Andrew Goldsmith

Thousands of fans descend onto college campuses every Saturday during the fall to watch National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I Power 5 and Group of 5 college football games. Power 5 is used to describe five of ten athletic conferences (ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, and the SEC) which are considered the most prominent and highest earning athletic conferences in college football whose teams compete in the NCAA Division 1 Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS). Group of 5 is an assembly of five conferences that also compete in NCAA Division I FBS. Group of 5 college football teams often compete against Power 5 and Independent teams during the regular season and bowl games (Vannini, 2022). The largest stadium seating capacity Group of 5 schools is around 40,000 people compared to the Power 5 stadiums, 10 of which seat at least 90,000 people (Chiusano, 2022). While the seating capacity at Group of 5 schools is not as great as Power 5 institutions it still represents a significant population (Vannini, 2022).

Gottfredson and Hirschi’s general theory of crime argues individuals with low self-control are more likely to engage in crime on and off-line. There is less research considering the role of opportunity, as low self-control should increase individuals’ willingness to act on opportunities to offend. The importance of opportunity is distinct for cybercrime, as technology access may be differentially impacted by various demographic factors. This study surveyed 1,411 South Australian adolescents enrolled at secondary schools across a large metropolitan region to examine the relationships between opportunity and self-control for four forms of computer hacking. A series of binary logistic regression models illustrated that distinct opportunity factors and low self-control are associated with each form of hacking.

This article argues that guns, as objects used in and for crime, have received insufficient criminological attention. It proposes a socio-material perspective for taking crime guns seriously as material agents in the ways many serious crimes are planned and executed. Drawing in part upon affordance theory, the perspective links the ‘objective’ physical properties of guns to their allure and take up for the purposes of carrying out crime. Guns are powerful organising objects in the commission of crime, it is argued, capable of provoking as well as enabling a range of threatening and harmful activities. The perspective is developed drawing upon interview data from a large qualitative study of convicted gun criminals. These data enable the notion of materiality to be considered at different stages of criminal career, particularly prior to first criminal gun use through to enforced or voluntary desistance. The article concludes with a consideration of policy options suggested by the socio-material perspective. In a post-Covid 19 world in which guns have gained greater salience in many countries, it is argued that the need to ‘dematerialise’ gun attraction and use has never been greater.

This article offers a socio-technical framework for better understanding youthful attraction to, and engagement in, online transgressions and delinquencies. Specifically, it takes the concept of ‘seduction’ from the work of Katz, as well as ‘affordance theory’ and insights from software and human–computer interaction studies, to analyse the affordances of the Internet that tempt and invite youthful transgressions such as digital piracy, viewing illegal pornography and hacking. We argue that Internet affordances not only enable transgressions to occur but can also precipitate them. The implications for youth crime policy are briefly addressed. Policy needs to reckon with the power of these factors in adolescent lives and thus minimize reliance on punitive responses. The article also contributes to the development of the concept of digital drift, by showing how Internet features and affordances foster drift into cyber delinquency.