Anti-social behaviour (ASB) has become a political and popular issue in Britain over the last decade. The legal definition of ASB is broad, intentionally requiring subjective assessment of the term. This is framed within an assumption that ASB represents the rejection of commonly recognised conventional values. Any variations, in the extent to which specific behaviours are identified as problematic in an area, are considered to reflect experiences therein. Accordingly, recent developments in policing policy require local Neighbourhood Police Teams to prioritise and target behaviours identified as 'signal crimes' or 'signal disorders' during consultation with local people. Theoretically rooted in the Signal Crime Perspective, signal crimes and disorders are behaviours that cause disproportionate concern to local people. This thesis argues that the subjective conceptualisation of ASB and these developments in Neighbourhood Policing have led to the ASB agenda disproportionately impacting on young people. This is despite the government's claim that ASB is "not a youth issue" and the Home Office requirement that ASB be interpreted based on the behaviour itself, rather than using youth as the defining factor. Rather, Matza suggests that deviant behaviour represents an exaggeration of subterranean values that permeate conventional society: it is the context in which such values are displayed that determines the acceptability of the behaviour. Interactionist theorists argue that meanings of behaviour are determined through interactions, so that interpretations of deviance will depend on factors other than the behaviour itself. Taken together, these theoretical contributions suggest that rather than ASB representing a pool of commonly recognised behaviours, behaviour will be variably defined as anti-social according to who is involved in the interaction (the 'labeller', victim and perpetrator) and the context in which the behaviour occurs. This thesis reports on a study conducted in Bexley, in South East London. Qualitative and quantitative methods are applied to determine the conceptualisation and experience of ASB amongst adult residents and local young people, as well as the process of ASB regulation by the local Neighbourhood Police Team. Results indicate that ASB is interpreted broadly, with adults particularly likely to attribute anti-social meanings to the behaviour of young people. As methods of police consultation primarily engage with local adults, the priorities developed by the police team focus on young people's behaviour and neglect their victimisation and concerns. The thesis concludes by offering principles on which to base interpretations of ASB, which seek to minimise such bias. Policy solutions are also suggested, to lessen the potentially damaging impact that the ASB agenda could have on young people in the future.

As more people obtain online access and the finance sector becomes transformed by networked technology, opportunities for internet fraud grow. In recent years we have seen the maturation of new digital environments in which financial transactions can take place while at the same time we have seen an explosion in incidences of identity theft. This unprecedented rise in internet fraud is depressing growth in e-commerce activities and is creating growing demands by governments, the commercial sector and also the public for an appropriate model of policing. This thesis will explore the policing of internet fraud and it will argue the scope of police work with regard to white collar crime, because the public believe that police forces do not effectively control internet fraud and non-internet fraud. By drawing upon various global sources this thesis analyzes the tensions between the respective interests of the public and the private sectors. Such tensions raise concerns about how public resources are most effectively allocated in the public interest. Although internet fraud is a globalized phenomenon and indeed the UK and the US are notably mentioned, the analysis has specially focused on South Korea. At the core of the thesis is the observation that a major conflict of interests emerges when the private and public models of policing compete for "ownership" over internet fraud, so before exploring the laws, rules and enforcement models for policing internet fraud, it is first necessary to remove the tensions that exist between and within policing bodies. Two significant tensions were examined: firstly, the tension caused by different characteristics and objectives of private and public models of policing. Whereas the public police pursue the public interest thorough a public model of justice, the private sector polices problems in their own private interest along a private/corporate model of justice. Secondly, tensions are also created within the public policing sector by intra-govemmental competition. For example, the South Korean National Police have attempted to obtain independent investigatory powers while the Prosecutors' Office strongly defends its ownership of investigatory powers.

The rehabilitation of young offenders has been a persistent social dilemma to which many solutions have been proposed. One such approach has been to rehabilitate young offenders through the medium of outdoor activities, the utility of which as a means of personal development has long been recognised. In the early 1990's however some newspapers and politicians associated specialist criminal rehabilitative programmes with the generalised use of outdoor adventure as leisure, labelling such programmes as holidays, treats for young offenders and rewards for misbehaviour. This construction has undermined outdoor adventure programmes designed for rehabilitate purposes by generating public hostility and by shaking the confidence of their advocates. In addition to the practical effect of limiting its application, the construction of outdoor activity programmes as leisure has theoretical consequences. Leisure theorists have begun to challenge traditional concepts of leisure as a residential category which have situated this field as subsidiary to work and outside of those aspects of life which have been constructed as serious and important (work, education, politics, law etc.). This marginalisation of leisure has been challenged by work that examines its role as a site of meaning in life and as a field of social governance. Media and political representations which dismiss the utility of programmes because they are 'leisure' therefore ignore this theoretical move, contributing to, and reifying the traditional perspective by portraying leisure as frivolous and incapable of addressing important social issues. In the light of these problems this thesis proposes an alternative way of theorising outdoor activities, not as a form of leisure, but in a Foucauldian interpretation, as a form of discipline. This is important because as yet leisure and outdoor adventure theorists have made only limited use of Foucault's ideas. The portrayal of outdoor adventure as leisure is critiqued through a discourse analysis of brochure and newspaper representations. This reveals the ways in which leisure has been constructed as a frivolously response to a serious problem because it is perceived to embody fun, free-time and freedom.

The aim of this study was to test the notion that the experience of being released from prison on parole reduces the risk of reoffending. The method was to apply the principles of 'scientific realist' evaluation to test four theories about how parole might be responsible for reducing the risk of recidivism among a small sample of paroles interviewed over the course of their licence periods. The four theories tested were that: the support and advice of a supervising social worker helps parolees to address offending-related behaviour and reduces the motivation or need to reoffend; the threat of recall to custody deters parolees from reoffending; regular surveillance from a supervising social worker increases the perceived risks that a return to offending will be detected and hence deters reoffending and finally that being selected by the Parole Board as deserving early release increases self-efficacy and gives parolees the encouragement and confidence to succeed on release. It was hoped that the study would make some contribution not only to the debate about the future of parole but also to the debate about how best to conduct evaluative research. Although the application of realist techniques provided some valuable insights into the parole experience, it provided no support for the notion that the conditions of the licence reduced the risk of recidivism. It was clear that the context in which many of the subjects were released was simply not conductive to the operation of the mechanisms outlined and, where the context was conductive, there was little or no evidence of a correlation between this and a reduction in the risk of reoffending. In considering the future of parole, the conclusion reached is that parole should be replaced with a reduction in the length of custodial sentences. In terms of the contribution of scientific realism, the study demonstrated that, while there were some important advantages of applying realist principles, there is little difference in the logic applied to test causality in this type of project and the logic applied in traditional experimental/quasi-experimental evaluations.

This thesis sets out to research the concept and institution of punishment in three cultures and systems of classical Athens, Islam and International Criminal Justice. The second overall objective of this thesis is to establish how the insights from these three traditions can enrich our understanding of the concept of punishment and also designing humane, just and effective methods of punishment. I will argue that our response to wrongdoing can be divided into three distinct categories: punitive measures, impunity, and forgiveness. This thesis will contend that western-oriented concept and methods of punishment have paid inadequate attention to the third category, forgiveness. This imbalance between the three categories of responses to wrongdoing has led to the crises of self-definition and effectiveness of the leading theories and methods of punishment. I propose that in order to address some of the conceptual and institutional deficiencies of modern institutions of punishment, we must contemplate communitarian, restorative and cross-cultural approaches, in particular in the context of post-conflict justice and international criminal justice. I identify the Islamic concept and institution of punishment as a suitable model that can make valuable contributions to such an endeavour. In examining the concept and institution of punishment, I will also argue that the institution of punishment of a given society/tradition is a gateway that sheds light on other aspects and institutions of the society. As such a closer examination of the institution of punishment in the cultures under investigation would question the popular views and prejudices about democratic Athens, Islamic world, and liberal democracy.

This thesis examines the specific criminogenic relationship between the state and corporation, and the state and civil society in the case of Trafigura’s dumping of toxic waste in Abidjan, Ivory Coast in August 2006. Research undertaken in London and Abidjan reveals that the impunity that was enjoyed by the Ivory Coast state and Trafigura for this state-corporate crime was underpinned by the power of the corporation and by failures of both domestic and international civil society organisations that might have been expected to have labelled and challenged the crimes. Moreover, the thesis reveals that in the case of this particular example of state-corporate crime, civil society as an agency of censure and sanction played a distinctly retrogressive role. Here, in fact, state crime facilitated organised crime’s insertion into civil society through a process I define as ‘the commodification of victimhood’ and, as a result, ensured that impunity was virtually guaranteed for corporation and government. The thesis also examines the failure of international and domestic legal measures to sanction the perpetrators. The thesis argues that a criminal state can act as a nexus for crimes by all three sectors of society, facilitating crime by actors in the state, the market and third spheres of society. Gramsci’s notion of civil society as an arena of struggle provides a theoretical framework to assist in understanding the complex relationships between civil society, the Ivorian state and Trafigura. The findings presented here suggest that scholars of state corporate crime should adopt a more cautionary approach to civil society’s capacity to label, censure and sanction than that suggested by Green and Ward (2004).

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