The Routledge Handbook of European Criminology

Sophie Body-Gendrot, Mike Hough, Klara Kerezsi, René Lévy, Sonja Snacken, Sophie Body-Gendrot, Mike Hough, Klara Kerezsi, René Lévy, Sonja Snacken

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136185489
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This new book brings together some of the leading criminologists across Europe, to showcase the best of European criminology. This Handbook aims to reflect the range and depth of current work in Europe, and to counterbalance the impact of the – sometimes insular and ethnocentric – Anglo-American criminological tradition. The end-product is a collection of twenty-eight chapters illustrating a truly comparative and interdisciplinary European criminology.

The editors have assembled a cast of leading voices to reflect on differences and commonalities, elaborate on theoretically grounded comparisons and reflect on emerging themes in criminology in Europe. After the editors' introduction, the book is organised in three parts:

• five chapters offering historical, theoretical and policy oriented overviews of European issues in crime and crime control;
• seven chapters looking at different dimensions of crime in Europe, includingcrime trends, state crime, gender and crime and urban safety;
• fifteen chapters examining the variety of institutional responses, exploring issues such as policing, juvenile justice, punishment, green crime and the role of the victim.

This book gives some indication of the richness and scope of the emerging comparative European criminology and will be required reading for anyone who wants to understand trends in crime and its control across Europe. It will also be a valuable teaching resource, especially at postgraduate level, as well as an important reference point for researchers and scholars of criminology across Europe.

1

The Routledge Handbook of European Criminology

Introduction

Sophie Body-Gendrot, Mike Hough, Klára Kerezsi, René Lévy and Sonja Snacken

The awareness of the need for a Handbook of European Criminology emerged during a board meeting at the European Society of Criminology in Barcelona in May 2009. So, in June 2009, during the final conference of the network CRIMPREV,¹ Sophie Body-Gendrot asked a panel of non-British criminologists and sociologists of law which handbooks they used, either for teaching or for their own research. From their answers, it appeared that they relied heavily on a large number of Anglo-American handbooks. We all agreed that such books are essential. Yet, as observed by David Nelken, these books reflect ‘an Anglo-American tendency to assume that what others do in foreign places and foreign languages is less important and that they … are bound to come into line eventually’ (2009: 294).

The predominance of English in international scientific exchanges and the abundance of research publications emanating from English-speaking countries (in particular the United States and the United Kingdom) together result in a distortion of comparative research. As Fabien Jobard and Axel Groenemeyer (2005: 235) remarked regarding French-German comparisons, many European continental countries share the same legal and institutional traditions, which should stimulate comparisons between them, yet the comparison is mostly made with common law countries whose legal and institutional systems are markedly different, thus condemning ‘researchers to have nothing to compare but the incomparable’. Høigård (2011: 266) observed the same phenomenon concerning Scandinavia: ‘Instead of using our neighbours as the basis for comparison, it has been far more common to look to the other side of the Atlantic, even though both U.S. society and U.S. police are very different from those of the Nordic countries’ (quoted by Levy in this volume).

Non-British users then have to operate intellectual and pedagogical transformations to explain how and to what extent the themes developed in these Anglo-American handbooks differ from those experienced in Europe in general and in their own country in particular, how conceptual mismatches are to be avoided. All these operations are time-consuming, particularly in a classroom situation and for European scholars writing for an international readership. Linguistically, the translation of terms such as community or anti-social behaviour or fear of crime needs to find a proper ‘functional equivalence’ to make sense in non-Anglophone countries. The specificities of history, institutions, laws and culture in each country need to be taken into account to show similarities and convergences when using such terms. Translations offered by dictionaries are just not enough.

Comparative criminological research in Europe has to take into account variations in crime and crime causes, patterns and trends from one country to another, offender motivations and behaviour, the distribution of victimization and variations in the reduction of crime and the production of social order, the effectiveness of decision-making and law enforcement institutions and preventative programmes, the rule of law and human rights, the influence of culture, etc. (Loader and Sparks, 2011: 125) to bring forward its different aspects.

The Handbook, written in English to maximize accessibility across Europe, intends to point to the essence of differences; it elaborates on theoretically grounded comparisons and on themes that reflect European perspectives. It emphasizes European trends and what the differentiations within Europe (in terms of institutional, legal, social and intellectual dimensions) reveal. To what extent are there pan-European unifying factors on the one hand, and on the other, how do they compare with American ones?

This Handbook is heavily dependent on authors who are members of GERN, a European network of research on normativities.² We, co-editors, are grateful to GERN for its financial support in the development of this book. Some of the selected authors were also part of CRIMPREV, the Coordination Action on ‘Assessing Deviance, Crime and Prevention in Europe’, funded by the European Commission from 2006 to 2009. For three years, it allowed European criminologists from various countries to exchange views and elaborate synthetic comparative reports on specific topics. The Handbook also owes a lot to an accumulated body of interdisciplinary knowledge stimulated for years by the conferences organized under the auspices of the European Society of Criminology. Thanks to Routledge, the Handbook thus showcases a selection of the best European research, and serves as a stimulus for further comparative research.

The task was to compare and contrast definitions, concepts, laws, practices among various European countries, while avoiding ethnocentrism. One of the difficulties of European comparative research comes from its unequal development. As will be seen in this volume, research referred to in the chapters frequently comes from the same countries, while other European countries are rarely mentioned. Moreover, some of the topics originally planned, such as corporate crime or green criminology, could not be delivered due to time constraints. Our purpose was, however, never to achieve the sort of comprehensiveness that one might expect of a sourcebook; this would have been tedious.

The Handbook

The content of the Handbook has been designed as follows: themes have been selected which reveal both unifying factors and differences across those European countries where they were most obvious. It introduces nuances in the multiple cultures of control, divergences in orientations and legal systems and their responses. It works on the use of concepts, statistics and laws and traces their evolution. We have attempted to illustrate the idea of a European way of tackling crime, punishment, security, restorative justice, etc.

Part I of the Handbook, ‘European issues on crime and crime control’, starts with David Nelken’s examination of globalisation and criminal justice trends, taking Italy as a starting point of the comparison. Nelken wonders in what ways and in what respects national states can still be considered as separate ‘units’. Should they be treated as instantiating different responses to globalization? To illustrate his argument, he makes reference inter alia to the role of prosecutors in Italy and to Italian methods of delivering juvenile justice. He argues that the role of national politics and of other local features of society and culture remain highly important – and not only in the way in which larger trends are adapted and resisted.

This is followed by Xavier Rousseaux’s chapter on the history of crime and justice across Europe. This chapter starts with a longue durée perspective of the evolution of crime concepts and criminal institutions over the centuries, with the emergence of what we can recognize as criminal justice systems towards the end of the eighteenth century. A second section examines how justice became transformed over the next two and a half centuries. Rousseaux moves on to discuss the troubling features of militaristic policing as found in colonial and occupied countries. He reminds us, in his concluding section, of the destructive potential of policing systems developed by societies committed to democratic values and aspirations to human progress – a potential whose risks are amplified by widespread concern about crime.

The important question of whether one can speak of a European criminal policy is then tackled by Klára Kerezsi who examines it under two aspects. First, she defines what criminal policy means, what it means for a criminal policy to be ‘European’ and what ‘European’ means in the context of European crime control. Kerezsi enumerates the distinct characteristics of European crime control – whether it is different from crime control in other parts of the world (in particular the U.S.) or whether there are commonalities. She discusses to what extent political, economic and professional conditions serve as a rational basis for criminal policy, and also reviews on one hand what determines the value-bound nature of European criminal policies, and on the other the change in approach to human rights, as well as the spread of the risk approach in crime control. While analysing criminal policy from a legal point of view, she questions whether the EU member states in fact need a harmonized criminal policy, and what historical and cultural embedding means. The author reviews the steps of EU crime policy harmonization before the Lisbon Treaty, its founding principles and institutions as well as the characteristics of harmonization in the Lisbon Treaty, and the limits of further/more complete harmonization.

The next contribution by Renée Zauberman points out that over the last forty years, surveys on victimisation and insecurity have developed considerably but quite unevenly across Europe. The range of studies varies between general surveys and those delving into specific topics, between international, national and regional or local surveys, between surveys covering both victimisation and insecurity – sometimes with a pinch of self-reported delinquency – and polls only devoted to the latter. Within this variety of arrangements, numerous technical issues have to be dealt with to ensure that survey results have a reasonable degree of reliability. Zauberman’s chapter touches upon some critical choices that are to be made (recall period, sample size, administration of the questionnaire), considering their financial implications. Further consideration is given to the use to which these surveys are put in terms of public policy and in the academic world: survey material, when of sufficient quality, can provide for a large number of scientific studies likely to give profound new insights into the knowledge of crime.

This first section of the Handbook ends with what Françoise Tulkens and Michel van de Kerchove label the ‘paradoxical’ relationship between human rights and the criminal law, as developed through case-law of the European Court of Human Rights. It is paradoxical because for almost two centuries; human rights have predominantly been granted a ‘defensive’ role, imposing limits on the criminal law through the ‘guilty conscience’ they have engendered in relation to its application, while more recently they have also fulfilled an ‘offensive’ role, contributing to a strengthening of the criminal law through the ‘good conscience’ they give it in ensuring the protection of such rights. Affirmation of the role of criminal law in protecting human rights generally appears to be accompanied by an overall weakening of its traditional function as a shield against the threats it poses itself to rights and freedoms.

Part II, ‘Variations in crime: description and explanations’, starts with a presentation of post-World War II crime trends in the Western world by Jan van Dijk. Many criminologists have believed that levels of crime are driven by so called root causes linked to the state of the economy, but the near universal rise in crime between 1960 and 1995 in the Western world flies in the face of this perspective. Increased levels and redistribution of wealth since the post-World War II economic booms have nowhere delivered the predicted crime reduction bonus. Crime has boomed in tandem with prosperity and an expanding welfare state. Since 1995, significant drops in crime have come at a time of diminishing economic growth and widening inequalities. The economics–crime link is especially challenged by the continued decline in crime during the economic crisis of the past five years. Levels of crime in the Western world have, since the end of World War II, shown a remarkably similar curvilinear trend with a peak around 1995 which does not match the global business cycle. Neither is there any basis for believing that crime trends have closely tracked changes in economic inequalities – which is not to rule out the possibility of some sort of linkage, of course. Van Dijk brings a fresh theoretical perspective. According to the newly proposed theory of responsive securitization, he shows that high levels of crime across the Western world have mobilized countervailing forces in the form of powerful arrangements for crime prevention. Crime waves must thus be understood as self-limiting phenomena, largely unrelated to the business cycle or economic inequality.

An analysis of crimes of the state and crimes of the powerful, in light of European and global patterns, comes next. According to Susanne Karstedt, state crimes are unique as they are defined by the ‘paradox of state and crime’. The monopoly in the use of force that modern Western states possess is an advantage in implementing the rule of law, but simultaneously it offers the opportunity for states, governments and their agents to commit the most atrocious crimes. It is this paradox which defines the problem of controlling and preventing state crime, as domestic within-state controls and international between-state controls are linked when sovereign states are held accountable for their domestic practices. The European experience of state crime exemplifies this paradox, manifest in both weak and strong states, and ‘imbalances of control’, as states engage in violent state crime and corrupt practices. The role of state strength and weakness in these types of crime is traced across European history, and state violence and corruption is analysed in depth from 1980 to the present, comparing Europe with the rest of the world, and its regions and countries. Europe’s history simultaneously reflects its legacy in controlling and preventing state crime. Its most compelling success was the end of impunity for serious state violence. It is in this process that Europe has emerged as a ‘normative power’, and its success amply demonstrates the significant impact that ‘normative power’ can wield in curbing state crime.

Vincenzo Ruggiero’s contribution focuses on organized and transnational crime in Europe. When accounting for organized crime, official agencies appear to focus primarily on conventional criminal activities, thus neglecting the overlaps and joint initiatives that organized criminals undertake with members of the white collar community. In this sense, official concerns are mainly directed towards ‘pariah’ forms of criminal enterprise, namely those whose options in markets are limited. Ruggiero’s contribution addresses more the powerful variants of organized crime which expand their activities into the licit arena of business and maintain their traditional characteristics while adopting those typifying corporate actors. Two types of sources are utilized here: first, a variety of official organisms investigating, studying and combating organized crime and its activities; second, a range of independent research studies conducted in specific countries.

Issues regarding ethnicity and crime are illustrated by a comparison of Eastern and Western Europe by Margit Feischmidt, Kristóf Szombati and Péter Szuhay. After a short description of the historical process through which Roma living in Hungary and the wider Central European region became stigmatized and criminalized, their contribution examines the current re-emergence of racist discourses in the public sphere. The image of the lazy, criminal, violent, worthless and dangerous Gypsy has become entrenched in public discourse, providing fertile ground for the re-emergence of a racist politics of hatred reminiscent of pre-war years. Then, they analyse one far-right campaign, providing a deeper understanding of the political and social processes that drive growing support for the political alternative represented by the far-right party (Jobbik) not only in Gyöngyöspata, but more widely among social groups articulating themselves as the ethnic majority in Hungary. Their analysis is mainly focused on the factors that led to the emergence of the ‘Gypsy question’ – and the topos of ‘Gypsy-crime’ in particular.

Loraine Gelsthorpe and Elena Larrauri examine broad patterns of crime and criminal justice systems across Europe, in the context of economic changes and the ‘feminisation of poverty’. They identify some common issues about women and criminal justice and pose questions about ‘gender-sensitive’ community penalties and the lack of suitable programmes in prison, for instance. Turning to women and victimization, their chapter outlines some key findings from international surveys, looking at intimate partner violence, rape, sexual harassment, and sex work. The authors also discuss women’s involvement in human trafficking both as ‘offenders’ and as victims, noting that there is overlap in these categories.

Dominique Boels, Antoinette Verhage and Paul Ponsaers consider the informal economy in Europe, a ubiquitous phenomenon, as informal economic activities are part of everyday life around the world. Notwithstanding the highly challenging character of international comparisons regarding the informal economy, only in recent years has it been possible to observe a rebirth of research on informal economy within criminology. In this chapter an overview of the state- of-the-art (European) informal economy is offered and a new taxonomy of the relation formal–informal–illegal economy proposed. Furthermore, a review of empirical research on informal seasonal work in European agriculture/horticulture and on informal European street trade is offered.

This section ends with an examination of place, space and urban (un)safety by Sophie Body-Gendrot. Crime remains ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms
• 1. Introduction
• Part I: European issues on crime and crime control
• Part II: Variations in crime: description and explanations
• Part III: Variations in institutional responses and possible explanations
• Index