual number of victims involved in multiple victim parricide situations was small, usually two or three. Murders of the magnitude as seen in Newtown, CT that involved a parent as a first victim are exceedingly rare.

Assessment of the dynamics involved in the killing of parents is also important in terms of prognosis and risk assessment. The first victims of some serial murderers were family members, including parents. Serial murderers are defined as individuals who kill three or more victims in separate incidents with a cooling off period between them. If the parricide offender intended to kill his parent and derived satisfaction from doing so, he represents a great risk to society. (This type of killer is known as the Nihilistic Killer.)

The gunman’s age (in Newtown’s case, he was 20 years old) is also an important factor in understanding how an individual could engage in such horrific violence. Research has established that the brain is not fully developed until an individual reaches the age of 23 to 25 years old. The last area of the brain to develop is the pre-frontal cortex. This area of the brain is associated with thinking, judgment, and decision making. A 20-year-old man filled with rage would have great difficulty stopping, thinking, deliberating, and altering his course of action during his violent rampage. He is likely to be operating from the limbic system, the part of the brain associated with feelings. Adam Lanza was likely driven by raw feeling and out of control when he sprayed little children with rounds of gunfire. Simply put, it would be very difficult for him to put the brakes on and desist from his violent behavior.

Events like the shooting in Newtown leave society once again asking what can be done to stop the tide of senseless violence. Clearly Adam Lanza and other mass killers have been able to kill dozens of people in a matter of a few moments because of high powered weaponry. It is time to ask whether our nation can continue to allow assault weapons appropriate for our military to be easily available to citizens in our society. It is time for us to ask what can be done to increase access to mental health services to those who desperately need them. My prediction is, when the facts are more clearly known, risk factors will be identified in the case of Adam Lanza and missed opportunities to intervene to help Adam will be uncovered, contributing to the profound sadness that we are experiencing in the United States and across the world.

Kathleen M. Heide, Ph.D., is Professor of Criminology at the University of South Florida. Her lastest book, Understanding Parricide: When Sons and Daughters Kill Parents, was published in December 2012 by Oxford University Press.

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Neil Websdale, PhD is Professor of Criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University and Principle Project Advisor to and former Director of the National Domestic Violence Fatality Review Initiative.  His book, Familicidal Hearts: The Emotional Styles of 211 Killers, uncovers the stories behind 196 male and 15 female perpetrators of this shocking offense, situating their emotional styles on a continuum, from the livid coercive to the civil reputable.  Websdale attempts to answer to important questions, why do individuals kill their families and why does familicide appear to be on the rise? In the excerpt below Websdale looks at the role of emotion in familicide.

Familicide is one of the consequences of modern emotional formations.  It remains a mystery why many men, and in all likelihood a (much smaller) number of women, experience this insurgent array of emotions and yet do not commit familicide.  The insurgent array of negative emotions in the the familicidal hearts seems profoundly linked to the ways men and women live out various ideas about masculinities and femininities.  It is almost as if these gender prescriptions offered an all-too-important lifeline for social order.  This observation raises the question of whether some offenders “perform gender” as they commit familicide.  It is possible to argue that when Marcus Sims killed his estranged wife, Gloria, with his barbells, he was doing his version of manhood, his particular form of masculinity.  Sensing that Gloria had abandoned him for another man, Marcus temporarily discharged his unbearable sense of shame with humiliated fury.  Similarly, Mandy Miller, replaced in her husband’s life by another woman, stashed her bullets in her sewing basket, a place were her husband Andrew would not go.  She bided her time for several weeks, then wrote Andrew a letter reminding him of her contributions over the years, her child-rearing, her housework, and their lovemaking.  Unlike Marcus Sims, Mandy did not use violence or fly into a rage at her departing husband.  Her approach was more considered, her emotional style more subdued and civil, even reputable.  Mandy told him she wanted him to be proud of her modest achievements in the field of volunteer work.  Andrew moved on anyway.  As she committed familicide, did Mandy perform the gender work of the humiliated housewife and mother, rejected for another woman?

The insurgent array of emotions that plagues the lives of perpetrators of familicide reflects the way these offenders were unable to life up to the gendered cultural prescriptions of their day as breadwinners, lovers, fathers, mothers, wives, and nurturers.  It is probably no accident we see these killings (where data exist) in homes evidencing a traditional or conventional sexual division of labor, with women being principally responsible for child care and housework and men for primary breadwinning.  Perhaps it is among these nuclear family forms that we see the greatest potential for profound shame and painful disappointment about the seemingly inadequate performance of gender scripts.  It is the failure to fulfill one’s perceived responsibilities within intimate interdependencies that strikes me as particularly important.

The failure of offenders like Marcus Sims and Mandy Miller to maintain intimacy w