Skip to main content
Scott Jacques
I'm professor of criminal justice and criminology at Georgia State University (GSU). I founded CrimRxiv, the field's open access repository and hub. I now serve as its associate director for sustainability. I am starting a utilitarian company for no-cost learning materials (e.g., textbooks and ancillaries). As a utilitarian, my moral duty is to improve the world for the greater good, to the greatest extent I can. I strive to provide students, taxpayers,1 and my other supporters2 with a clear and concrete return-on-investment (ROI). I do applied research to invent, implement, and refine high-ROI strategies that make everyone happier. At a minimum, for every dollar I’m given, my goal is to save or make stakeholders at least two dollars. Before the next decade, I want to achieve a 10x ROI. Currently, my priorities are, one, improving the quality and reducing the cost of learning materials for students; and, two, increasing the quality and quantity of open access to criminology outputs (e.g., articles, books, data, code, learning materials, everything). I also do cyber- and digital-criminology with the Evidence-Based Cybersecurity Research Group, with a focus on deterrence, prevention, and offender-decision making. Prior to, I applied that focus to active drug dealers, robbers, and shoplifters, along with “theorizing method.” On this website, you'll find my CV and open access to my publications. Here are links to my web profiles. At a glance (and last I checked), my impact includes saving students millions of (US) dollars on learning materials; ~37,000 users of this website and ~66,000 pageviews; ~117,000 users and ~237,000 pageviews of CrimRxiv; 1655 citations and an h-index of 25. My neologisms are “open criminology” and “proterrence.”
Follow me on Twitter at @sjacques83.
You can email me at me@scottjacques.us.
Books
Published: May 29, 2020
Coffeeshops are the most famous example of Dutch tolerance. Yet these cannabis distributors are highly regulated. Coffeeshops are permitted to break the law, but not the rules. On the premises, there cannot be minors, hard drugs, or more than 500 grams. Nor can a coffeeshop ...
Published: May 01, 2015
When we think about young people dealing drugs, we tend to picture it happening on urban streets, in disadvantaged, crime-ridden neighborhoods. But drugs are used and sold everywhere, even in upscale suburbs and top-tier high schools. Drawing on my fieldwork, Code of the ...
Published: Apr 30, 2021
Bentham’s ideas on punishment are famous. Every criminology student learns about Bentham. Every criminologist contends with him, as advocate or opponent. This discourse concerns his ideas about punishment, namely with respect to legislation and the panopticon. Yet, they are ...
Papers
Published: Oct 05, 2022
In this article, I describe and explain a way for criminologists—as individuals, groups and, especially, as university units (e.g., colleges, departments, schools)—to increase the quantity and quality of open criminology: ask university librarians to make their outputs open ...
Published: Jul 16, 2022
Dutch coffeeshops are quasi-illegal. Their sale of cannabis is de jure prohibited but de facto permitted. In this sense, their criminal acts are tolerated. Less often explored, and less well understood, is that coffeeshops also tolerate crimes against them. “Doing nothing” is ...
Published: Apr 15, 2022
When authors make their papers open access (OA), they increase their impact and contribute to social justice. An impediment are publisher embargoes, which limit when and where authors can legally share their postprints. Some publishers, like Wiley, prohibit sharing anywhere ...
Published: Mar 31, 2022
It’s embarrassing to admit, but I’m really into NFTs. I blame Zach Verdin, the Head of Strategic Programs at Knowledge Futures Group. He convinced me to buy my first one, back in late 2021. This stemmed from our broader conversation about the technology. Already, I was ...
Published: Mar 04, 2022
The field of criminal justice (CJ) uses research, education, and outreach to make the world better. CJ scholars have become increasingly concerned with applied science, whereby research findings are widely disseminated and used to positively impact the CJ system. The Academy ...
Published: Oct 15, 2021
Twitter is a social media platform for publicly sharing information in “tweets.” Tweets are limited to 280 characters (text and emojis) and four photos or a video (including GIFs). Tweets may be sent or read at twitter.com or on its “app” (application). By tweeting, a journal ...
Published: Jul 03, 2021
This paper examines the concept of proterrence: scaring people into doing something to stop others from doing something bad. This contrasts to deterrence, which involves threatening persons to not do something bad. The tobacco ban in Amsterdam coffeeshops ...
Published: Jun 22, 2021
This page provides a curated list of websites that promote Open Educational Resources (OER). They include information on the utility of OER; libraries for finding it; guides to making it; and, platforms for sharing it. ...
Published: Apr 08, 2021
There are many platforms, or places, to make your papers green open access (OA). In addition to CrimRxiv, there is your personal webpage, institutional repository, other field-specific repositories, broader repositories, and websites like ResearchGate and Academia. Should you ...
Published: Nov 23, 2020
Accessing public Wi-Fi networks can be as dangerous as it is convenient. People who access a public Wi-Fi network should engage in self-protective behaviors to keep their data safe from malicious actors on the same network as well as persons looking over their shoulder, ...
Published: Oct 31, 2020
Every criminology article can be free, without radical change to the current system. In my Open (Access) Letter to Criminologists, I write about why we should pursue that goal and how we can achieve it. Key to the strategy is taking advantage of “green access” — the legal and ...
Published: Oct 19, 2020
We are writing with respect to the American Society of Criminology’s journals, Criminology: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and Criminology & Public Policy. Their self-archiving policy prohibits authors from sharing the accepted version of their manuscripts, or “postprints,” ...
Published: Jul 23, 2020
This study examines the relationship between drug control policy, normalization, and symbolic boundary work among drug traders. Taking from interviews with 50 personnel in Amsterdam’s coffeeshops, we find that Dutch drug policy shapes their understanding of what comprises ...
Published: Jul 20, 2020
Authors should consider this article when deciding whether to share preprints via Open Access (OA) repositories, such as CrimRxiv. “Preprints” are papers that have not been accepted for publication; once accepted, they are “postprints.” As I explain below, making preprints OA ...
Published: Jul 02, 2020
This article describes and explains a legal solution to embargo problems: (1) the inability to freely and publicly share your written works (2) in a way that is reasonably discoverable by search engines. It is best to avoid the dilemma by publishing in diamond, gold, or ...
Published: Jun 06, 2020
Police mobilization is a first step in the judicial process and an important source of information on offending. Whether victims mobilize police is affected by their assessment of its utility. Victims who are criminals, such as drug dealers, are known to face a different ...
Published: May 10, 2020
Fellow Criminologists: We can make our written works free to everyone, with only a little extra effort. Too much of what we write is behind publisher paywalls. The current system is socially unjust and irrational. It hampers the spread of scholarship’s benefits, costing more ...
Published: May 04, 2020
This article is meant to minimize your time, effort, and uncertainty in determining copyright at criminology journals. This is crucial to legally make your articles free to everyone; that is, Open Access (OA). I describe four ways to determine copyright. All have ...
Published: Nov 01, 2019
Despite a wealth of empirical exploration on neutralization theory, several aspects of the theory remain underexplored. For instance, one task of neutralization research is to investigate whether and how neutralizations vary with offender characteristics. A second ...
Published: Oct 10, 2019
At a park in downtown Atlanta, there is an area about the size of a boxing ring where people gather to play chess. Surrounded by low perching walls with flower boxes on top, there are four picnic-style tables with inlay chessboards. Across the street are restaurants, coffee ...
Published: Dec 21, 2018
Offenders and nonoffenders possess valuable information about crime. But which possesses the best data? This is a complex issue, so I narrow my focus to data on empirical aspects of criminal events. Drawing on the necessary conditions perspective, I theorize that a source’s ...
Published: Dec 11, 2018
This article examines qualitative data obtained from 66 Black college students about perceptions of their interactions with municipal police (MP) and campus police (CP). Participants described MP and CP as acting severely, but only attributed racial bias to MP. This finding ...
Published: Jul 20, 2017
Published: Jul 01, 2017
Criminology not only draws on the perspective of many disciplines, but also of many subjects. In this article, we focus on active offender perspective research, or AOPR. We begin by describing classic studies of offender-based research with both active and inactive offenders. ...
Published: Apr 16, 2017
Qualitative, field-based studies of police tend not to rely on random sampling, but, instead, navigate a well-trodden path to cases. The first step is gaining a supervising officer's (SO) consent to study their department, and the last step is convincing patrol officers (POs) ...
Published: Jan 31, 2017
Criminals’ tattoos have many meanings. A limitation of prior research is that these meanings have not been organized into an elegant yet exhaustive typology that is theoretically informed. To address that gap, this article analyzes “Russian criminal tattoos” in light of ...
Published: Oct 29, 2016
There is a disproportionate focus on pain over pleasure in policy-relevant research on drugs. This is unfortunate because theories of and findings on drug-involved pleasure can be used to inform knowledge of drug-involved pain. The cross-fertilization of theories and findings ...
Published: Oct 25, 2016
Statistics show that blacks are subjected to disproportionately more policing than whites, and more often interpret their encounters with police as affected by racial discrimination. The ethnographic evidence supports the numbers, but this body of work, I suggest, has been ...
Published: Aug 28, 2016
Criminals have a firsthand perspective on why and how to commit crime. In this chapter, we outline and illustrate five ways that offender-based research can be used to inform understanding of crime prevention, more specifically situational crime prevention: namely (1) by ...
Published: May 19, 2016
To reduce individual and social harms, most nations prohibit certain psychoactive drugs. Yet, prior scholarship has suggested that prohibition reduces illicit drug sellers’ access to law and thereby increases predation against and retaliation by them. No prior ...
Published: Jan 01, 2016
Our inquiry focuses on why some violent offenses but not others result in injury to the victim. Building on existing theory nested in the paradigm of pure sociology, we propose and test a general principle of conflict: Victim injury varies directly with social distance. This ...
Published: Oct 14, 2015
This article examines the utility of a novel tool for conducting offender-based research: the “eye-tracking device” (ETD), which is designed to identify what a person sees in the center of his or her vision. First, we review prior research using the ETD. Second, we detail the ...
Published: Oct 14, 2015
According to a rational choice theory of crime location choice, offenders commit crimes at locations where the mix of expected rewards and costs is optimal. The present study applied this general theory to a very specific crime—illicit drug dealing in an open air drug market ...
Published: Sep 26, 2015
This chapter presents a review of the legal and cultural path that marijuana has taken through the twentieth century and into the twenty‐first. From the ripple effect of early US criminalization, the start of global marijuana prohibition will begin to unfold under the ...
Published: Sep 13, 2015
What factors do police officers point to in explaining offending and victimization? A limited amount of prior research has addressed this question, despite the possibility that such theories impact police practice. Moreover, the findings that do exist are based solely on ...
Published: Jul 01, 2015
This chapter explores the following questions: Why has quantitative research achieved dominance in American criminology, and what implications does this have for the future of qualitative criminological research? It outlines the ways in which quantitative criminology's ...
Published: Jun 08, 2015
Amsterdam has many lively spots, including Leidseplein, Rembrandtplein, and an area that locals call de Wallen. Foreigners know it as the Red Light District. The sex trade gives this area its name but it is also a hot spot to procure drugs, having been called everything from ...
Published: Mar 01, 2015
Criminologists have a long history of interviewing those engaged in illegal behaviors to gain insights into the nature of crime and criminality (Bennett, 1981). Ethnographic interviews give offenders the opportunity to explain their offenses and lifestyles from their own ...
Published: Jan 01, 2015
This article explores the crucial role played by criminal expertise in carjacking, a violent street offense that exhibits characteristics of both car theft and robbery. Specifically, it describes the manner in which an offender's perceptual skills (aimed at discerning the ...
Published: Dec 09, 2014
Although criminals are known to put on a façade of normalcy while offending, no study has categorized the various ways they do so in a theoretically informed manner. We address this gap in the literature by drawing on Goffman’s notion of body gloss to explore how shoplifters ...
Published: Oct 07, 2014
Drug consumption and addiction are known to increase the incidence of violent and property crimes. For this reason, governments prohibit the trade in some psychoactive substances and vigorously enforce the law. The unfortunate consequence of this governmental control is ...
Published: Jul 01, 2014
Illicit drug sellers have limited access to formal mediation and therefore are rational targets to predators. As such, dealers are especially reliant on retaliation to deter victimization. Prior scholarship on dealers, retaliation, and deterrence has focused largely on ...
Published: Mar 01, 2014
Drug dealers are infamous for overcharging customers and handing over less than owed. One reason rip-offs frequently occur is blackmarket participants have limited access to formal means of dispute resolution and, as such, are attractive prey. Yet drug dealers do not cheat ...
Published: Jan 20, 2014
Qualitative research is published in criminology journals at a frequency far smaller than that of quantitative research. The question is ‘Why?' After reviewing existing theories of the discrepancy, this article draws on the paradigm of Blackian sociology, Jacques and ...
Published: Nov 26, 2013
When addressing affect, studies of criminal decision making have tended to focus on a limited number of negative emotions such as shame, regret and guilt. Instead of being felt at the time decision of whether or not to commit crime, these emotions actually regard expectations ...
Published: Oct 22, 2013
Laub and Sampson's age-graded theory of social control posits that the greater is a person's agency, the less that person commits crime. But agency has a dark side as well. Some people choose to offend in order to transform their life; when this happens, agency is a ...
Published: Sep 09, 2013
College and alcohol are a potent mix. This paper reviews what is known and unknown about college students’ involvement in alcohol-related crime as both offenders and victims. There are three types of alcohol-related crime: psychopharmacological; economic compulsive; and ...
Published: Aug 08, 2013
Restrictive deterrence is the process whereby offenders limit the frequency, magnitude, or seriousness of their offenses to avoid pain. Prior research on drug dealing and restrictive deterrence largely focuses on the effect of formal control, or political sanction. Bentham, ...
Published: Mar 01, 2013
Alcohol is connected to crime in two broad ways. One is alcohol crime, which refers to prohibited acts of substance consumption, possession, distribution (buying, selling, or giving), and manufacturing (e.g., brewing one’s own supply). Examples include underage drinking, ...
Published: Jan 27, 2013
Illicit drug traders are more likely to be victimized because they cannot report crimes committed against them to the police. Their inability to access law is seen as a major precipitating factor in retaliatory violence. But, as we demonstrate, sometimes victimized drug ...
Published: Jan 01, 2013
During the course of being victimized, why do people sometimes fight back with their fists, in other cases with a knife or blunt object, and at other times a firearm? One theory is that the weapons involved in self-defense, also known as reflexive retaliation, become less ...
Published: Dec 28, 2012
High rates of violence are characteristic of many urban drug markets because the individuals therein abide by a set of informal rules known as the code of the street. This code governs interpersonal conduct that emerges from the social circumstances found in various ...
Published: Sep 07, 2012
There are a number of ways that victims of violence informally handle attacks as they unfold. Their responses range in severity from physical resistance, to talking it out with the offender, to running away, to cooperating. Why do victims respond in a more or less severe ...
Published: Oct 19, 2011
The aim of this article is to describe and explain the development of drug user groups in the UK and elsewhere by drawing on a case study of one of the earliest drug user association formed in England in 1983, known as the Drug Dependents’ Association. By way of context, a ...
Published: Aug 08, 2011
Antidrug legislation and enforcement are meant to reduce the trade in illegal drugs by increasing their price. Yet the unintended consequence is an increase in informal control—including retaliation, negotiation, avoidance, and toleration—among drug users and dealers. Little ...
Published: May 11, 2011
Irony is a kind of communication in which shared knowledge about a particular context is formed as a counter-intuitive statement with hidden meaning. Irony is important because it branches the tree of knowledge and balances morality. This paper reviews the definition and ...
Published: May 09, 2011
Law-abiding citizens are concerned with deterring and preventing crime. One strategy to accomplish this goal is to increase the costs and reduce the benefits that particular situations present to offenders. This form of crime control is known as situational crime prevention. ...
Published: Mar 11, 2011
The past quarter century has witnessed the emergence of a rich methodological literature devoted to various ways of tapping into the offender’s perspective on crime. Whatever its virtues, that literature has remained almost wholly atheoretical. We recently introduced a ...
Published: Dec 01, 2010
Active offender research contributes to criminology, but a major concern for active offender researchers is that they will be victimized in the course of their work. With that concern in mind, experienced criminologists have recommended strategies for minimizing danger during ...
Published: Dec 01, 2010
Foreign fieldwork often comes with vast cultural differences between the researcher and participants. Such differences have implications for the success and findings of research. In this paper, we draw on our experiences doing fieldwork abroad to propose a theory of method. ...
Published: Nov 04, 2010
The transfer of drugs from one person to another does not always involve a fair sale. Gifts and frauds are also common. Although the rationality perspective has dominated and made important contributions to the study of drug transfer, this article proposes a new theory of ...
Published: Oct 15, 2010
Three paradigms can be used to explain weapon lethality: rational choice and deterrence theory; social learning and cultural theory; and opportunity and prevalence theory. Each makes distinct predictions regarding the economic, psychological, and environmental factors that ...
Published: Jul 13, 2010
Enlightenment is the use of resolve, courage, and intellect to think for one’s self. Not everyone reaches enlightenment, but bringing students to this cognitive destination should be the goal of teachers. This raises the question: How do you teach enlightenment? One answer is ...
Published: Jul 01, 2010
Sir Francis Bacon believed “the true and lawful goal of the sciences is not other than this: that human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers.” The goal of pure science is to understand behavior, while the goal of applied science is to control behavior. ...
Published: Mar 01, 2010
No one would disagree that scientific research has been unethical—even criminal—at times. Institutional review boards (IRBs) play a fundamental role in protecting people from unethical criminological research. At the same time, IRBs, as social entities, are subject to a wide ...
Published: Feb 03, 2010
The law discriminates against low status offenders, but so too might criminologists during the course of their research. In this paper, we address the following question: Does the social status of lawbreakers have an effect on their likelihood of being recruited to ...
Published: Apr 30, 2009
Research provides strong support for the theory that drug market participants are often involved in violent retaliation because they lack access to formal mediation. Yet retaliation is not always violent. The existing drug market literature offers few counts, estimates, or ...
Published: Dec 01, 2008
The life histories of drug dealers suggest that victimizations sometimes mark turning points toward the end of criminal careers, which is a criminologically important but neglected empirical connection that we label the “victimization–termination link.” We theorize this link ...
Published: Feb 01, 2008
The past quarter century has witnessed the emergence of a substantial literature devoted to the mechanics of recruiting, paying, and interviewing currently-active offenders. Absent from that literature, however, is a theoretical framework within which to understand, test, ...
Published: Feb 01, 2008
Goldstein's concept of systemic violence has contributed substantially to criminological thought and research, but its power can be enhanced by connecting it to a broader typology of social life: the resource exchange—social control typology. That typology ...
Note: Three papers on my CV are not listed above because I am unsure which files are their preprints and postprints: “Crime in Motion” (in On Retaliation); “Consequences of Expected and Observed Victim Resistance for Offender Violence During Robbery Events” (in The Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency); and, “25 Years of Crime and Social Control” (in Criminology Theory). Also, I wrote guides for editors and self-publishers that are only on COADO’s website.
Websites
Published: May 18, 2020
I moved The Oral History of Criminology Project from its original website to a new one.
