Susanne Karstedt

Public attitudes play a role in the development of policy, meaning that what the public think about certain issues (and what shapes these attitudes) form an important part of the broader penal policy environment. Internationally, research has found a relationship between racial attitudes and public punitiveness; however, the relationship between these two types of attitudes is still largely under-researched in Australia. This study had two aims: (1) to understand the relationships between racial essentialism (the belief that racial groups possess fixed traits that determine their abilities and behaviour), attitudes towards Indigenous Australians and punitive attitudes; and (2) to test whether sentencing preferences differ when a justice-involved person is explicitly labelled as Aboriginal, using a vignette experiment. To do this, the study drew on survey data obtained from a representative sample of the Australian public ( N = 520). The results showed that stronger racial essentialism and more negative attitudes towards Indigenous Australians were associated with greater punitiveness. However, perceptions of rising crime rates and internal attribution of crime emerged as stronger predictors of punitive attitudes than race-related factors. The vignette experiment revealed no significant differences in sentencing preferences when a justice-involved person was explicitly labelled ‘Aboriginal’. These findings suggest that although racial attitudes are associated with punitiveness, public support for harsher punishment is driven more strongly by perceptions of crime rather than characteristics of the justice-involved person themselves.

Involvement of corporations in international crimes and conflict atrocities, such as crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide, are neither isolated events nor uncommon. Importantly, corporate involvement in atrocity crimes is shaped by conditions in “zones of legal risk” (International Commission of Jurists), where gross human rights violations, atrocity crimes and extreme violence are pervasive. In this context, corporations become complicit in the most serious state crimes. The empirical study of 205 historical and contemporary cases across all global regions in a total of 36 countries explores patterns of involvement starting from the conceptual framework developed by the International Commission of Jurists. We identify six “risk profiles” of involvement defined by industry type, partners in such crimes, and the type of involvement and contribution to the crimes. Our results showcase the relationship between corporate characteristics and risks of involvement in serious violence for different risk profiles across space and time. Starting from a legal conceptual framework, we discuss how these results contribute to criminological theories of corporate crime, as well as to regulation theory and practice.

State violence includes a range of extremely harmful state actions, ranging from extrajudicial killings, torture and forced disappearances to mass atrocities committed by agents of the state. These foremost implicate criminal justice agencies and security forces, as both democracies and authoritarian regimes engage in oppressive violence. While the relationship between interpersonal violence and social inequality is firmly established, the relationship between state violence and wider contexts of social inequality is mostly ignored in global comparisons. At the sub-national level, however, racial and socio-economic inequality and segregation are major determinants of excessive violence and extrajudicial killings by police forces. This chapter explores the role of different dimensions of social inequality as risk factors in facilitating such types of violence from a cross-national as well as a sub-national perspective. It introduces major global data sets (PTS, CIRI, ITT), and analyses a range of indicators of socio-economic and political inequality. The role of racial segregation and disadvantage will be explored for three countries with high levels of police killings: the Philippines, Brazil and the US. Taken together, both perspectives provide insights into the structural conditions and causal mechanisms that link inequality and state violence.

I would like to start this review with a personal statement. As a criminologist, I was surprised (and disappointed) that none of the many lists of social sciences relevant to the endeavor of creating a “New Social Science of the Holocaust” included criminology. In fact, criminologists—side by side with political scientists, who are mainly represented in this volume—have contributed pathbreaking analyses and empirical studies to genocides in Rwanda, Darfur, and the former Yugoslavia using exceptional and unprecedented data collections and testing theories (see, for example, the work of John Hagan, Holly Nyseth-Brehm, and Nicole Rafter). Though criminology was generally a latecomer to the study of genocide—notwithstanding the fact that between 1943 and 1946, Sheldon Glueck, a leading criminologist of his time, wrote the first analyses of the Nazi regime’s crimes for the Nuremberg trials—criminologists, like their colleagues in other social sciences, turned their attention to the genocides in Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and Guatemala in the 1990s.