Journal of Criminology

India has experienced significant economic growth since the 1990s. Young middle-class Indian nationals have embraced international tertiary and vocational education as a part of this trend. Many of these students have come to Australia to study. In 2009, claims that Indian students in Australia were being targeted for racial violence received worldwide media attention. This article presents the results of a qualitative study of public documents surrounding the ‘violence against Indian students’ issue over a 12-month period. It contends that there is sufficient evidence to conclude that some of the victimisation had a racial or anti-Indian element to it. Drawing upon literature on racism, it reveals a discourse of denial that runs through the responses of Australia’s political leaders to this claim. In the current global environment, however, exposure of Australia’s denial by the Indian media may operate as a form of counter-discourse from an emerging superpower whose citizens refuse to tolerate the failure of western nations to take responsibility for the injustice of racial violence.

This study uses propensity score matching to test the proposition that imprisonment deters future criminal activity among juvenile offenders. Using data from all court appearances of juveniles in the NSW Children’s Court (Australia) between 2003 and 2004 (N = 6196), the reoffending of a group of young offenders sentenced to control (i.e. custodial) orders (N = 376) was compared to a matched group of offenders receiving community-based sanctions. No differences were observed between the two groups. The young offenders given detention orders had a slightly lower rate of reoffending, but this difference was not significant. The results of this study indicate that, over the time period examined in this study, the imposition of a custodial sentence had no effect on the risk of reoffending.

This paper examines the critical issue of public confidence in sentencing, and presents findings from Phase I of an Australia-wide sentencing and public confidence project. Phase I comprised a nationally representative telephone survey of 6005 participants. The majority of respondents expressed high levels of punitiveness and were dissatisfied with sentences imposed by the courts. Despite this, many were strongly supportive of the use of alternatives to imprisonment for a range of offences. These nuanced views raise questions regarding the efficacy of gauging public opinion using opinion poll style questions; indeed the expected outcome from this first phase of the four phase sentencing and public confidence project. The following phases of this project, reported on elsewhere, examined the effects of various interventions on the robustness and nature of these views initially expressed in a standard ‘top of the head’ opinion poll.

Drawing on survey and focus group research completed in New Zealand in 2009 this article examines young peoples’ perspectives on graffiti and tagging. The results further demonstrate that graffiti writing is an activity invested with considerable cultural meaning by many of those engaged in it and that their understanding of graffiti is considerably at odds with prevailing political, media and policy discourse that sees it purely in terms of criminal damage and antisocial behaviour. While graffiti can be conceptualised as an alternative way of ‘reading’ urban space, the results of this study show that writers recognised that graffiti had damaging consequences and was inappropriate in some contexts. Graffiti was not simply nihilistic destructive behaviour but one in which perceptions of criminality were leavened by aesthetic judgements and the allure and excitement of potential local celebrity.

Trust in the police has emerged as a critical issue in China where the police have experienced a crisis of legitimacy. Only a small number of studies, however, have empirically assessed Chinese citizens’ trust in the police. Moreover, the effects of citizens’ participation in social and political activity on evaluations of the police have rarely been investigated. Using survey data collected from over 3,500 Chinese citizens in eight cities, this study examines the impact of social capital and political participation on trust in the police, controlling for demographic characteristics, sense of safety, and locality. Trust in the leaders of neighborhood committees increased the likelihood of trust in the police. A sense of safety also raised the odds of trust in the police. Citizens’ trust in the police is also predicted by trust in neighbors, participation in political activity, and gender. Trust in the police varies across cities and is explained by some common and distinctive variables.

Piracy in the coastal waters of Somalia has received significant attention from the news media and international political community, both of which have been major actors in defining the issue of piracy in and around the waters of Somalia. Drawing on the thematic frames of Cohen (1972) and Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994), this work provides an analysis of the media and political depictions and international responses to Somali piracy, to evaluate if the phenomenon is reflective of normal societal concern or constitutes a case of ‘moral panic’. The results indicate that the media presentation and the international political community’s discourse on piracy in the Somali coastal waters have led to increased levels of fear and panic and over-reaction, resulting in an excess of militarized response to piracy. This then has negated attention being paid to the underlying causes of Somali piracy; the extant structural conditions in Somalia that have continued to facilitate increased instances of piracy. The findings suggest that a moral panic failed to materialize with the general public, rather, the reaction of the international political community, the international shipping industry, and the media’s actions correspond with the theoretical perspective of agenda-setting.