This thesis explores the English doctrine of joint criminal enterprise by way of a comparative study. Joint enterprise allows for the conviction of an accomplice (S) of an offence (crime B) committed by his associate-in-crime (P) on the basis of S's foresight of its commission by P as a possible incident to their joint criminal venture (crime A). While it is generally accepted that this common law principle needs reforming, successive governments have declined to take on the task. Against this backdrop, this thesis explores whether the contentious features of joint enterprise liability might be reformed by way of common law development. To this end, the thesis examines the doctrine's constituent elements, its function, underlying rationale and place within the structure of primary and secondary liability. Particular emphasis is put on the specific problems associated with the application of joint enterprise liability in the context of murder. Looking at the functional equivalents of joint enterprise in German law, the thesis challenges the orthodox view that joint enterprise is a head of liability available to the prosecution alongside co-perpetration and aiding and abetting. Indeed, it argues that an inculpatory function of the principle is difficult to justify and suggests that, both historically and as a matter of principle, it is better seen as an exculpatory device aimed at delineating the scope of co-perpetration and aiding and abetting. The thesis concludes that the current law does not serve this function very well, as its mens rea threshold (some form of recklessness, when proof of intention is needed to convict the principal offender) sets the hurdle for conviction of secondary parties indefensibly low. Informed by ideas taken from German law - especially an extended concept of intention known as dolus eventualis - the thesis's principal contention is that English law would do better defining joint enterprise liability in terms of foresight plus endorsement. Indeed, the thesis aims to show that English law was very close to such a conception, and that the common law took a wrong turn in Powell. It concludes that it is still open to the Supreme Court to adopt an endorsement-focussed approach to joint enterprise liability, thereby alleviating concerns that the law in this area is too harsh and over-inclusive, and bringing it closer to the threshold of liability for principal offenders which requires proof of intention. Such an approach would also make the law of complicity more principled and coherent.

How do you acquire the ability to respond proportionately to incidents of community tension? Who should aggregate early warning indicators to identify potential issues? Where is the responsibility for ensuring that emancipatory security practices safeguard tension and promote accurate analysis without subjecting communities to excessive surveillance and control? This thesis demonstrates the sustainability required to create a paradigm shift in the management and application of tension monitoring by the police. Achieved through broadening the current discussions of early warning and tension monitoring, an evaluation and application of a systems based pragmatic approach is presented to address and resolve tension. The method codifies an enhanced multi-criteria risk selection tool, reporting on and triaging incidents, whilst building resiliency through community mobilization. The relevance of security, agency and community has been streamlined through collaborative inquiry enhancing best practice. Communities and stakeholders are integrated into the response, with specific application to Canadian Indigenous and human security issues. The potential for improved situational intelligence and operational decision-making is augmented using heuristic models of analysis. Based on applied systems thinking the research explored the mapping of leverage points to fully consider informed responses to complex situations. The impact of this research is directly relevant to operational policing and non-government organisations that work with Indigenous people and, more broadly, all communities experiencing conflict.

This research examines a community safety crime prevention partnership in the communities of Aberfan and Merthyr Vale that lie within the South Wales police area. It analyses the work of the local multi-agency partnership in its attempts to reduce recorded crime and fear of crime within that community through a variety of initiatives and schemes. This includes the use of burglary prevention schemes organised by the police and the local Safer Merthyr organisation. This is achieved through a variety of research methods including the examination of official statistics over a period of five years, the use of comparative questionnaire surveys and through covert observational methods. The strengths and weaknesses of these methods, including ethical and organisational problems encountered by the researcher are discussed and evaluated. Results indicate that not one of the objectives set by the multi agency partnership was achieved, and there appears to be no indication of any long-term positive effects as a result of the initiative. Reasons why this should have occurred are explored and a discussion on the implementation of evidence led crime prevention initiatives are considered. Consideration of future policy making-within this area is also considered.

In seeking to make sense of the role of intensive family support in the governance of anti-social behaviour, this thesis has focused analytical attention on one case study project, the Family Support Service. Based on data collected from 35 interviews with women receiving the service, project staff and local agents, the research findings suggest that intensive family support is a complex intervention with both positive consequences as well as negative costs for the families involved. The Family Support Service entailed intense surveillance and supervision of marginalised populations in domestic private spaces and did, therefore, have controlling and disciplinary qualities, particularly with regard to the families living in 'core' residential accommodation. Yet, in spite of this, the Family Support Service also contained a -significant social welfare ethos based on finding long term sustainable solutions to individual's problems, not least security of housing and income. The approach project workers took with families was, largely, non-stigmatising and sensitive, and for the women interviewed, who were socially isolated and susceptible to depression, this 'befriending' role was important in improving their quality of life. The role that family support plays, however, in the governance of anti-social behaviour is inherently bound up with the way in which it is implemented at the local level and the particular circumstances of the families involved, which suggests that positing intensive family support as inherently 'bad' or 'good' is inaccurate. This challenges some of the more critical literature around New Labour's anti-social behaviour and family support policies and suggests that this type of intervention can not be understood simply as a project of exclusion, punishment or moral reformation. The thesis argues for further research about what it is that gives rise to less punitive types of family intervention and, therefore, how progressive change for vulnerable families might be generated.

This thesis utilises the theoretical device of Folk Devils and Moral Panics, instigated by Stanley Cohen and developed by Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, to explore the discovery of, and social response to, crime and deviance in eighteenth-century London. The thesis argues that London and its media in the eighteenth-century can be identified as the initiating historical site for what might now be termed public order moral panics. The scholarly foundation for this hypothesis is provided by two extensively researched chapters which evaluate and contextualise the historiography of public opinion and media alongside the unique character and power located within the burgeoning metropolis. This foundation is followed by a trio of supportive case studies, which examine and inform on novel historical episodes of social deviance and criminality. These episodes are selected to replicate a sequence of observable folk devils within Cohen’s original typology – youth violence, substance abuse, and predatory sex offending. Which are transposed historically as the Mohocks in 1712, Madam Geneva between 1720-1751, and the London Monster in 1790. Taken together, these three episodes provide historical lineage of moral panic which traverses much of the eighteenth-century, allowing for social change, and points of convergence and divergence, to be observed. Furthermore, these discrete episodes of moral panic are used to reveal the social problems of the eighteenth-century capital that informed the control narratives that followed. Consequently this thesis makes an important contribution to the understanding of both moral panic theory, and the historiography of crime and deviance, and posits that the current discourse on folk devils and moral panics can be extended via the exploration of the moral crises of earlier centuries.

Since the start of the 21st century the terms identity theft and identity fraud have been used to describe a variety of crimes which appear both new and unique to the 21st century. So much so, that the government is in the process of re-introducing a National Identity Card Scheme to tackle the problem. But are identity theft and identity fraud uniquely 21st century problems, and is a new Identity Card Scheme going to prevent these crimes? The study seeks to examine identity theft and identity fraud and determine what these crimes are, and to distinguish between the two. In order to do this, the study will examine the different definitions used in America, Australia and the U.K. as well as the history of identity related crime. The use of identity theft and identity fraud by organised crime, illegal immigration and terrorism will also be discussed. This examination of identity theft and identity fraud includes an explanation of the differences between modern and traditional identity related crimes and the various methods used to gather information on people's identities. The study also looks at ways of researching identity related crime. As part of the research process, simulated identity theft was developed as a research approach. The use of this research method and the ethical and legal consideration associated with it are discussed at length as is the use of the internet as a source of information. The study concludes with an analysis of the role of the National Identity Card Scheme in preventing identity related crime, and the potential benefits and drawbacks of reintroducing a National Identity Card Scheme.

This thesis considers the wellbeing of young people at risk of offending in North Wales, whether it is protected by welfare services and how this manifests within the youth justice system. Over the last decade, Westminster government policy has contributed to an ethos of personal responsibility for even the youngest of children who offend. The abolition of the legal convention of doli incapax in early years of New Labour, the continued use of ASBOs and the recent 'Respect' agenda have all reinforced the message that society is at risk from children and young people. Yet academics and policy makers recognise that welfare risk factors influence young people's offending behaviour. Therefore the debate can be viewed from a different perspective where children and young people are the ones at risk from a society that is unable to meet their welfare need. It is no surprise that youth justice practitioners have been af the mercy of a 'welfare versus justice' debate for many decades. For Welsh youth justice practitioners, devolution and the Welsh Assembly Government has added a further dimension to this conflict. The All Wales Youth Offending Strategy, states 'there is no contradiction between protecting the welfare of young people in trouble and the prevention of offending and re-offending.' This principle will be tested using qualitative data gathered from empirical research and a review of relevant literature on the state of youth justice in England and Wales. Based in the North of Wales, this study is uniquely placed in its aims to give a voice to young people, parents and professionals working with a cross -county rural Youth Offending Team.

This paper reports on the observations of a combined level 2 and 3 Multi-Agency Risk Assessment Committees (MARAC) over a 12 month period. It considers agency representation and discusses this in respect to attendance and the nature of relationships between representatives. The key findings are structured around the experiences of three identifiable groups of panel members and leads to a discussion of how the status of agencies and the informal roles adopted by the different members are defined by power relationships based on possession of knowledge. These relationships reflect cultural traditions in working with high risk offenders, but are also shaped by statutory responsibilities placed on different agencies within the MARAC forum.

This thesis presents the research and evaluation of ‘Promoting Prevention’, a multi­agency, multiple intervention initiative to prevent youth offending in Swansea that is predicated on the generation of systematic information through official and self- reported sources. The thesis discusses how structures and processes within Promoting Prevention have developed through a rolling dynamic between information generation and system reproduction, with particular emphasis upon consultation with young people and key stakeholders. An individual study computer questionnaire, underpinned by the risk factor prevention paradigm, assessed young people’s self-reported attitudes, perceptions and behaviour in order to associate them with a range of risk and protective factors for offending. Statistical analysis identified that exposure to multiple risk factors in the key domains of the young person’s life (i.e. family, school, neighbourhood, lifestyle, personal/individual) was significantly linked to ever and active offending, particularly for males. Several key factors within each domain were highlighted as predictive of ever and active offending. When placed in the context of official and self-reported statistics locally, nationally and internationally, there was a clear overlap in salient issues for young people and identified risk factors, although levels of self-reported drug use and offending were generally higher in Swansea. Systems analyses adapted the grounded theory methodology and utilised interviews with key stakeholders to produce narrative reports and maps of Promoting Prevention components (organisations, committees, documents, individuals) to elucidate the complex, cross-cutting and reflexive nature of the initiative. Overall levels of (self-reported and official) permanent school exclusion and (self- reported and official) ever and active offending in Swansea have fallen since the inception of Promoting Prevention. This indicates that Promoting Prevention can tentatively claim to be successfully addressing offending behaviour by targeting interventions based on risk factors identified by young people. There is a commitment amongst key stakeholders to Promoting Prevention principles and strategies such as consultation and developing a reflexive relationship between research, information and practice. This highlights Promoting Prevention as a modem example of an holistic, rights-based crime prevention initiative underpinned by an ethos of consultation and responding to information relevant to the local context.

This thesis is about the operation of the youth justice bail process, between initial arrest and sentence (or other final case outcome), in a particular area of England and Wales (known here as Baytown). Following a review of the literature on youth justice bail services, and a critical discussion of the methodology used, the study examines the outcomes of the bail process in Baytown over a three-year study period. It analyses the usage of the different options available for the granting, restriction and denial of young persons' right to bail, by comparing court bail decisions with key case characteristics. In undertaking this analysis, the study not only explains how systematic bail decisions were during the study period, but also shows the impact of these decisions on later stages in the youth justice process, such as sentencing. However, the study also moves beyond quantitative discussion and analysis of the Baytown youth justice process. It does so by explaining the operation of the process in terms of the attitudes towards it of those who have a say in bail decision-making in Baytown. A mixture of quantitative and qualitative techniques, including surveys, semi-structured interviewing and participant observation, is therefore used to explain how local Youth Offending Team staff, local youth court magistrates, and young people on bail perceive the process which their own decisions help to shape. The study concludes by arguing that, despite recent Government rhetoric and policy, widespread discretion continues to exist at local and individual level within the youth justice bail process. Future Government policy in this area must therefore acknowledge the role of discretion in youth justice, rather than simply ignoring or attempting to eradicate it, if bail services for young people are to become more systematic and effective.