Ethnic Minority Youths’ Encounters With Private Security Guards: Unwelcome in the City Space

An increasing amount of literature is suggesting that ethnic minorities perceive their relations with the police as negative and procedurally unjust. There is, however, a distinctive lack of research on the relations between ethnic minorities and private security agents. This study uses the qualitative interviews of 30 ethnic minority youths living in Finland to explore their interactions with security guards. The findings suggest that perceptions of discrimination, suspicion, being moved on, and exclusion from city space were common. The study advances the theorizations of the changes in policing and procedural justice and incorporates these into the discussions on policing the city space. It argues that net-widening of policing means that city spaces are becoming more unwelcoming for ethnic minority youths in particular, limiting their opportunities to use city spaces.

Exploring the Boundaries of Missing Persons: Hidden Interplay Between Policing and Private Entities in Relation to Cases on the Periphery

This discursive article explores the argument that, by gently tweaking core parameters of what it means to be a missing person—specifically relating to definition and risk—the role played by private organizations and entities in managing the problem of missing persons can be interrogated. The examination begins by inquiring into the extent to which police take ownership of missing persons as an issue, utilizing net-widening and pluralization concepts to investigate the limits of the police role. To inquire into the role of definitional widening, the case of lost children in commercial spaces is used, arguing that private providers are routinely responsibilized with managing lost child cases that would otherwise enter into missing person statistics. To explore tweaks to the definition of risk in relation to missing, the debtor tracing industry is explored. The final argument is made that further exploration of the periphery of ‘missingness’ ought to be undertaken.

A Review of Gang Literature

Having outlined the purpose of the book in Part I, in the last chapter, chapter 2 reviews existing US and British gang literature. This chapter breaks down the gang concept and analyse literature form three resulting perspectives: the environment; the structure; and activities. This allows aspects of the gang to be analysed while also accounting for a holistic picture as well. The chapter then looks to explain how research has gradually brought closer concepts of ‘the gang’ and ‘drug harms’ - in that drug distribution has become a central feature when conducting gang research. After reviewing gang research the chapter then provides a brief overview on organised crime literature. This explains how aspects of the gang, at all levels, has come to be tied to various aspects of organised crime terminology. As a consequence, such perceptions retain potentially net-widening and criminalising properties.

New Horizons?

The fourth chapter places the focus on the period 1884-1910, analysing the situation in Scotland at the turn of the century; by this time the statutory system had evolved into a net-widening diversionary mechanism under which thousands of children were detained in institutions of a penal character. An important aim of this chapter is to assess the impact the Children Act 1908 and the introduction of the juvenile court, which means looking beyond this timeframe to the 1920s and 1930s. Crucially, this chapter provides a detailed analysis of archival case studies revealing the way children were dealt with by the courts, including the High Court of Justiciary.

Drug Courts and Net-Widening in U.S. Cities: A Reanalysis Using Propensity Score Matching

Although drug courts were intended to reduce the justice system involvement of drug offenders, a recent study found evidence that drug courts were associated with increased (rather than decreased) arrests for minor misdemeanor drug offenses (Lilley, 2017; Walsh, 2011). However, the previous study did not utilize an equivalent comparison group and may have relied on a large sample size to generate findings. The current study tested the robustness of those findings by analyzing only cities with over 50,000 population, including four additional years of data, and utilizing a more equivalent comparison group that was propensity-matched to reduce the possibility that a preexisting difference may have generated higher arrest outcomes among drug court jurisdictions. Net-widening, arrest, and crime challenges and implications for drug court policies and law enforcement roles are also discussed.

Civil Citation

Objectives: The primary objective of this study is to assess potential variation across Florida’s counties of their implementation of civil citation and the outcomes associated with that implementation. Methods: Interrupted time-series analysis is used to determine whether the trends in juvenile arrests and the total delinquent population referred to the juvenile justice system (either through arrests or through civil citation) were significantly affected by the implementation of civil citation in each county. Results: There were immediate and gradual diversion effects of the civil citation program in a number of Florida’s counties. As a result, there is evidence of successful implementation with a few cases of net widening. Conclusions: While there was variation between counties in their implementation of civil citation, overall, Florida’s civil citation program was found to provide a diversion from arrest rather than a net-widening outcome. The study concludes with the identification of county-specific factors that characterized the local jurisdictions that were able to successfully overcome the major impediments associated with diversion and other reform programs’ implementation fidelity.

The Citizen and the Criminal

New enforcement targets and deployment of more border patrol to Arizona-Sonora border communities has inadvertently involved agents more directly in local crime control. This is the flip side to the more familiar scenario of local police and sheriffs who carry out immigration enforcement. This chapter considers the overreach of enforcement priorities and what some refer to as “net widening” in predominantly Latino border communities where border residents, mostly Mexican American citizens and legal permanent residents, are routinely arrested, prosecuted, sentenced, and, in some cases, deported for violations of immigration law.

Female Violence and Gender Gap Trends in Taiwan: Offender-Behavioral Changes or Net-Widening Enforcement Explanations?

Two long-standing explanations of converging violence gender gap trends in the United States are net-widening enforcement and offender-behavioral changes. We examine these explanations in an Asian context, democratic Taiwan. We use sex-specific arrests, conviction, and imprisonment statistics for violent offenses, 1989 to 2012, to identify whether Taiwanese gender gaps are converging across the criminal justice system. This study did not identify a female violent crime “wave” but mainly stability, failing to support the offender-behavioral change hypothesis. There is limited evidence of net-widening enforcement of felony assault and domestic violence, where disparate impacts on female arrest trends are identified solely for domestic violence.