Criminal Justice Research In An Era Of Mass Mobility

We live in an era of mass mobility where governments remain committed to closing borders, engaging with securitisation discourses and restrictive immigration policies, which in turn nurture xenophobia and racism. It is within this wider context of social and political unrest that the contributors of this collection reflect on their experiences of conducting criminological research. This collection focuses on the challenges of doing research on the intersections between criminal justice and immigration control, choosing and changing methodologies while juggling the disciplinary and interdisciplinary requirements of the work’s audience. From research design, to fieldwork to writing-up, this book captures every part of the research process, drawing on a range of topics such as migration control, immigrant detention and border policing. It also reflects on more neglected areas such as the interpersonal and institutional contexts of research and the ontological and epistemological assumptions embedded within data analysis methods. It makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the major developments in current research in this field, how and why they occur and with what consequences. This book seeks to shake off the phantom of undisturbed research settings by bringing to the fore the researchers' involvement in the research process and its products. An interdisciplinary collection, it can be used as a reference not just for those interested in the criminology of mobility but also as a learning tool for anyone conducting research on a highly charged topic in contemporary policy and politics.

In an era of mass mobility, those who are permitted to migrate and those criminalised, controlled, and prohibited from migrating are heavily patterned by race. This volume places race at the centre of its analysis; 14 chapters examine, question, and explain the growing intersection between criminal justice and migration control.

With contributions from leading experts in the field, this timely Research Handbook reconsiders the theories, assumptions, values and methods of comparative criminal justice in light of the challenges and opportunities posed by globalisation, deglobalisation and transnationalisation.

As scholarly work on crime, deviance, criminal justice, and social control advances and sophisticated methods of investigation develop, chapter authors demonstrate the methodological maturity and diversity of current empirical research in criminology and criminal justice.

How did Canadian border officers come to think of themselves as a "police of the border"? This book tells the story of the shift to law enforcement in Canadian border control. From the 1990s onward, it traces the transformation of a customs organization into a border-policing agency. Border Frictions investigates how considerable political efforts and state resources have made bordering a matter of security and trade facilitation best managed with surveillance technologies. Based on interviews with border officers, ethnographic work carried out in the vicinity of land border ports of entry and policy analysis, this book illuminates features seldom reviewed by critical border scholars. These include the fraught circulation of data, the role of unions in shaping the border policy agenda, the significance of professional socialization in the making of distinct generations of security workers and evidence of the masculinization of bordering. In a time when surveillance technologies track the mobilities of goods and people and push their control beyond and inside geopolitical borderlines, Côté-Boucher unpacks how we came to accept the idea that it is vital to deploy coercive bordering tactics at the land border. Written in a clear and engaging style, this book will appeal to students and scholars in criminology, sociology, social theory, politics, and geography and appeal to those interested in learning about the everyday reality of policing the border.

This book offers a systematic exploration of the changing politics around immigration and the impact of resultant policy regimes on immigrant communities. It does so across a uniquely wide range of policy areas: immigration admissions, citizenship, internal immigration controls, labour market regulation, the welfare state and the criminal justice system. Challenging the current state of theoretical literature on the ‘criminalisation’ or ‘marginalisation’ of immigrants, this book examines the ways in which immigrants are treated differently in different national contexts, as well as the institutional factors driving this variation. To this end, it offers data on overall trends across 20 high-income countries, as well as more detailed case studies on the UK, Australia, the USA, Germany, Italy and Sweden. At the same time, it charts an emerging common regime of exploitation, which threatens the depiction of some countries as more inclusionary than others. The politicisation of immigration has intensified the challenge for policy-makers, who today must respond to populist calls for restrictive immigration policy whilst simultaneously heeding business groups’ calls for cheap labour and respecting legal obligations that require more liberal and welcoming policy regimes. The resultant policy regimes often have counterproductive effects, in many cases marginalising immigrant communities and contributing to the growth of underground and criminal economies. Finally, developments on the horizon, driven by technological progress, threaten to intensify distributional challenges. While these will make the politics around immigration even more fraught in coming decades, the real issue is not immigration but the loss of good jobs, which will have serious implications across all Western countries. This book will appeal to scholars and students of criminology, social policy, political economy, political sociology, the sociology of immigration and race, and migration studies.

This book is a unique and original examination of borders and bordering practices in the Western Balkans prior to, during, and after the migrant "crisis" of the 2010s. Based on extensive, mixed-method, exploratory research in Serbia, Croatia, FYR Macedonia, and Kosovo, the book charts technological and human interventions deployed in this region that simultaneously enable and hinder the mobility projects of border crossers. Within the rich historical context of the Balkan Wars and subsequent displacement of many people from the region and beyond, this book discusses the types and locations of borders as well as their development, transformation, and impact on people on the move. These border crossers fall into three distinct categories: people from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia transiting the region; citizens of the Western Balkans seeking asylum and access to labour markets in the EU; and women border crossers. This book also maps border struggles that follow these processes, analyses the creation of labour "reserves" in the region, and examines the role that technology – in particular smartphones and social media - play in regulating mobility and creating social change. This volume also explores the role of the EU in, and the impact of the aforementioned processes on nation-states of the Western Balkans, their European future, and mobility in the region. Whilst the book focusses on a particular region in Southeast Europe, its findings can be easily applied to other social contexts and settings. It will be particularly useful to academics and postgraduate students studying social sciences such as criminology, sociology, legal studies, law, international relations, political science, and gender studies. It will also be useful for legal practitioners, NGO activists, and government officials.

How does justice for non-citizens look like? This book provides a nuanced cross-section of how criminal courts deliver justice to non-citizens, investigating rationales and purposes of penal power directed at foreign defendants. It examines how lack of citizenship alters the contours of justice, creating a different system oriented at control and exclusion of non-members. Drawing on ethnographic research in an Italian criminal court, the book details how citizenship and national belonging not only matter, but are matters reproduced, elaborated, and negotiated throughout the judicial process, exploring the implications of this development for the understanding of penal power and the role of criminal courts. Set in the context of the growing intersection between migration control and penal power, Delivering Justice to Non-Citizens explores whether and how instances of border control have seeped into judicial practices. In doing so, it fills a significant gap in the scholarship on border criminology by considering a rather unexplored actor in the field of migration studies: criminal courts. Based on a year of courtroom ethnography in Turin, Delivering Justice to Non-Citizens relies on interviews with courtroom actors, courthouse observations, analysis of court files, together with local media analysis, to provide a vivid image of judicial practices towards foreign defendants in a medium-size criminal court. It considers and balances the distinctive traits of the local context with ongoing global processes and transformations and adds much needed insights into how global processes impact local realities and how the local, in turn, adjusts to global challenges. Through instances of everyday justice, the book calls attention to how migration control has silently seeped into the judicial realm. The book will be of interest to students and academics in sociology, criminology, law, penology, and migration studies. It will also be an important reading for legal practitioners, magistrates, and other law enforcement authorities.