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THE NEIGHBOURHOOD CONTEXT OF URBAN ABORIGINAL CRIME
Robin T Fitzgerald
Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics
Peter J. Carrington
University of Waterloo
This article addresses Carol La Prairie's (1992; 2002) hypothesis that the over-representation of Aboriginal people in the Canadian criminal justice system is, to a considerable extent, due to their disadvantaged urban living conditions. Specifically, it investigates the sources of the high level of police-reported Aboriginal crime in Winnipeg in 2001. Geocoded crime incident data from the incident-based Uniform Crime Reporting Survey and Census data for the City of Winnipeg are combined in a neighbourhood-level ecological analysis of urban Aboriginal crime. The results indicate that a substantial part of the elevated level of police-reported Aboriginal crime is explained by the structural characteristics of the neighbourhoods in which Aboriginal people tend to live. These results confirm La Prairie's hypothesis and point to the importance of considering community conditions in understanding and preventing crime.
REVISITING SELECTION AND INFLUENCE: AN INQUIRY INTO THE FRIENDSHIP NETWORKS OF HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS AND THEIR ASSOCIATION WITH DELINQUENCY
Chris Baerveldt and Beate Völker
Utrecht University
Ronan Van Rossem
Ghent University
Criminologists tend to assume that friends are fairly similar in their delinquent behaviours. However, the process leading to this similarity is not fully understood. It is not clear whether similarity in delinquent behaviour among friends is the result of a selection- or of an influence process. In this article, we investigate this issue using longitudinal data on students' friendship networks and their delinquent behaviour in 16 Dutch high schools (n = 859). For the analysis, we made use of SIENA, a technique for the simultaneous analysis of the dynamics of both networks and behaviour. A meta-analysis showed influence to be a general process without variation over the schools, while selection played a role in only 4 of the 16 schools.
RECOVERING THE EARLY HISTORY OF CANADIAN CRIMINOLOGY: CRIMINOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, 1951-1959
Gary Parkinson
British Columbia Open University (retired)
This article is an account of the development of Canada's first criminology program, offered at the University of British Columbia from 1951 to 1959. The program included a BA. in criminology with an honours option, an MA. in criminology, and a postgraduate diploma. This program has been neglected in the history of criminology but deserves attention due to its innovative nature and to its impact on corrections in Canada. It emerged during the era when the
new penology was being articulated and played a profound role both in transmitting this philosophy and in implementing it at the Haney Correctional Institution, which developed in concert with the university program. Elmer Kim Nelson, a criminologist from California, was in large part responsible for the shape and direction of both the university program and the prison. Although the program was short-lived, it exerted considerable influence on both the regional and the national scene for three decades.
YOUTH CRIME RATES AND THE YOUTH JUSTICE SYSTEM
Jane B. Sprott
Ryerson University
Anthony N. Doob
University of Toronto
An examination of variation across provinces in self-reported violent and property offending by Canadian youths demonstrates considerably less variation than the rate of police-recorded contacts with youths or the rate of use of youth court for these youths. Official measures of offending by youths in Canada are probably best seen as reflections of the behaviour of adults in deciding how to respond to offending by youths, rather than of the behaviour of youths.
