SpringerBriefs in Criminology

Criminology has until recently neglected the nature and levels of crime outside the urban realm. This is not a surprise as crime tends to concentrate in urban areas and the police directs resources where the problems are. Yet, there are many reasons why scholars, decision-makers and society as a whole should care about crime and safety in rural areas. This book highlights 20 reasons why crime and safety in rural areas is a topic of relevance. We attempt to untangle currently simplistic views of the rural by discussing a number of facets of the countryside as both safe and criminogenic, and more importantly, a hybrid place worth to be examined in its own right. We adopt the notion of a rural-urban continuum that captures the nuances of places of varied nature, spanning from remote and desolate spaces to accessible and connected environments of the urban fringe. Areas on the rural-urban continuum may be in constant transformation given local and global influences, which imposes challenges for policing and long-term social sustainability.

Then, the book critically reviews a rich body of English-language literature in rural criminology that extends over more than four decades—a scholarship that has engaged researchers and practitioners in all continents. The books finishes with a discussion of the emergent research questions of the field, and offers implications for practice and the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

This brief describes the theory and evidence of a form of social control known as place management. Created by property owners, place management is an alternative to the two other domains of social control: formally created by the state and informally created by residents. It helps explain the high concentration of crime and disorder at a relatively small proportion of addresses and facilities. This volume examines the specifics of place management and extends it in three ways: to show how high crime places may radiate crime into their surroundings; to reveal networks of places that create crime hotspot spanning blocks; to demonstrate how networks of place managers influence crime throughout neighborhoods. Finally, it shows that the policy implications of place management extend far beyond the police and should include regulatory policies.

• The backstory, purpose, and structure of the international criminal justice system followed by how the regime could and should be extended to encompass aggravated sex trafficking.
• The role of culturally-shaped neutralization theory in understanding decision-making in sex trafficking on the individual level
• Historico-cultural  context, including competing elements of tradition and modernity
• Longstanding gender attitudes, particularly evaluating violence against women
• Interviews with Albanian sex traffickers and victims

By evaluating Albanian sex trafficking through this lens, this book aims to identify international criminal justice as a more appropriate and effective approach to prosecuting aggravated sex trafficking and to suggest future opportunities for further research that can aid in improved policing and prisoner management as it relates to Albanian sex trafficking. This book is ideal for students and academic researchers interested in international criminal justice and sex trafficking studies.

This open access book critically revisits 30 years of debate surrounding the evolution of crime trends, aiming to reconcile various hypotheses and controversies. It scrutinizes the concept of the "crime drop," highlighting the methodological pitfalls in understanding the causation mechanisms behind this phenomenon. By examining the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) on daily routines and crime, the book challenges traditional notions of crime reduction.

Drawing on extensive examples, data from official and non-official statistics, and crime surveys, this book illustrates how cyberspace has fundamentally reshaped the nature of crime. Despite this transformation, integrating cybercrime into conventional crime statistics remains an unaccomplished task. The book offers a thorough methodological discussion on measuring cybercrime, addressing the challenges researchers face in quantifying and explaining crimes committed both in cyberspace and across physical and digital boundaries.

This book speaks to students, academics, researchers, and practitioners in the fields of criminology, criminal justice, and cybercrime. It is an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to understand the complexities of modern crime trends and the challenges posed by the digital age.

This open access brief summarizes the literature on personal recurrent victimization—broadly defined as experiencing more than one victimization. The featured research uses different categories of personal recurrent victimization to describe ways individuals can be victimized more than once, including (1) recurrent victimization, (2) repeat victimization, (3) multiple victimization, (4) poly-victimization, and (5) revictimization. Each chapter in this text reviews prior work on one of these five categories of personal recurrent victimization to provide an overview of this research in an accessible yet comprehensive way. While there is a large body of literature examining how and why some individuals experience more than one victimization, this is the first comprehensive review of research on each of these categories. As a result, this book is an excellent tool for students, researchers, and practitioners.

This book tells the story of Hang Time, a grassroots, community-based program to reduce violence and recidivism amongst returning citizens in Connecticut, and how its model can be used in restorative justice efforts across the country.

Featuring stories of Hang Time participants, this volume illustrate the impact a supportive and safe environment has on ex-offenders, their families, friends, and community during re-entry. It offers examples of successful programming elements, such as:

•Creating a safe space for people to share their experiences and issues

•Developing an community for people of different ages, backgrounds and community roles

•Identifying and utilizing community resources

•Furthering community engagement via training of new correctional officers, police, and state prosecutors during their career on-boarding.

This volume is the ideal resource for individuals, groups, and organizations aiming to humanize justice-involved individuals and programing, including: community organizations and funders, policy makers, social services, members within the judicial, law enforcement, corrections, students, and non-profit community leaders.

This book presents the first major release of findings from the Fourth International Self-Report Delinquency Study (ISRD4), an ongoing, multi-national project examining young people's experiences with both victimization and offending. Covering 21 countries, this book reports responses from 58,000 young people aged 13 to 17, exploring their experiences with crime as victims, offenders, and offender-victims. The book provides in-depth analyses of cross-national crime patterns, the victim-offender overlap, the overlap in both online and offline domains, and the experiences of serious and repeat victims and offenders.  It concludes with a thought-provoking discussion of the implications for theory as well as policy.

Key takeaways from the study include:

• Cultural differences significantly impact the willingness to disclose offending behavior.
• Online victimization is an increasing concern, especially among girls and younger adolescents
• Overlap between online and offline forms of crime, and between victimization and offending is present in all countries
• Hate crimes and parental violence are more common than typically recognized.

 Authored by an international team, this book is essential for researchers in criminology, criminal justice, sociology, public policy, youth studies, and psychology.