Criminology Commons^™

Contact Is A Stronger Predictor Of Attitudes Toward Police Than Race: A State-Of-The-Art Review, Amy Alberton, Kevin M. Gorey

Social Work Publications

Purpose – This scoping review thoroughly scanned research on race, contacts with police and attitudes toward police. An exploratory meta-analysis then assessed the strength of their associations and interaction in Canada and the USA. Key knowledge gaps and specific future research needs, synthetic and primary, were identified. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Design/methodology/approach – A germinal methodological framework for conducting scoping reviews was used (Arksey and O’Malley, 2005). The authors searched for published or unpublished research over the past 15 years and retrieved 33 eligible surveys, 19 of which were included in a sample-weighted meta-analysis.

Findings – The …

"Tough On Crime, Tough On The Causes Of Crime": Liberal Carceral Logics And The Reproduction Of Settler Colonial Violence In Winnipeg, Mb, Canada, Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation illustrates how settler colonialism is reproduced in present-day Canada through the governance of crime, and how political struggles against policing, imprisonment, and colonialism are linked. It focuses on the politics of crime in the Province of Manitoba from 1999–2016, during which the left-of-center New Democratic Party (NDP) government engineered a significant expansion of the carceral state, overseeing unprecedented increases in policing and jail growth. In Manitoba, the vast majority of prisoners are Indigenous. This dissertation explores the logic through which the NDP integrated their support for policing and imprisonment into their “progressive” value system, packaging their carceral expansion …

Representations Of Youth Crime In Canada: A Feminist Criminological Analysis Of Statistical Trends, National Canadian Newspapers, And Moral Panics, Jennifer Silcox

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This research explores different representations of youth crime in Canada from a feminist criminological and social constructionist perspective. Using a mixed-methods approach that draws upon historical scholarly works, official governmental crime and court statistics, and national Canadian newspapers, I investigate statistical and media representations of youth crime in Canada.

Official crime and court statistics were analyzed to identify trends in youth crime and how they vary by gender and legislative changes. I provide an historical overview of changing definitions of youth, crime and delinquency, and consider how these combined with changing norms regarding morality to shape youth crime legislation in …

Female Canadian Murderers: The Public Trials Of Karla Homolka And Terry-Lynn Mcclintic Through Documentary Representation, Emma Smith

Cultural Analysis and Social Theory Major Research Papers

This paper critically examines the production of violent female offenders by analyzing their visual representations in two Canadian television investigative documentaries created fifteen years apart. Karla Homolka (offending in 1990-1992) and Terri-Lynne McClintic (transgressing in 2009) were both responsible for committing horrific and unpardonable crimes resulting in significant media coverage throughout Canada.

Despite some similarities and consistencies in both documentaries, anomalies and disparities in coverage serve as the center of my analysis. Against features of both substance and style, a comparative analysis of the documentaries with features closely associated with the production of reality television, I contend that both documentaries …

Abortion And Crime In Canada: A Test Of The Bmdl Hypothesis, Timothy Kang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Donohue and Levitt (2001) argued that the legalization of abortion in the US during the 1970s contributed to 50 percent of the dramatic decline in crime that occurred in the 1990s. Although a lengthy debate in the literature has proliferated and remains inconclusive, this controversial theory has been popularized by the Freakonomics (2005) franchise. The liberalization of abortion services that occurred in Canada in 1988 offers an improved focal intervention to perform an empirical test of this theory. The methods that have emerged from the debate are reviewed. The most promising strategies, namely time-series plots of crime, “effective abortion rate” …

Communicating Crimes: Covering Gangs In Contemporary Canadian Journalism, Chris Richardson

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this integrated-article dissertation, I examine representations of gangs in Canadian journalism, focusing primarily on contemporary newspaper reporting. While the term “gang” often refers to violent groups of young urban males, it can also signify outlaw bikers, organized crime, terrorist cells, non-criminal social groups, and a wide array of other collectives. I build on Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework to probe this ambiguity, seeking to provide context and critical assessments that will improve crime reporting and its reception. In the course of my work, I examine how popular films like West Side Story inform journalists’ descriptions of gangs. Though reporters have …