29. Rehabilitation of offenders

This chapter examines the rehabilitation of offenders. Much discussion of crime and criminality focuses on the culpability of the offender, the management and control of crime, and the nature and legitimacy of punishment. However, there is another strand of criminological inquiry (and practice) which is more concerned with understanding offenders, appreciating ‘what makes them tick’, and seeking out tools and methods for reintegrating them into society as conventional law-abiding citizens. In effect, such approaches are concerned with identifying the causes and consequences of criminal behaviour and developing interventions which will enable offenders to change their behaviours and thought processes to enable them to take advantage of legitimate opportunities and to live decent lives. The chapter explores some of the beliefs and assumptions which underlie this kind of approach to crime and criminality. It considers some of the implications in terms of criminal justice practices and evaluates the outcomes of rehabilitative approaches. Finally, the chapter reflects on some of the limitations of this perspective on crime, both empirically and theoretically.

Narrative Criminologies

The purpose of this chapter is to twofold: to introduce narrative as a research method and as an organising principle for criminological theory. It begins by distinguishing six levels of criminological inquiry – approaches, frameworks, theories, models, methodologies, and methods – and their relationships with narrative representation. The focus of the chapter is on Lois Presser’s development of the narrative criminological framework in Been a Heavy Life (2008), Why We Harm (2013), and Inside Story (2018). The chapter concludes by describing the framework of the criminology of narrative fiction as emergent from the narrative criminological framework in virtue of the combination of identity and difference, in particular the shared realist approach, corresponding core commitments, and overlapping emphasis on narrative form.

Use of a Multitheoretic Model to Understand and Classify Juvenile Computer Hacking Behavior

Criminological inquiry has identified a range of risk factors associated with juvenile delinquency. However, little research has assessed juvenile computer hacking, despite the substantial harm and opportunities for delinquent behavior online. Therefore, understanding the applicability of criminological risk factors among a cross-national sample of juvenile hackers is important from a theoretical and applied standpoint. This study aimed to address this gap using a logistic regression and latent class analysis (LCA) of risk factors associated with self-reported hacking behavior in a sample of more than 60,000 juveniles from around the globe. Results demonstrated support for individual- and structural-level predictors of delinquency, although distinct risk factors for hacking among three subtypes are identified in the LCA. This study examines criminological risk factors for juvenile hacking in a cross-national sample and provides insight into the distinct risk factors of hacking, so more tailored prevention and treatment modalities can be developed.

Animals as Something More Than Mere Property: Interweaving Green Criminology and Law

Our article argues that non-human animals deserve to be treated as something more than property to be abused, exploited, or expended. Such an examination lies at the heart of green criminology and law—an intersection of which we consider more thoroughly. Drawing upon our respective and collective works, we endeavor to engage in a discussion that highlights the significance of green criminology for law and suggests how law can provide opportunities to further green criminological inquiry. How the law is acutely relevant for constituting the animal goes hand in glove with how humanness and animality are embedded deeply in the construction of law and society. We contend that, when paired together, green criminology and law have the potential to reconstitute the animal as something more than mere property within law, shed light on the anthropocentric logics at play within the criminal justice system, and promote positive changes to animal cruelty legislation. Scholarship could benefit greatly from moving into new lines of inquiry that emphasize “more-than-human legalities”. Such inquiry has the power to promote the advocacy-oriented scholarship of animal rights and species justice.

A Criminology of Policing and Security Frontiers

Policing and security provision are subjects central to criminology. Yet there are newer and neglected forms that are currently unscrutinised. By examining the work of community safety officers, ambassador patrols, conservation officers, and private police foundations, who operate on and are animated by a frontier, this book reveals why criminological inquiry must reach beyond traditional conceptual and methodological boundaries in the twenty-first century. Including novel case studies, this multi-disciplinary and international book assembles a rich collection of policing and security frontiers both geographical (e.g. the margins of cities) and conceptual (dispersion and credentialism) not seen or acknowledged previously.

Conclusion: Policing and Security Frontiers

This concluding chapter identifies seven subthemes, derived from exploring policing and security frontiers, for future research and for criminology as a field of study. These include nuisance, aesthetics, public policy relations, the role of law, moving resources, oversight, and contestation. The chapter then advocates the adoption of this book's themes for future research and thinking in criminology and suggests that greater attention be paid to forms of policing and security neglected due to methodological myopia and stagnation as well as to fixed disciplinary boundaries. If policing and security provision can usefully be conceived in terms of frontiers, then so too can criminological inquiry. Indeed, criminologists can open doors to new concepts, venture beyond disciplinary boundaries, and avoid methodological pitfalls on the way to discerning what is happening on these frontiers, discovering and advocating what forms of security, politics, and life are possible.

Race, Gender, and Border Control in the Western Balkans

This chapter looks at the intersection of race, gender, and migration in the Western Balkans. Immobilizing mobile bodies from the Global South has increasingly been the focus of criminological inquiry. Such inquiry, however, has largely excluded the Western Balkans. A difficult place to research, comprising countries of the former Yugoslavia and Albania, the region is the second-largest route for irregular migrants in Europe (Frontex 2016). Indeed, EU expansion and global developments such as wars in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq have had a major impact on mobility and migration in the region. The chapter outlines racialized hierarchies in play in contemporary border policing in the region, and how these racialized and gendered practices target racially different Others and women irregular migrants and asylum seekers. Finally, this chapter maps the impact of such practices and calls for a shift in knowledge production in documenting and addressing such discriminatory practices.

Foucault and the Visual Reconstitution of Criminological Knowledge

Criminology began as a speculative historical discourse about lawbreaking. Guided by the classical utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham and Cesare Beccaria, criminology in the late 18th century viewed crime as the result of a hedonistic calculus employed by rational individuals to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. But by the middle of the 19th century, criminology had transformed into a positivist science of the determined causes of crime. New visual technologies of surveillance, classification, and measurement contributed significantly to this reconstitution of criminological knowledge. A genealogy of this transformation in criminological inquiry is found in Michel Foucault’s landmark study, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, in which the French social philosopher pictures optical transformations in the nature of criminological inquiry as an early instance of modern, disciplinary modalities of power and knowledge. Beginning with an analysis of Bentham’s 1791 architectural drawings for a panoptic prison, Foucault links the visual turn in criminological thought to compulsive modern efforts to observe, map, categorize, code, and analytically penetrate the bodies, minds, and behavioral patterns of captured offenders. But visual objectification of this sort results in other things as well—a tragic displacement of the once subversive wisdom of medieval festival and the inscription of a sado-dispassionate “gaze” at the heart of the criminological enterprise itself. Together, these processes institute a seemingly fixed distinction between the subject and the object of the criminologist’s gaze. This distinction is amplified and transgressed in the early 21st century by a host of new, fascinating, and fearful visual cybernetic technologies of power. Following Foucault’s provocative genealogy of the optical foundations of early criminological science, recent digital technological advances in visual surveillance and the high-speed global transmission of visual images of crime today challenge criminology to be reflexive about the situated character of its own power-charged claims to knowledge.

Personality and Offender Decision Making

This chapter introduces readers to the notion of personality and how it relates to offending through decision making. It also demonstrates the importance of personality to criminological inquiry more generally. The chapter begins with an explanation of what is personality, with a focus on two of the more common structural models used to measure it. In addition, a review of the robust association between personality and offending is provided. This is followed by an explanation of the theoretical and empirical linkages between personality and offender decision making. The final section provides readers with a sense of how personality can be better integrated into criminology and the advantages that can be realized by doing so.