Criminology & Criminal Justice

This article explores the ways in which African approaches to policing challenge western preferences for transparent and equitable forms of partnership-based policing. It uses the experience of the Nigeria Police Force in metropolitan Kano to question the value of police–public partnerships as the best way to tackle crime and communal conflict in cities where multiple religious and secular norms and processes affect the meaning and delivery of security and justice. Based on recent fieldwork, the article argues that while the need to negotiate with Kano’s semi-state and informal policing providers has not reconfigured the Nigerian police’s authority practices, the city’s relative stability owes much to the political and technical skills with which senior officers manage Kano’s competitive environment. Policing in Kano emphasizes the need for clarity of purpose, actionable intelligence and robust operations, rather than partnership.

Marks and Fleming (2006: 178–179) have conjectured that ‘if we are to expect the police to behave democratically, it is important for the police themselves to experience democratic engagement within the organisations in which they work’. This article tests their conjecture, using data from a survey of frontline officers in Ghana. In particular, it explores whether police support for, and satisfaction with, democracy and police commitment to procedural justice in police–public encounters are driven by experiences of organizational distributive justice and procedural justice. The findings show strong support for democracy and for procedural justice in police–public encounters, but they also indicate dissatisfaction with ‘the way democracy works’. Further analyses suggest that assessments of distributive justice and procedural justice within the Ghanaian police service are the main drivers of support for democracy, satisfaction with democracy and commitment to procedural justice in police–public encounters. The findings thus lend support to the Marks–Fleming conjecture. It was also found that satisfaction with personal financial circumstance undermines commitment to procedural justice in police–public encounters.

This article develops an expansive notion of confinement as a lens through which to think about the lives of former prisoners, former fighters and slum dwellers in a post-conflict setting characterized by political volatility, exorbitant poverty and limited opportunities. The theoretical purpose of the article is to explore whether an expansive notion of confinement might help us make sense of the lives of people whose possibilities are limited materially, spatially and discursively. The intention – inspired by Loïc Wacquant, Zygmunt Bauman and archaeologist Eleanor Casella – is ‘to move beyond the prison as the dominant optic for thinking about confinement’. The concept of confinement under development is illustrated with empirical examples culled from fieldwork in prisons and a poor urban neighbourhood in Freetown, Sierra Leone, West Africa. The orientation is towards confinement as site, practice and state of mind. The argument is that an expansive notion of confinement that attends to space, time, practices, meanings and states of mind is a useful way of thinking about the situated struggles of people living in prison and relative poverty.

More than three decades of war in Angola have created a generation of disaffected children, poorly educated and living in crime-infested urban neighbourhoods where violence appears to have become the norm. This article is based on a self-report study of 30 juvenile offenders housed at the Observation Centre in Luanda. The article examines the children’s views on what accounts for their delinquency. What emerges from their narratives is the central importance of the neighbourhoods in which they live. In these neighbourhoods, the children have developed delinquent relationships and encountered experiences of serious violence. Most of the children attributed their offending to the economic and social problems created by the war. The study agrees with Wessells and Monteiro’s (2006) position that, in order to address this problem, a proactive approach is required in Angola that supports youth, prevents violence and enables sustainable neighbourhood development.

To address whether there is a systematic racial bias in the language used to describe offenders and victims in Canadian print media, content analysis was conducted in four Canadian local newspapers. Using 12 sub-themes relating to fear and marginalization, the results of the 1190 sampled crime articles indicate that white offenders were disproportionately criminalized and dehumanized. In addition, articles describe crimes against white victims with significantly more fearful language, while visible minority victims were blamed for their own victimization. The results reflect a bias mainly through explanations for crime rather than in what newspapers report about crime and offenders. The racialization of offender and victims creates a powerful hierarchal treatment between those who are and are not ‘meant’ to have their lives impacted by crime and for whom being a victim of crime is tragic.

Transnational corporate bribery is complexly organized at a multi-jurisdictional level. However, enforcement remains at the local, national level where investigators and prosecutors are pressured to respond using frameworks for enforcement created by intergovernmental organizations. These legal frameworks are incorporated into national laws which result in legal convergence between jurisdictions but the ‘functional equivalence’ approach of intergovernmental organizations enables divergence in enforcement practices. This article analyses two theoretically comparable anti-corruption enforcement systems, those of the UK and Germany, to evidence an understanding of policy responses at the operational level. Irrespective of the enforcement system implemented (centralized or decentralized, use of corporate criminal liability or not, among other dimensions), enforcement faces significant structural, legal, procedural, evidential and financial obstacles, even where the will to enforce the law is high. Consequently, criminal law enforcement is currently implausible.