David T. Johnson

Public Opinion and the Governance of Punishment in Democratic Political Systems

It is unlikely that hostile attitudes about criminals or beliefs that punishments for crime were too lenient were the major causes of the explosive increase in punishments in the United States after 1970. Public hostility toward criminals has been a consistent theme in this country for a long time, but it did not cause big increases in imprisonment before 1970 in the United States or large expansions of incarceration elsewhere. In this article, the authors argue that growth in the salience of crime as a citizen concern and increasing public distrust of government competence and legitimacy were two of a number of changes that transformed ever-present hostile attitudes into a dynamic force in American politics. Negative attitudes toward offenders are a necessary condition for anticrime crusades, but they are always present. It was the addition of fear and distrust into the law and politics of punishment setting that produced the perfect storm of punitive expansion.

On the Comparative Study of Corruption

This essay has two ambitions. The first is to show that a transnational comparative perspective can be of value in identifying topics worth studying in criminology and criminal law, as well as an important method of conducting such studies. The second aim is to use the comparative perspective and method to explore the topic of corruption a pervasively important and distinctive behavioural phenomenon that is of critical importance in both developing and developed nations. A comparative perspective on corruption provides insight about the role of this peculiar form of crime in various cultures and stages of development. Moreover, we also believe that a focus on corruption as a special category of crime helps to explain the passions and politics that have been involved in discourse on white-collar crime. We begin our tour with a plea for the increasing value of comparative study as a tool for criminological agenda setting and research. A brief second section defines corruption as a special subcategory of criminal behaviour defined as the unlawful use of power. A third section then speculates on the relationship between corruption and features of social and governmental organization. A final section applies this comparative perspective to some longstanding issues in criminological discourse. We show that the same mix of condemnation and imprecision that has frustrated efforts to define white-collar crime produces ambiguity in the definition of corruption. We also suggest that the core focus of our criminology of corruption-the use of power as an instrument of crime also helps to explain why white-collar crime has evoked concern, particularly among criminologists on the left. The unifying substantive theme in this analysis is the view of corruption as the criminal misuse of power. Language: en

The Homicide Drop in Postwar Japan

Japans homicide rate dropped 70% in the last 50 years, and the nation now has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world. A decline of this magnitude has been documented in few other contemporary social settings. One key feature of the fall is young Japanese males, who now commit one tenth as many homicides as their counterparts did in 1955. At present, Japans homicide rate is higher among men in their 50s than among males aged 20 to 24. This article describes Japans postwar homicide decline and the vanishing young killer in particular. More is known about who is responsible for the decline than about what has caused it. The search for a more satisfying explanation of Japans homicide drop should be a high priority in homicide studies.

Law, society, and capital punishment in Asia

Students of capital punishment need to study Asia, the site of at least 85 percent and as many as 95 percent of the worlds executions. This article explores the varieties of Asian capital punishment in two complementary ways. Cross-sectionally, the impression of uniformity that comes from classifying 95 percent of the population of Asia as living in executing states breaks down when closer attention is paid to the character of capital punishment policy within retentionist nations. Temporally, the general trajectory of capital punishment in the Asian region seems downward (though generalizations about patterns in this part of the world are undermined by significant data problems). Asia is also a useful territory for testing the generality of theories of capital punishment based on European experience. Looking forward, Japan and South Korea, two developed nations in Asia that still retain the death penalty, may indicate what other Asian nations are likely to do as they develop. Ultimately, Asia either will become a major staging area for world-wide abolition or the campaign against capital punishment will fail to achieve global status.

The death penalty in Asia Introduction to a Special Issue of Punishment & Society

A recent essay in this journal lamented ‘how few articles or book reviews appear by French authors’ (Daems, 2007: 319), but a more important problem in this and related publications is the dearth of work about punishment and society in Asia, a region that is home to more than half the planet’s population and to several of the most rapidly changing societies on earth. This Special Issue introduces readers to some of the Englishlanguage scholarship about the death penalty in Asia. Asia is the regional capital of capital punishment because that is where more than 90 percent of the world’s judicial executions occur – the large majority of them in China. Asia also covers a vast geographic area and a wide variety of cultures, political systems, and capital punishment policies. The geographical focus of this symposium is the jurisdictions of East Asia – the People’s Republic of China (two articles), Taiwan (one article), and South Korea (one article). For English-language accounts of capital punishment in Japan, the other East Asian country most frequently categorized with these three, see my own article in this journal (Johnson, 2006) and the works cited therein. The main method employed by the authors in this symposium is the case study of a single jurisdiction (an exception is the overview by Franklin Zimring and David Johnson). The limitations of the case study approach need to be acknowledged. Can one generalize from death penalty developments in East Asian nations to Muslimmajority societies such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan? What about nations like Mongolia and Nepal that are not very developed? And how does capital punishment in East Asia relate to death penalty practice in other retentionist strongholds such as the Middle East and the southern United States? Some scholars have tried to discern the determinants of the death penalty worldwide (Anckar, 2004; Neumayer, 2006), but in some respects they have had limited success. The case study approach employed here has two primary virtues: sustained attention to local context, and the experience that the researchers bring to their studies from having lived and worked in the contexts about which they write (Flybjerg, 2001).

Book Review: Park, W.-K. (2006). Trends in Crime Rates in Postwar Japan: A Structural Perspective. The Law and Political Science Series of the University of Kitakyushu, 20. Morioka City, Iwate Prefecture, Japan: Shinzansha Co., Pp. xii, 255

reflected throughout this book—is its progress in developing a single definition of “street gangs” that can be used in research across the many international sites involved. This definitional problem has plagued gang research (as well as policy makers and law enforcement officials) for many decades, making this a most notable achievement of the Eurogang working group, whose importance cannot be overstated. This agreement makes comparison more feasible and more scientifically meaningful, of course. The group’s efforts also have resulted in the production and utilization of common understandings concerning research methodology and research instruments (which have proved to be viable across international sites), thus greatly facilitating the kind of multimethod, multisite, comparative research that is required to develop a more intellectually mature understanding of the similarities and differences among these collectivities on these two continents. Some common themes represented throughout this book include the definitional issue, as mentioned, as well as important contributions to our understanding of the ecological neighborhoods where these collectivities operate; the role of ethnic identity and immigration; how these collectivities affect individual law-violating behavior; the characteristics and risk factors of individual gang members; and of course, the issues of the comparative structure, organization, and characteristics of these gangs as collectivities. None of these issues are easily addressed in a cross-national context, yet the quality of the various chapters of this volume is uniformly high and the book is much better integrated than is often the case with edited collections. This seems to be due, in part at least, to the fact that the contributors have been engaged in their own collectivity—the European Research Program. The publication of this book, along with a preceding book by Klein et al. (The Eurogang Paradox: Street Gangs and Youth Groups in the U.S. and Europe, Kluwer, 2001), has laid an important foundation for future comparative research on street gangs and how societies might develop better-informed policies to address them. This book is recommended reading for those interested in expanding their understanding of street gangs, but it is more than that. It is also valuable reading for those engaged, or contemplating engaging, in cross-national, comparative research. Although this volume focuses on gangs, many of the same definitional, methodological, and analytical issues arise in other cross-national research and this book can be a useful roadmap for such efforts. Finally, the book can serve as a valuable supplement to classroom books providing general treatments of gangs. Often, the best way to understand phenomena in our own society is through the comparative lens of other nations and cultures. This volume reminds us of that and makes a valuable contribution to our extant knowledge concerning street gangs.

The land stirs: Volcanoes and the eastern highlands

Australia is currently the only continent in the world without active volcanoes, but this was not so in the past. There has been regular volcanism throughout Australias geological history, especially of the silica-rich, felsic type along the eastern margin during the Paleozoic and Mesozoic, and the most recent mafic phase has barely finished. Basalt eruptions may have started in the late Cretaceous, as early as 90–85 Ma, were most active through much of the Cenozoic (from 55 Ma) and persisted until the most recent eruptions, in South Australia, only 4.6 ka ago. There is a close relationship between these basalts and the Great Divide of eastern Australia. Rich soil derived from the weathered basalt on elevated country combined with cooler and wetter climates along the eastern margin is the basis for many of Australias finest agricultural and horticultural areas. THE VOLCANIC PROVINCES The mainland has no active volcanoes, though there are two active volcanoes in the offshore Australian territory, which includes Heard Island and the McDonald Islands. These islands are part of the Kerguelen volcanic system, related to a large igneous province of mantle plume association, and lie about 4000 km southwest of Australia and 1500 km north of Antarctica. Big Ben volcano on Heard Island has a high point at Mawson Peak which is 2745 m in elevation. It has a thick mantle of snow and glacial ice and last erupted in 1992 and 2016. The McDonald Islands volcano is only 230 m high and erupted between 1997 and 2005, following a long hiatus in activity thought to have extended back tens of thousands of years. Most of the volcanism in Australia produced rhyolite and andesite, rocks which formed mainly during a subduction-related active margin setting, and involved considerable melting of continental crust. In addition, three episodes of within-plate, mantle-derived basaltic igneous activity are evident: in the early to mid Cambrian (at about 515 Ma) in northern Australia, during the final assembly of Gondwana; in the Jurassic and early Cretaceous (185–132 Ma) in southern and western Australia, before and during the initial Gondwanan breakup; and in the late Cretaceous (about 85 Ma) to Holocene (5.6 ka) interval, along eastern Australia.

Jurors' Stories of DeathJurors' Stories of Death: How America's Death Penalty Invests in Inequality, by Fleury-SteinerBenjamin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. 199 pp.

been ignored or even considered off-limits to researchers; dealing as it does with the decision process used by juries in capital punishment cases, it demonstrates the overwhelming significance of race and racism in these deliberations. The data consist of indepth interviews with 57 jurors in 26 death penalty cases regarding their decision-making during the penalty phase. This book demonstrates how racial inequality is protected by the manner in which jurors are allowed, and even required, to fill their roles. White jurors openly define black defendants as unemotional and unrepentant losers and need not be consistent in taking account of the difficulties in the lives of minority prisoners. Indeed, white jurors blame bleeding-heart liberals and the welfare system for creating these black defendants. No consideration is given to the racist war on drugs, but rather white jurors define defendants’ struggles as excuses designed to avoid taking proper responsibility for their law violation. Thus, the white juror can come to the conclusion that the black defendant is an immoral outsider who deserves to be executed. There are clear distinctions between good and evil and the accused are clearly evil. The author argues that such definitions justify America’s war on ethnic and economic minorities. Black jurors understandably exhibit some resistance to such easy racism and object to the failure to consider the deprived social backgrounds of many minority defendants, or the low IQs of some of the accused. But black jurors are often pressured to go along with the white majority on the jury and agree to a death sentence. An example of the extreme pressure placed on a resisting juror objecting to imposing the death penalty was given by the author in which other jurors started yelling and screaming and saying things such as “Goddamn, you’re gonna waste all this time and money and effort that we’ve all put in!” (p. 106). Finally this juror gave up and agreed to the death sentence. Thus, black jurors are required to reconcile what appears to them to be irreconcilable. Benjamin Fleury-Steiner has done a masterful job in assembling his data and has created a book that is as engaging as it is damning of the jury role in the American death penalty. This book will be of great interest to the general public and will be used by those teaching and writing in the areas of criminology, criminal law, corrections, and racial inequality. With the evidence from this book in hand, no one can claim that capital punishment in America can be reformed to adhere to the tenants of a constitutional democracy.