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In October 2018, Canada legalized recreational cannabis. Key goals of legalization included reducing access by minors and eliminating the illicit market. Now, three years into the legal regime, important public policy questions are beginning to emerge. With police being tasked to enforce the Cannabis Act and associated provincial/territorial legislation, there is a critical need to understand their experiences, including the successes they have had, challenges they have experienced, and issues that remain unresolved. This paper begins to address these issues by presenting results from a qualitative study involving law enforcement personnel who, through their primary roles and responsibilities, have been actively involved in overseeing cannabis enforcement (in supervisory roles) since legalization in October 2018. Three key findings emerged from the analyses, and all were tied to the overarching perception that the illicit cannabis market has persisted since legalization: 1) there is a small but significant pattern of abuse of the medical system of production and distribution, specifically tied to designated grower provisions; 2) there are many challenges associated with halting online sales of illicit cannabis; and 3) the issue of unregulated sales of cannabis from Indigenous reserves remains a "hot button" political issue, in need of resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerns surrounding the use of force by police officers appear to be growing, fuelled by perceptions that the police use force too frequently, research showing that force is applied disproportionately to members of certain groups, and the view held by some that the mechanisms for holding police responsible for unjustified force are inadequate. In this paper, we advocate for the creation of a national use-of-force database in Canada to gain a better understanding of these issues, adding our voice to those who have already been actively calling for this. We describe some of the potential benefits that would be associated with such a database, including the fact that it would enhance police transparency and accountability, while also increasing our understanding of when and why force is used and what strategies may be useful for reducing inappropriate applications of force. We also highlight some of the challenges we think would be encountered, including mandating nationwide participation, overcoming resistance from the police community, establishing sensible case inclusion criteria, and standardizing data collection. While these are significant challenges, we believe not only that they are possible to overcome but that doing so will provide real value to Canadian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era when reported hate crimes are increasing dramatically, it is troubling that there appears to be, at best, an uneven response to the problem from law enforcement in Canada. Our pilot study of policing hate crime in Ontario is the first attempt to understand whether and how law enforcement think about and act on hate crime. Interviews with officers in eight police forces across eastern and southern Ontario (N = 38) uncovered three clusters of factors that appear to shape how they manage hate crime: environmental, organizational, and individual. What we offer in this paper is a series of related recommendations for enhancing police responses to hate crime along each of the three dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era when reported hate crimes are increasing dramatically, it is troubling that there appears to be, at best, an uneven response to the problem from law enforcement in Canada. Our pilot study of policing hate crime in Ontario is the first attempt to understand whether and how law enforcement think about and act on hate crime. Interviews with officers in eight police forces across eastern and southern Ontario (N = 38) uncovered three clusters of factors that appear to shape how they manage hate crime: environmental, organizational, and individual. What we offer in this paper is a series of related recommendations for enhancing police responses to hate crime along each of the three dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drug treatment courts (DTCs) have been proposed as an alternative to custody that will better deal with drug-dependent offenders through application of therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ). While DTC proponents emphasize the positive aspects of the judicial involvement and intense treatment that most courts provide, critics observe that there are many punitive aspects to DTCs. Frequent court appearances, curfews, urinalysis, multiple bail conditions, and delayed sentencing can be viewed as extensions of coercive social control rather than as benevolent measures intended to help offenders. Further, critics of Canadian DTCs have challenged the efficacy of treatment. This paper seeks to add to a limited Canadian research literature by examining a DTC in the Prairie city of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Two samples are used: sample 1 examines sentencing outcomes and reoffence data for 199 DTC admissions from 2006 to 2014; sample 2 is employed for a quasi-experimental comparative recidivism study using a propensity score matching determined sample of 63 DTC cases with 167 adult probationers from 2010–12. Graduates showed lower rates of reoffence compared to unsuccessful cases. Sentencing outcomes showed that unsuccessful participants were most often incarcerated when re-sentenced on original charges. Probation cases reoffended at higher rates than the matched DTC group. Administrative violations were still higher than in the probation group, and may actually result in an inflated reoffence rate for Canadian DTCs. Policy implications and directions for further research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the authors discuss the importance of replication and reproduction studies to building an evidence base in policing research. This evidence base, they note, is important to the task of informing sound policy and practice in policing and in relation to community safety efforts more generally. Despite the recognized value of such work, a scoping analysis of peer-reviewed Canadian policing research published over the past 10 years reveals that very few researchers engage in research aimed at replicating other studies. Potential remedies are suggested in the paper's conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Illicit production of marijuana on residential properties creates significant health and safety problems. Health Canada grants licences to individuals to produce medicinal marijuana for personal use, conditional on their compliance with all appropriate regulations. Health Canada does not inspect licensees' activities to monitor regulatory compliance, and privacy legislation prevents Health Canada from sharing licence holders' details with third parties. This research examines how effective this administrative structure is at preventing medicinal marijuana from being produced in residential buildings by licence holders. Methods: The indoor production of marijuana requires substantial amounts of electricity. From 2005, addresses in Surrey, British Columbia, with exceptionally high power consumption have been provided to the municipal government for the purposes of undertaking fire safety inspections. This paper examines the outcome of inspections at 1,204 marijuanaproduction sites (n = 252 medicinal, n = 952 illicit) to see whether the licensing process prevents marijuana production in residential buildings. The illicit-production sites inspected by the city are used as a non-random comparison group for the medicinal sites. Findings: This inspection process has identified an increasing number of medicinal- (relative to illicit-) production sites in recent years. Medicinal-production operations were significantly less likely to be located in residential buildings. However, the medicinal residential sites that were detected were located in equivalent parts of the city to the illicit residential operations. Residential medicinal-production sites presented fewer electrical and biological safety problems relative to illicit-production sites, but all residential medicinal-production sites breached zoning and legislative requirements relating to land use, building safety, and structural integrity. Conclusions: The current administrative structure for licensing medicinal marijuana production does not prevent residential buildings from being used as marijuana-production sites. Routine activity theory is used as a platform to explain how additional situational prevention mechanisms can be used to prevent licensed medicinal marijuana production from creating building-related health and safety problems in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines support for the use of conducted energy weapons (CEWs) by police in Canada using data from the 2014 Alberta Survey (N = 1,204). Support for CEW use is measured using four Likert-scale questions, capturing different dimensions of CEW use: (1) "less-lethal" weapons such as Tasers should be made available to police officers; (2) Tasers are a safe policing tool; (3) the use of Tasers reduces levels of confidence in the police; and (4) official explanations regarding injuries and casualties in Taser-related incidents are satisfactory. Results of a logistic regression indicate that race, age, and gender are key predictors of perceptions of CEW use by police in Canada. Specifically, women, young people, and racialized minorities are least likely to be supportive of CEW use by police. Individuals identifying as white are over three times more likely to support CEW use by police, compared to those identifying as Aboriginal or members of another racialized group. Having a low household income, living in an urban area, and education are not statistically significant predictors of support for CEW use by police. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are conflicting claims about whether women's imprisonment in Canada has followed the trend toward increasing punitiveness observed in a number of other western nations. This paper provides a detailed description of the scope of women's imprisonment in Canada since the early 1980s to adjudicate between these claims. Using different measures of imprisonment and data from federal and provincial prisons for women, the paper shows that we do not have convincing national evidence that there has been substantial growth in women's imprisonment Canada over the past few decades. There are however, some important gaps in the existing data that make it impossible to describe the full extent of the imprisonment of women and, more importantly, trends in the size of the population of women in prison. At the same time data from one province – Ontario – describe an important and disconcerting shift in the nature of women's imprisonment that has gone largely unnoticed by scholars: a large and growing proportion of the imprisoned female population is made up of women who are not serving sentences. The paper concludes with a call for more attention to the increase in the remand population and to what it means for theories of punitiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

RCMP executives and the Canadian government promoted community justice forums (family group conferences) in the late 1990s. They did so because CJFs offered a process consistent with the national community-policing strategy. When this strategy changed, executives cut their support for the program. This paper argues that this “rise” and “fall” was a function of the program's theoretical and procedural alignment with shifting strategies of national governance. This raises a question about the role of restorative forums in Canadian governance. If such programs remain desirable, multi-agency forums (police, public schools, child welfare, immigration) may well align with the nascent governmental framework of public safety interoperability. The paper also considers another possibility: non-state local peacemaking forums. The conclusion discusses potential benefits and limits of these possibilities. It also offers general theoretical observations on the role of alignment in governmental programming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Canadian federal government has promised legislation that will decriminalize the simple possession of cannabis by the summer of 2003. This paper will first review the socio-historical context as it pertains to the criminalization of cannabis use in Canada. Specifically, it will discuss the numerous (unsuccessful) legal and political attempts at cannabis-control reform in the past 30 years, called "the saga of promise, hesitation and retreat" by Giffen, Endicott, and Lambert (1991: 571). It will then review some distinct forces in the current cannabis law reform debate, namely a series of high-profile court cases, patterns of public opinion, and the recommendations of two federal inquiries, all of which contribute to the momentum for reform. After summarizing the diverse landscape of cannabis-control regimes in other Western countries, this paper will examine more closely the actual options that exist for cannabis decriminalization in Canada and their possible effects and implications. Specifically, making simple cannabis possession a civil offence, as suggested, would provide for both discretionary interpretations and net-widening effects in law enforcement and would, in addition, leave the cannabis supply question unresolved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The published Canadian homicide rate indicates a steady downward trend since the mid-1970s. Yet the conventional homicide rate inaccurately reflects the nature of homicide, when used as a social barometer, and should be supplemented with a new homicide rate, calculated using available demographic information about offender characteristics. This paper uses recent advances in statistical techniques to show that an age-adjusted homicide rate exhibits a significantly different trend than that of the conventional rate: (1) there was no structural break in the trend until the late 1980s; (2) until the early 1990s the trend was an increasing homicide rate; and (3) although the homicide rate has been decreasing since the mid-1990s, there is insufficient statistical evidence to suggest a new downward trend. These findings suggest that demographics and time series analysis are required to properly assess homicide trends, helping to isolate social variables so their effects on homicide rates can be more accurately determined. Homicide rates have a substantial affect on social policy and public opinion and therefore should be critically calculated. Finally, this paper demonstrates the benefits of cooperation between academic disciplines and the utility of taking advantage of the latest theoretical and empirical techniques to reach a better understanding of social phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the growing concern with motorists driving under the influence of drugs, the Canadian government has recently implemented legislation to tackle this issue. The new legislation compels drivers to submit to a series of tests, by a police officer, if/when a motorist is suspected of drug impairment. The aim of this paper is to present a review of scientific studies that have evaluated the effectiveness of three methods to detect cannabis use in motorists. These methods include the Drug Evaluation and Classification (DEC) Program, on-site oral fluid screening devices, and on-site urine screening devices. Only studies that included appropriate measures of reliability (i.e., sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy) were included in this review. Given their increasing reliability, on-site oral fluid devices appear to show the most promise for the detection of cannabis use in motorists. Despite the promising results, however, there is still a need to establish standard levels of impairment for cannabis, like the blood alcohol content (BAC) cut-off levels for alcohol, before these devices can be meaningfully utilized and implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In-custody deaths have garnered considerable attention in recent years, both within Canada and internationally. This study represents the first examination of death-in-custody cases across three provinces - Alberta, British Columbia, and Ontario - between 2000 and 2009. To provide context, the article reviews deaths in custody in several international jurisdictions. The objective of this project was to identify baseline indicators of the nature and extent of custody deaths in Canada. Using all completed cases from the offices of Medical Examiners and Coroners, this paper compares and contrasts the manner and causes of death by type of custody (provincial vs. federal) and further compares the mortality trends (natural vs. non-natural) between the provinces. The results and findings from this comparison are then examined and the implications for policy makers are identified. Most of the recommendations relate to improved intake and more sophisticated pre-screening strategies for inmates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthony Doob's career as a criminologist has been distinguished by his commitment to evidence-based policy development and to making criminological research relevant not just to other scholars but, perhaps more importantly, to policy makers, criminal justice practitioners, and the public. This paper provides an overview of the underdeveloped state of evaluation research on crime prevention and policy in Canada and discusses some of the obstacles to conducting rigorous evaluations. Fortunately, these obstacles - which include a tendency to rely on ideology and intuition as opposed to empirical evidence and a lack of sufficient resources for evaluation studies - have not discouraged Doob in his efforts to improve our criminal laws and justice system so that they reflect the fundamental Canadian values of justice, fairness, and humanity. Through his own research and his promotion of others' research - through, for example, Criminological Highlights - he has worked tirelessly to promote interventions by the criminal justice system that are informed by these values as well as by sound empirical evidence as to their effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is frequently suggested that Canadians would have more confidence in the courts, in criminal sentences, and in the justice system more generally if sentences were harsher. Taking advantage of the fact that there is variation across provinces in sentencing practices, this paper demonstrates that there is essentially no relationship between the punitiveness of a province's courts and that province's residents' views of courts, sentences, and the justice system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The crime mobility triangle summarizes the spatial divergence of three locations: the offender's residence, the victim's residence, and the location of the delinquent act itself. The further these three locations are from one another, the greater the area covered by the mobility triangle. The original mobility triangle was not designed for cases with multiple offenders or multiple victims. Accordingly, the current paper defines the crime mobility polygon for such a crime and its corresponding area. We calculate the areas contained within mobility polygons for 26,476 index crime incidents. These calculations demonstrate the influence of extra-crime participants upon the area an incident covers. We find that not all crime classifications have substantial increases in their mobility area as the number of individuals increase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a consensus that some racial groups are over-represented in their contact with the Canadian justice system, but a lack of agreement about possible reasons for this over-representation. The two dominant explanations for disproportionate minority contact (DMC) with the police are differential involvement in crime and differential treatment by the police. Differential treatment may be due to disproportionate possession by minorities of risk factors for police contact or to discriminatory policing. This paper uses data on self-reported delinquency and police contacts from a representative sample of Canadian youth aged 12 to 17 years from the National Longitudinal Study of Children and Youth to test the hypotheses that DMC is due to differential involvement or to differential treatment due to disproportionate risk factors. The results indicate that there was disproportionate minority contact with the police, but no support was found for explanations of DMC in terms of either differential involvement or differential treatment due to risk factors. Distinguishing between youth who report violent delinquency and all other youth, DMC was found only for the non-violent youth; this DMC was also not explained by differential treatment due to risk factors. By eliminating other explanations, the results suggest that racially discriminatory policing may be one explanation for DMC in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few studies have investigated law enforcement agencies' motivation and capacity to integrate video surveillance of public places into patrol- and criminal-investigation practices or the extent to which that motivation and capacity are constrained by independent regulatory agencies. In this paper, we assess the impact of a law-enforcement experiments in video surveillance in Montreal during a five-year period (2004 to 2008). Two strategies are compared. The first strategy made use of CCTV as a proactive and integrated element of a problem-solving initiative targeting an open-air drug-dealing market. The second strategy was essentially passive and CCTV cameras were spread along a street known for its nightlife, bars scene, and clubs. Findings show that video surveillance is, in fact, effective when closely linked to traditional police strategies and focused on a specific, recurrent, and localized problem. CCTV did manage to have an impact on the incidence of drug-dealing transactions as well as a collateral impact on the incidence of other offences, especially violent crimes. The second and more common approach, however, had no impact on crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the literature examining media depictions of crime and the criminal justice system, very little attention has been paid to the ways in which harms to the environment and human health have been constructed. This is not entirely surprising, given that the discipline of criminology has been reticent in addressing environmental harm more generally. This gap in the criminological imagination is beginning to be addressed within the growing field of green criminology, which seeks to focus attention on environmental harms as an important area of criminological investigation. Using a green criminological lens, this paper examines the case of mercury-contaminated fish as depicted in the Globe and Mail and New York Times from 2003 through 2008. Through qualitative content analysis, we examine the construction of responsibility for mercury contamination and for mitigating the attendant risks. We find that, in explaining the contamination of fish, both newspapers problematize the regulation of mercury-releasing industries by the state and pay a great deal of attention to the responsibility the state has to inform the public about the risks. However, little attention is paid to the responsibility of the mercury-releasing industries, the commercial fish industry, and restaurants and supermarkets to protect consumers. Furthermore, media attention is mainly directed at the responsibility of individual consumers – particularly those deemed most at risk of being harmed by mercury contamination – to limit the amount of mercury-rich fish they consume. These media depictions simultaneously foster a sense of individualized responsibility and normalize the risks posed by this environmental hazard, which is made to appear virtually inevitable, something that requires management, partly by the state, but mostly by vulnerable consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of hegemonic masculinity is a useful tool for critiquing and understanding narrow cultural constructions of masculinity, the diversity of men's real experiences, and the trajectory of power relations among men. One important tenet of the concept is that masculinities are often constructed, maintained, and restructured according to particular social networks in a given environment. Research that has been conducted on the impact of masculine prison environments has tended to focus on traditional adult male prisons. This paper offers a qualitative account of the lived experiences of 350 incarcerated Canadian male youth. It explores how everyday minor acts of subversion, assertions of youthful identity, and masculinity are used to contest and recast the meanings, directions, and restrictions imposed by the institution. We draw attention to the various ways in which these youth resist the experience of power, discipline, and formal social control. We highlight the ways in which masculinities and subcultural norms intersect to provide the psychological resources and frameworks within which these young people actively resist the experience of captivity, their captors, and the correctional environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I develop an approach for normative engagement by academic criminologists through the test case of international policing-reform assistance. By examining some of the known controversies and difficulties associated with international policing-reform assistance, I illustrate the practical policy utility of Foucauldian genealogical analytic inquiry. I argue that the insights and capacities for lateral thinking opened up through this approach are usefully “brought to bear” by taking a page from Jürgen Habermas to institutionalize discursive space and thereby democratic experimentalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the militarization of security and police forces occurring in Canada vis-à-vis regulation of the nuclear industry. Based on analysis of access to information requests, we investigate the operations of Nuclear Response Forces (NRFs) on nuclear sites in Canada, including the structural features of these NRFs, and their connections to local as well as national security and policing agencies. Our research explores the post–11 September 2001 impact of “design basis threat” assessment and counterterrorism policy on policing operations. Design basis threat assessment organizes security and policing practices according to adversarial models of military operation. We argue that the literature concerning militarization of policing must be extended to account for how the coordination of private and public security agencies as well as intelligence agencies at critical infrastructure sites facilitates the distribution of military technology and strategy across numerous scales of policing. Commenting on how militarization of security vis-à-vis nuclear proliferation in Canada is affecting some rural police forces, we contend that the design basis threat model of counterterrorism is transforming the strategy and operations of some local police forces working in jurisdictions near nuclear sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Canada, the number of pre-trial detention cases in provincial/territorial custody has soared dramatically. The traditional proportion of sentenced to remand in the inmate population, 75% sentenced to 25% remand, has now become a 50/50 split, and this trend has been accelerating. This paper explores possible reasons for this dramatic shift, focusing particularly on the two-for-one time served credit available to offenders upon conviction. Using content analysis of open-ended survey responses, we provide a “convict” perspective both on explanations for the rise in remand rates and on potential solutions to the problem. The formal position of justice officials on use of the two-for-one policy is compared and contrasted with inmate perceptions. Study findings indicate some consistency between official and inmate explanations, but also show considerable divergence, particularly in whether or not the accused or the prosecution seek to delay the trial process. We conclude with suggestions for policy development and future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a time in which private security is becoming more and more ubiquitous, questions as to the adequacy of security officers’ training for their positions become more relevant as well. However, calls for increased or improved training are rooted in abstract concerns with legality, governance, and accountability, and not in actual analysis of how useful extant training regimens are for actual security officers. Utilizing a grounded, ethnomethodological analytic perspective, this paper explores recollections of training in open-ended interviews with 29 shopping-mall-based security officers and then considers whether and how officers found their training useful in emergency (or otherwise unexpected) situations. Despite patchwork standards for training, this study finds that the security officers interviewed manage emergencies by marshalling not only their formal training but also resources from security experience outside their current positions and even outside the realm of private security entirely. This study does consider efforts to improve security training; however, with its focus on officers’ own descriptions and understandings of their work, it also suggests that security officers are more adaptable than might be expected. Based on these findings, suggestions for security practice and research are offered in the conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Youth Criminal Justice Act (2003) was enacted with the intent of decreasing the use of courts and restricting the use of custody for adolescent offenders, while improving the effectiveness of the responses to serious violent youth offenders. This paper assesses the impact of the act in its first five years. It reviews salient provisions of the act dealing with sentencing and diversion, discusses Supreme Court of Canada jurisprudence interpreting the act, and presents statistical data on the impact of the YCJA on diversion and sentencing of youth and on youth court and custodial caseloads. The Supreme Court has narrowly interpreted the provisions of the YCJA that allow for the use of custody, contributing to a reduction in use of custody. The Court has also emphasized that youth are to be treated differently from adults and ruled unconstitutional provisions of the YCJA that created a presumption of adult sentencing for the most serious offences by young offenders, limiting the effect of provisions of the act directed at serious violent offenders. The YCJA has succeeded in significantly reducing the rates of use of court and custody, without increasing recorded youth crime. There continue to be significant regional variations in rates of use of youth courts and custody. Although regional differences in the use of court have declined under the YCJA, variation in the use of custody has not been significantly affected by the new act. Youth crime remains a contentious political concern in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the meaning of police denials of racial profiling. Based on interviews with members of Hamilton Police Service, we suggest that the concept of a police subculture offers the most credible backdrop for understanding what is commonly termed racial profiling. When contextualized in this manner, racial profiling is perceived by the police as one in a series of activities that define their work. We argue that, when seen in the context of police subcultures, such profiling occurs even in the absence of officers who may be inclined to prejudice or discrimination against members of visible minorities. As well, that subculture provides police with a powerful and convincing deflection rhetoric to neutralize claims that the policing institution has failed to root out the racist practices of its officers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the paper "Crime-Prevention Jurisprudence?," by Astrid Birgden. The authors respond to Birgden by describing the risk-need-responsivity (RNR) principles of relationship and structuring skills, the theory of human behavior and its potential role in crime prevention in the context of justice. The reasons of the authors for dismissing therapeutic jurisprudence are also provided.

In July 2003, in an article published in the Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice , Fischer, Ala-Leppilampi, Single, and Robins wondered whether Canada's long “saga of promise, hesitation, and retreat” in cannabis law reform was coming to an end, after 30 years of inertia. Their optimism was rooted in the federal government's apparent determination to decriminalize cannabis possession and in an existing socio-political context favourable to reform. Indeed, the government had recently tabled legislation that would decriminalize the possession of small amounts of cannabis, making it a ticketable offence. However, this bill died before it could be passed into law. Two later versions of this legislation also failed to pass through the House of Commons. This paper picks up where Fischer et al. (2003) left off, by updating and reviewing developments in Canadian cannabis policy between 2003 and 2008. It reviews the provisions proposed by Bill C-38 and its successors, tracing the bills’ movements through Parliament and then delineates the positions of key interest groups regarding the decriminalization of minor cannabis possession. It concludes by reflecting on the contemporary period to show that Canada's “saga of promise, hesitation, and retreat” in cannabis law reform continues unabated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Section 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees to all Canadians the right “to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure.” Decisions regarding this section of the Charter are typically made in the context of charges against an accused, and the accumulation of these decisions defines the boundaries of the privacy interests of Canadians vis-à-vis governmental action. But while the court is focused on the privacy interests of particular individuals who have been accused of contravening the law, it is also determining the privacy rights of all Canadians. This paper explores the judgmental biases that arise naturally in such a situation. The evidence from psychological literature suggests that the degree to which government actions are viewed as intrusive (and thus compromising privacy) will be reduced to the extent that the decision maker takes a third-party perspective (search of others, not oneself) and to the extent that there is knowledge of irrelevant situational information, including the results of the potential search (i.e., whether evidence was produced) and indication of the guilt or innocence of the subject of the search. In deciding the typical section 8 case, judges find themselves in exactly these positions, and they thus run the risk of attenuated perceptions of intrusiveness. Analysis of the empirical literature suggests strategies for minimizing this bias, including considering intrusiveness from a first-person perspective and adopting an explicitly analytical stance on the specific question of whether the actions in question constitute a search or seizure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often assumed that self-control and informal social control are compatible with their direct influence on adolescent misconduct. It is also frequently assumed that informal social control theory can account for ontogenetic influences, like self-control, and sociogenic influences in a manner consistent with both perspectives. And finally it is assumed that processes of informal social control have been shown to have the strongest effect on adolescent delinquency while at the same time mediating ontogenetic influences like self-control. These misconceptions can be traced to the original presentation of informal social control theory. This paper represents the first step of a direct re-examination of the role of informal social control in the genesis of adolescent delinquency as presented in [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Azmi Jubran was subjected to homophobic harassment throughout his high school experience. In 1996, he filed a human rights complaint against the Vancouver School Board alleging discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. His case was the first in Canada to deal with the issue of school responsibility for peer-to-peer harassment. It also makes a significant contribution to the jurisprudence in the realm of sexual orientation harassment and discrimination. This is because Jubran did not identify as homosexual. Using a critical feminist analysis, this paper analyses the decisions and opinions of the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, Superior Court, and Court of Appeal regarding the relevance of sexual orientation identity and the recognition of harm in the case. Drucilla Cornell's concept of sexual shame, Gail Mason's linking of sexuality harassment to visibility and naming, and Judith Butler's discussion of the power of words to injure are discussed in relation to the case as to whether it would qualify as harassment under these conceptualizations. It is argued that while the precedent carries the possibility of eliminating homophobia in schools, there are significant concerns with the legalistic human rights mechanism that potentially undermine efforts to eliminate oppression and achieve social equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a small residential private security program in an affluent Ontario neighbourhood in which individual residents hired a private firm to provide security patrols. Drawing primarily on in-depth interviews with program subscribers, this exploratory study examines consumers’ imaginings of the private security program and its context. Four key aspects of subscribers’ discourse – exclusivity, security, public and private patrols, and responsibility – are discussed. Through analysis of consumers’ understandings of these issues, we argue that the consumption of private security may be more complex and private security's purchase on the consumer imagination weaker than earlier theory and research has acknowledged. Based on these findings we suggest more research into private security consumption is required and that neighbourhood-initiated private security programs, especially those without state endorsement or support, are unlikely to proliferate in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an analysis of the risk assessment and sentencing released in the special issue of the Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice. According to the author, offenders can be differentiated in terms of their risk to re-offend basing on the corrections developed by Burgess in 1928 regarding the issue of giving parole. It is the author's view that the common issue raised on the three papers featured in the special issue is whether or not risk instruments play a significant role in pre-sentencing decisions.

Despite the promise of the 1970s, critical criminology's influence in Canada has diminished in recent years. This paper examines this decline and charts one possible avenue for renewal. It argues that critical criminology has been limited by its emphasis on the state, and state-centred constructions of criminality, and by its failure to come to terms with how social injustices are reproduced through private institutions and modes of expertise constituted on the margins of the state and in the shadow of the law. Based on this critique, it is proposed that a dialogue with governmentality studies may help to overcome these limits, a dialogue that is examined in two substantive contexts: the governance of immigration and the policing of financial disorder. Revealed are not only forms of governance and oppression enacted on law's margins, but also possibilities for the realization of the progressive politics that lies at the heart of the critical criminological enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

RCMP executive problematizations of community-policing misalignments during the 1990s created the conditions for adopting intelligence-led policing since late 2000. Executives identified three areas as acute problems: front-line acceptance, training, and mid-level management. These ‘sites’ of executive problematization are expected to re-emerge under intelligence-led policing. As such, this article proposes that new model adoptions and subsequent organizational restructuring initiatives form part of broader cyclical alignment. This paper also discusses the broader implications of this study in terms of possible relocations of expertise and knowledge production at the agency-network level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines 10 sources of uncertainty in any risk-management system and illustrates them in security measures against terrorism. First, any risk assessment is an uncertain knowledge claim about contingent future events that cannot be fully known. Second, only some risks can be selected for attention, and those left unattended are sources of uncertainty. Third, specific decisions in risk management bear the uncertainty of false positives and false negatives. Fourth, risk-management technologies manufacture new uncertainties, some of which pose risks greater than those they were designed to control. Fifth, risk is reactive: as people act on knowledge of risk, they simultaneously change the risk environment and create new uncertainties. Sixth, the complexity of risk-management systems can result in multiple and unexpected failures occurring simultaneously; such ‘normal accidents’ are a source of uncertainty beyond any direct human capacity for control. Seventh, catastrophic failures result in the urge to risk manage everything: intensified surveillance, audit, and regulation increase system complexity and yield more uncertainty. Eighth; risk managers facing an increasingly litigious environment for failures become defensive, focusing more on operational risks that might affect the reputation of their organization than on the real risks they are supposed to manage. Ninth, excessive precaution escalates uncertainty and breeds fear, leading to risk-management measures that are at best misplaced and at worst incubate new risks with catastrophic potential. Tenth, risk-management systems can restrict freedom, invade privacy, discriminate, and exclude populations. Such self-defeating costs and the uncertainties they entail can be minimized only by infusing risk- management systems with value questions about human rights, well-being, prosperity, and solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the sentencing of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal youth under the Young Offenders Act, using youth court data from five major cities in Canada. Three separate sentencing decisions are examined using logistic and multiple regression analyses: (1) the imposition of a custodial sentence versus a non-custodial sentence, (2) the use of secure custody versus open custody, and (3) the length of the custodial sentence. First, there is no evidence that Aboriginal youth are more likely than non-Aboriginal youth to receive a custodial sentence. Sentencing judges appear to base the decision to impose custody on traditional factors such as criminal history and the severity of the offence. Second, there is no convincing evidence to suggest that Aboriginal youth are more likely than non-Aboriginal youth to receive a secure custody sentence. Lastly, there is evidence to suggest, however, that Aboriginal youth are likely to receive a longer custodial sentence than non-Aboriginal youth, regardless of standard aggravating factors such as criminal history and offence severity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks first to show that persons who are convicted of crimes can be perceived as either remorseful or as lacking in remorse. This division establishes a moral hierarchy that has profound implications for the characterization and disposition of persons who are so designated. Second, using both Canadian and American cases, it looks at how inclusion in the category of the unremorseful affects the characterization and disposition of those who have been wrongfully convicted. Finally, it suggests that remorse is a major site of conflict between persons who are wrongfully convicted and officials within the criminal justice system, conflict that involves the use of institutional pressure to encourage the expression of remorse, on the one hand, and the mobilization of individual resources to resist those expressions, on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-control and strain perspectives are widely viewed as independent and contrasting explanations for crime and delinquency. This paper re-evaluates the competing paradigms approach by considering the two theories as potentially complementary in explaining participation in delinquency based on Gottfredson and Hirschi's (1990) assumption that self-control acts as a barrier to criminal behavior. If such a claim is valid, one would hypothesize that individuals with high self-control would be able to mediate the effects of strain and refrain front engaging in delinquent activities. In contrast, adolescents with low self-control may not be equipped with the necessary constraints to abstain from delinquency and would therefore exhibit the greatest criminal propensities. A significant interaction term would support such claims. Data from a sample of over 2,000 adolescents attending junior and senior high schools in a western Canadian city were analysed to determine the independent and contextual effects of self-control and strain on involvement in delinquent behaviour. Results suggest that both self-control and strain are important contributors to delinquency, bat in an additive and not an interactive way. Such results do not seem to provide support for claims made by control theorists, who would no doubt argue that the effects of strain should be conditioned by low self-control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large-scale cohort studies suggest that offenders are more likely to experience premature death. We argue, in this paper, that strain, self-control, and differential association theories would all predict higher fatality rates among offenders but rely on different processes in order to account for differential outcomes. Whereas low self-control theory holds that higher offender mortality rates are accident driven and unrelated per se to criminal activities, strain theory emphasizes the significance of suicides and overdoses as critical factors underlying offenders' excess mortality rates. Co-offending research, on the other hand, would predict that offenders' higher mortality rates will incorporate a significant, crime-related, occupational-hazard component. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the criminal technologies and criminal organization associated with gambling-related computer crimes that occurred in the video lottery terminal industry in the province of Nova Scotia. We emphasize the techniques of VLT crime, such as cracking protection codes, boot tracing, ghost programming and down-lining, as rationally geared to neutralizing social control. We analyze how the cyber-attacks were socially organized and we conclude by discussing the implications that our case study has for the field of computer crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relative contributions of four ecological theories of crime -- urbanization theory, social disorganization theory, opportunity theory, and the overload hypothesis -- to understanding crime rates and the use of discretion by Canadian police in their decision making about youth. Data on crime rates and police charging practices in 447 communities in Canada in 1991 were regressed on indicators of the characteristics of the police force and the community, within a path analytic framework. Support was found only for social disorganization theory as an explanation of crime rates; and for both urbanization theory and social disorganization theories as explanations of the police use of discretion with youth. No support was found for opportunity theory or the overload hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In both the United States and Canada, a community protection approach to the perceived enduring dangerousness of sex offenders has emerged since the 1980s, in response to several high profile cases involving the sexual assault and murder or mutilation of young children. The key elements in this community protection approach are sex offender registration and tracking, community notification, and post-sentence controls in the form of civil commitment, peace bonds, and community surveillance. This paper compares the different trajectories community protection has taken in the United States and in Canada and offers an explanation for the relatively slower and more cautious approach taken by the Canadian federal government, compared to the rapid, aggressive approach taken in the United States at both a federal and state level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses nine years of youth court data to understand two different trends: increases in the proportion of youth court cases (found guilty) involving girls and few changes in the rate of finding girls guilty in youth court. It appears that the increased proportion of cases involving girls (found guilty) is due more to a decrease in the rate of finding boys guilty than to an increase in finding girls guilty. Thus, in understanding trends in the use of youth court, explanations should explore why it is that the rates for girls are relatively stable whereas the rates for boys, for property offences in particular, are decreasing. An explanation that assumes that rates of offending (or apprehension, or imposition of guilty findings) are increasing for girls will not, we suggest, fit the existing data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]