This PhD dissertation uses prostitution to transform our understanding of working class sexuality and ethics in twentieth century Germany. It reveals the complicated societal interrelationship between class and gender. It demonstrates the need to grant a new, nuanced category of class a position of greater centrality in analyses of an incredibly class-conscious society. It radically alters our conception of the relationship between the type of government in power and official attitudes towards sexuality, arguing that the prevalent desire to control citizens’ sexuality transcended traditional left-right divides and intensified with economic and political modernisation. It begins by chronicling the life experiences of Cornelie Beyer, a Leipzig prostitute from 1907 to 1941. The ambiguity of treatment she experienced across the period, which saw her released in 1941 during the height of Nazi repression, reveals the significance of the disparities between national, regional and local politicians and bureaucrats, as well as the deep gulf that arises between ideological motivation and practical implementation. The PhD then moves to those prostitutes with whom Cornelie interacted. Next, the project analyses the prostitute milieu, investigating which citizens were involved in or supported the sex trade, as well as where prostitution took place. It then discusses how different citizens expressed frustrations with prostitution. Finally, the project turns to the other side of the prostitution issue, investigating the motivations of the law enforcement agencies, social workers and doctors, who all attempted to manage and contain prostitutes’ movements and behaviour. Developments within both state and private agencies, particularly those relating to attempts to scientifically categorise prostitutes, indicate the continuities across the multiple regimes in power during the period 1914 to 1945.

Crime and punishment are phenomena rich in emotion and emotional significance. We have the suffering of the victim, the anger and fear of the community, and the pain of punishment, to give but three obvious examples. Every aspect of crime and punishment generates an endless variety of feelings and passions. Emotion is central to both the experience of crime and the practice of punishment. And yet, when we turn to the history of criminology, we find a curious unwillingness to engage with the emotional dimension of crime, or, for that matter, the emotional dimension of the practice of doing criminological research. In fact, it has been argued that one of the defining features of criminology has been its ability to suspend emotional judgements and treat an issue which arouses such passions in a 'disinterested' and objective fashion. Criminology is thus presented as purely rational discourse on crime. This piece of work sets out to challenge this claim. The first half of the thesis examines the attitudes towards emotion found in various strands of criminological thought. The central contention of these chapters is that an unattainable desire to exclude emotion has, until relatively recently, been a central feature of the discipline. In the second half of the thesis, I go on to explore the various ways that a range of emotions have informed, and continue to inform, criminological debate. In order to substantiate the argument, I draw upon a number of examples from the history of criminology, as well as the work of contemporary social theory. This piece of work therefore represents a preliminary and tentative attempt at analysing what I would characterise as being the 'affective dimension' of the criminological field.

This dissertation examines children’s rights and responsibilities in the area of youth crime within the context of the domestic incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights and the increasing emphasis within Government policy of the need to hold children responsible for their offending behaviour. The mechanisms for securing the responsibility of children within youth crime have widened since the Labour Party was elected to government in 1997, prompting two questions. Firstly, has the increased responsibilisation of children been met by an increased protection of their human rights? Secondly, does an emphasis on responsibility detract from the child’s needs, vulnerabilities and limited competence? It is argued that, in contrast to the child in the family law context, the child in the criminal law holds a dual status: he is both offender <i>and</i> child. This dual status affects the type of rights available to the child, and the way in which those rights are protected. In particular, it is noted that the child’s status varies at different stages of the youth justice process, and that in turn, there is a variation in the type of rights being protected. Specifically, children’s rights theory is drawn on to distinguish the types of rights the child has: rights <i>qua</i> child (clustered around ideas of welfare and care and protection); and rights <i>qua</i> person (shared in common with adults and which are based on notions of autonomy). A broadly sequential approach is taken: first, the pre-crime context and the use of preventative orders is examined, followed by a consideration of the pre-court stage of police investigation and the diversion of young people away from the criminal courts, then the rights of the child in court are explored, and finally attention turns to the sentencing framework.

This study aims to investigate the psychosocial dynamics involved in male prisoner-on-prisoner confrontations (fights, assaults, arguments and threats). The psychosocial literature on aggression suggests shame, masculinity and a weak sense of self may predispose individuals to engage in confrontations as a means of ego defence (Gaylin, 1984; Katz, 1988; de Zulueta, 1994; & Gilligan, 1996). This study seeks to examine whether measures of shame and masculinity derived from the self-narratives of prison participants can predict involvement in prisoner confrontations. Eighty-nine adult male prisoners were voluntarily recruited from a Category C prison in England and asked to complete various social and psychological questionnaires, whilst also taking part in semi-structured interviews about their life experiences both in and outside of prison. All interviews were tape-recorded, transcribed and then coded for themes of shame and definitions of masculinity. One month later, the participants were also asked to complete a self-reported involvement in prisoner confrontations questionnaire. The participants’ accounts of their confrontations were analysed to determine what kinds of confrontations occur, in which settings and for what reasons. From these accounts it seems that the participants’ main motivations include defending the self, conforming to prisoner norms, releasing frustration and self-defence. A series of tobit regression analyses were then used to test whether themes of shame, masculinity and biased cognitions could predict the men’s self-reported involvement in prisoner confrontations during the following month. This analysis found that themes of shame and masculinity could significantly predict the participants’ subsequently involvement in prisoner confrontations, whilst controlling for possible confounding variables. Biased cognitions were not found to predict their involvement in confrontations. Participants who reported themes of unresolved and acknowledged shame tended to engage in more confrontations than those who did not express such themes.

From the Andean ridge to the Southern Cone, economic turbulence, poverty, inequality and corruption remain chronic almost everywhere, dashing popular expectations that the return to electoral democracy in the 1980s and the economic liberalisation model that was widely adopted in the 1990s would bring political stability and material improvement. Against this backdrop, the region experienced an explosion in criminality and violence that remains unabated: the Latin American homicide rate is twice the world-wide average - exceeded only by rates in sub-Saharan Africa. This dissertation concentrates specifically on the public security crisis and the politics of reform in Argentina and Brazil in the 1990s, focusing on the cities of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. In both cities, there was a marked deterioration in the public security situation following the end of military rule - a period that left an ideological and tactical legacy on the police that could not be easily eradicated. While social problems, crime and drug trafficking were far more acute in Rio than in Buenos Aires, one shared characteristic was the failure of the police to adequately fulfil their expected role in a democratic polity, even though the police cannot bear sole responsibility for the public security problem or its solution. That successive governments failed for more than a decade to reform an under-trained, under-performing and corrupt police was commonly justified by invoking arguments of police recalcitrance to reform, or by claims that the government's overriding preoccupation with the economy necessarily took precedence over other policy issues. These explanations, however, could not fully account for the patterns observed in both cities. The main reasons the police could not fully break from their past and forge a new role for themselves were rooted in the corrosive nature of the political game, an enduring dynamic whose outcome was improvisation, denial, and evasion of responsibility. Rather than professionalise the police, redress deficient and weak institutional forms of external control, or overhaul irrational systems of resource allocation, civilian governments persisted in manipulating the police for personal benefit, and exploiting the public security issue for electoral purposes.

In 2003 the Government enacted a controversial piece of legislation aimed at tackling alcohol-related crime and disorder in England and Wales. The Licensing Act (2003) (referred to hereafter as the ‘Act’) was an effort to simplify a previously complex system for regulating licensed alcohol sales. This study is based on the examination of recorded crime and licensing data for the City of Manchester between February 2004 and January 2008, roughly two years before and after the Act’s implementation (24^th November 2005). Analyses designed to examine the impact of the Act on crime were undertaken in three stages: i) examination of crime trends across the study period at the city-level; ii) measurement and analysis of changes to licensed trading patterns across the study period; iii) evaluation of the relationship between changes to licensed trading patterns and violent crime in small geographic units of analysis. This research found no evidence to support the hypothesis that relaxed trading restrictions have contributed to significant reductions in violent crime. On the contrary, examination of city-level trends in violent crime revealed a small but significant average <i>increase</i> in violent crime (7.6%) following the implementation of the Act. Analysis of temporal trends in night-time violence revealed a significant shift in the timing of offences, suggesting that displacement of crime to later periods of the early morning (3am to 6am) had occurred. However, analyses of patterns of licensed trading showed that changes to the physical availability of alcohol, the temporal distribution of closing times and density of premises over the study period varied considerably across the city as a result of the Act. It was necessary to consider whether changes to trading routines had caused any localised effects on violence (a local dosage effect) that might have been masked by analysis at the city level. By disaggregating to smaller geographic units, it was possible to examine whether a dose-response relationship existed between changes to licensing and violent crime. Using multivariate analyses, this study was able to examine the specific relationship between local changes to licensing and local violence. These analyses concluded that no significant relationship exists between change in opening hours and change in violent crime when controlling for other variables. The thesis emphasises the importance of designing evaluation studies to fit and examine the specific components of the intervention that are proposed to instil change. The collection of detailed process data on pre- and post-intervention trading times enabled a comprehensive model of licensing change to be created.

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This dissertation proposes an original approach to theory of action in psychological and sociological criminology, i.e. to theory explaining the causation of human wilful behaviour at great abstraction through the information processing conducted by each individual human agent. It is argued that the model presented in this dissertation, the so-called Minimal Model of Action, is more theoretically comprehensive than prior familiar approaches originating in various related fields, in particular through its integration of both rational and habitual aspects of behaviour in a unified causal argument. Secondly, it is argued that the model is more methodologically appealing than previous approaches due to its formalisation through conventional mathematics. The proposed model is brought to bear on more concrete behavioural data and criminological problems in three separate chapters so as to scrutinise its validity and tractability from three methodologically different angles. An experimental chapter shows that empirical responses to computer-based scenario tasks frequently display behaviour patterns, especially forms of habituation, which the Minimal Model of Action in its simulated implementations and unlike previous models manages to explain and predict. In the following chapter, it is mainly shown through mathematical deduction both in continuation of and in juxtaposition to prior economic reasoning in which ways “optimum law enforcement” levels are systematically overestimated (and sometimes underestimated) under a variety of conditions when over-rationalised conceptions of the individual offender are employed. Finally, a chapter on aggregate levels of small-scale public corruption employs the general model to simulate a typical criminal phenomenon to the explanation of which economic and broader social conceptions of human agency equally should contribute.

This research is an extensive comparison of two maximum-security prisons in England. Its key aim was to describe the contemporary experience of prisons ‘at the deep end’ of an expanding and deepening penal system. In part, this research revisits and builds on the work of Sparks, Bottoms, and Hay (1996) in <i>Prisons and the Problem of Order</i>, but does so in light of contemporary penelogical developments. It also draws extensively from the work of Leibling (2004) on quality of prison life, but applies her work at the extreme end of imprisonment. This research takes into account both the contemporary and historical context of the two prisons studied. The historical aspect of the research included the study of available documents and interviews with key figures from each prison’s past. The current experience of staff and prisoners in the two prisons studied was investigated primarily using an ethnographic approach. Three months were spent in each prison, interviewing staff and prisoners and observing prison life. In addition, survey data was collected from staff and prisoners at each prison using a revised version of the Measuring Quality of Prison Life survey (Liebling and Arnold 2002). The research found that the repressive environments appeared to outweigh the potential benefits of any rehabilitative opportunities. Although these prisons were quite effective in delivering punishment to prisoners, the more constructive purposes of imprisonment were lacking. Current penal policy in the UK is increasingly punitive and the use of prison sentences and their increasing length means that it is now more important than ever (e.g. in view of the European convention on Human Rights) to keep a close watch on the conditions in which prisoners are spending these sentences.

This thesis is a comparative study of the cultural, political and media impacts of two child-on-child homicides—the 1993 English case of James Bulger and the 1994 Norwegian case of Silje Redergård. A discourse analytic approach is used to study the meanings and effects of newspaper coverage of both homicides in order to explain the cases’ dissimilar effects. Discourse theory provides insights into how the culturally distinct language used to describe social problems implies concordant solutions. The intention is to compare the intra-and inter-jurisdictional ways in which each homicide was contextualised in the broadsheet and tabloid press coverage. These case studies are the vehicles by which the culture-specific penal sensibilities governing penal policy decision-making are assessed and compared. The politicisation of penal policy debates in England has meant that policymakers now defer to assessments of public opinion to an extent unseen in earlier post-war decades. The media has simultaneously expanded its influence on public affairs, often speaking for the public, and politicians court the public via the media, often conflating the two. Lost in these interactions is both a sense of the unmediated and informed public will, and a public forum where the issues are engaged on a level of proportionate to their importance. The first aim of this research is to describe a set of interlinked problems facing professional experts and penal policymakers, most of which are more acutely experienced in England than in Norway. Adversarial political culture, the media, and poor measures of public opinion each constrain the range of choices available to policymakers, minimising opportunities for the deliberative consideration of all available knowledge. The second aim is to provide ameliorative proposals to broaden the range of choices policymakers consider to include knowledge’s politicians often ignore, the media often overlook, and opinion polls often fail to measure. The ‘Deliberative Poll’ is one promising means to facilitate ‘public judgement’, a more durable assessment of the informed public will which appears less susceptible to populist manipulation and distortion than current, weaker assessments. Providing opportunities for public deliberation could also generate the kind of trust among citizens that characterises those nations where the politicisation of crime is not so pressing an issue.