Scott Jacques

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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) ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

A Proposal to the Open Access DAO

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 ...

For KFG Commonplace's '5 Things to Think About'

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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,” ...

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 ...

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 ...

In the fall of 2020, I moved The Oral History of Criminology Project from its original website to a new one.