October 2015
Volume 57, No. 4 | Go to abstracts
Articles
Page 439
Delinquent Displays and Social Status among Adolescents
Owen Gallupe, Martin Bouchard, and Garth Davies
Page 475
Making Meaning out of Punishment: Penitentiary, Prison, Jail, and Lock-up Museums in Canada
Kevin Walby and Justin Piché
Page 503
La cyberintimidation à l’épreuve du milieu scolaire québécois : regards d’intervenants sur l’irruption des nouvelles technologies à l’école
Jean-François Cauchie et Patrice Corriveau
Page 528
Re-defining Environmental Harms: Green Criminology and the State of Canada’s Hemp Industry
Wesley Tourangeau
Page 555
Hidden in the Shadows: The Impact of Temporary Worker Populations on Crime Rate Calculations
Andrew A. Reid and Neil Boyd
Page 566
Cyberbullying: Is Federal Criminal Legislation the Solution?
Patricia I. Coburn, Deborah A. Connolly, and Ronald Roesch
Abstracts
Delinquent Displays and Social Status among Adolescents
Owen Gallupe, Martin Bouchard, and Garth Davies
Adolescents with high social status are more important than others in determining the delinquent involvement of the peer group. Yet relatively little is known about how delinquency and analogous acts and traits affect social status. We examine whether adolescents who display a capacity for delinquency enjoy greater social status (popularity/centrality). Two models of delinquency display are proposed to explain social status among adolescents: the illicit behaviour model and the delinquent potential model (which does not require any delinquent involvement). Data from the saturation sample of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health are used (n = 1,514). The results show that adolescents who display a potential for delinquency by associating with delinquent peers tend to have higher status while actual involvement in illicit acts (violence) hurts social status.
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Making Meaning out of Punishment: Penitentiary, Prison, Jail, and Lock-up Museums in Canada
Kevin Walby and Justin Piché
While much of the penal tourism literature focuses on historically significant and infamous penitentiary, prison, and jail museums, such as Alcatraz and Eastern State Penitentiary in the United States, there exist many smaller, rural sites, including decommissioned local jails and lock-ups, where confinement and punishment are represented. Based on a 5-year qualitative study, this article examines the scope of large and small penal history museums across Canada. Offering a typology to aid criminologists and criminal justice scholars in understanding cultural sites that shape public meanings of imprisonment and punishment, we contribute to the penal tourism and dark tourism literatures by analysing museum displays. We make comparisons with national meanings found in studies concerning penal history museums across Australia, South Africa, and the United States and reflect upon the factors animating the emergence of these sites in Canada. We conclude with a discussion on the significance of our findings for criminological and penal tourism literatures.
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La cyberintimidation à l’épreuve du milieu scolaire québécois : regards d’intervenants sur l’irruption des nouvelles technologies à l’école
Jean-François Cauchie et Patrice Corriveau
In Quebec, the emergence of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the school environment regularly prompts media and politics attention, often through the matter of cyberbullying. But what does the milieu itself think about this? To answer the question, we conducted semi-structured interviews with stakeholders from two school boards in two different regions. These interviews turned out to be most instructive. Giving to the stakeholders themselves the task of delimiting the problems brought to the school community by ICT, especially the sudden emergence in school of social networks, we could establish that 1) the rhetoric of cyberbullying finds only a faint echo, if any, among the stakeholders in the field, 2) the problems raised by ICT in school are not associated only to a possible suffering of the youth, and 3) they are also linked to the elusiveness of the phenomenon (what is cyberbullying?), the porosity of the school walls (where does “school” begin? where does it end?), and the total lack of command of a given environment (should ICT be part of socialization in school, or not?). Our research, therefore, warns against too fast and too consensual analyses regarding the fight against (cyber)bullying.
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Re-defining Environmental Harms: Green Criminology and the State of Canada’s Hemp Industry
Wesley Tourangeau
Green criminology has been developing for more than 20 years as a field of criminological inquiry that grapples with defining and exploring environmental harms. This perspective includes approaches that look beyond legally defined environmental crimes, highlighting permissible activities that cause environmental deterioration, such as clear-cutting of forests, and prohibited activities that benefit the environment, such as pedicabs. Extending the criminological gaze helps green criminology identify unacknowledged environmental harms. The article draws from postmodernist/poststructuralist concepts to work past merely defining actions as either harmful or harmless, highlighting the complexity of socio-ecological effects and the importance of extending the conceptual boundaries of harm. Canada’s experiences with industrial hemp provide a fitting example. The heavily regulated Canadian hemp industry offers an important case for investigating the impacts of social constraints that limit the industry’s capacity to benefit the environment. Qualitative interviews reveal negative public perceptions, over-restrictive regulatory requirements, and insufficient technological capabilities as important obstacles to a fuller realization of hemp’s environmental benefits. Informed by constitutive criminology, chaos criminology, and Halsey’s important critique, the article adds to postmodernist/poststructuralist developments in green criminology.
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Hidden in the Shadows: The Impact of Temporary Worker Populations on Crime Rate Calculations
Andrew A. Reid and Neil Boyd
Crime rates have long been established as standard metrics in criminological research and have been recognized for their utility in many different contexts. The utility of crime rates, however, depends largely on the accuracy of the data that are used to operationalize them. Using three jurisdictions in the province of Alberta, Canada, as case studies, this research note sets out to assess the impact of including shadow populations (i.e., temporary workers) in the denominator of crime rate calculations. Results of the alternative crime calculations reveal that, in some cases, shadow populations make very little difference to reported crime rates. In other cases, however, shadow populations make large differences. It is concluded that municipal census data that include shadow population counts ought to be given greater consideration, particularly for municipalities with large shadow population to permanent population ratios.
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Cyberbullying: Is Federal Criminal Legislation the Solution?
Patricia I. Coburn, Deborah A. Connolly, and Ronald Roesch
Cyberbullying occurs frequently and is often a reciprocal conflict, with individual youths filling the roles of both the victim and the bully in a short period of time. Regardless of the role, involvement in cyberbullying is associated with negative outcomes and has recently been linked to the death of young people in a few cases. In an attempt to alleviate growing concerns about cyberbullying, the Canadian government passed Bill C-13 (the Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act), which includes a prohibition on the posting of non-consensual intimate images. Due to the specific criteria in this section of the bill, it is unlikely that it will protect many youth from online victimization. Bill C-13 also criminalizes harassing or annoying behaviour conducted via electronic communication. This law may exacerbate the problem of non-disclosure, may be confusing to youth, and may result in too many youth and a disproportionate number of marginalized youth becoming involved in the criminal justice system. Alternative approaches to dealing with the conflict, such as increasing the use of empirically based programs that teach youth to resolve interpersonal conflict and encourage them to disclose incidents of cyberbullying, would be more effective than federal criminal legislation at protecting young people from online victimization.