Braithwaite's reintegrative shaming theory argues that communitarian societies tend to put heavy emphasis on group obligations and mutual trust, and to rely on normative mechanisms to control people's behavior.  Thus, these types of societies are more likely to use shame both as specific deterrence and general deterrence. On the other hand, those societies that tend to emphasize individualism are more likely to depend on stigmatizing, instrumental conditioning mechanisms to control undesirable behavior. However, those societies that are preoccupied with instrumental conditioning mechanisms are likely to experience more crime.  We test Braithwaite's theory in two culturally diverse societies - China and the U.S.  Our findings show some supporting evidence for the theory.

This paper summarizes the results of a participant observation study conducted in Hong Kong, and aims to understand the role of the police in post-caution supervision of juvenile delinquents. After being discharged under the Police Superintendents' Discretion Scheme (PSDS), "at risk" juveniles are diverted to the Juvenile Protection Section (JPS) of the Hong Kong Police Force. The aim of the JPS is to ensure that the juvenile does not lapse into crime or associate with undesirable characters. This analysis is based on participant observation of post caution visits with 14 youth, conducted by 3 JPS officers working in Kowloon West Regional Headquarters. During the visits, JPS officers discussed academic or work affairs with the juveniles, and at the same time, tried to reinforce their authority to prevent further involvement in crime. Moreover, the visits aimed to give advice and information to the youth and their parents to help them manage family life. The dominant philosophy behind the practice of post-caution visits conducted by the JPS is "disciplinary welfare" (Gray 1994). The JPS officers regarded the youths' involvement in delinquency as behavioral problems caused by a breakdown of social bonds with his/her family and school. With this breakdown, the juvenile has a higher chance of associating with deviant peers and becoming involved in criminal behavior. Consequently, JPS officers deal with cautioned youth by trying to help resolve problems and conflicts, and thereby, re-establish their social bonds with family and school. This "welfare approach" is also coupled with officers' "disciplinary" method which aims to involve greater regulation of the young person's behavior and lifestyle.

According to police statistics, many new towns in Hong Kong suffer a high degree of delinquency problems in the recent years.  The situation raises public concern about the occurrence and clustering of juvenile crimes especially in the context of public housing in the new towns, such as Tuen Mun.  Tuen Mun is one of the districts with the highest juvenile arrest rate this decade, and it has been receiving a great deal of attention from different social control agencies.  This paper examines the relationship between the high concentration of juvenile delinquency and the specific environmental features in Tuen Mun; it focuses on analyzing the data obtained from the participant observation of the teenage street playgroups or "gangs" in one of the public housing estates in Tuen Mun, Shan King Estate.  Theories of environmental criminology are employed to explain how the disorganized community characteristics and the problematic design of public housing contribute to the breakdown of social control and cultivate a delinquent subculture within Shan King Estate.

This paper examines the management of law and order functions. Law and order management is defined as the lawful administrative measured adopted by state police departments to maintain law and order in society. Its' objective is to ensure peace and public safety without disturbance. It plays an important role in the prevention and control of criminal activities. Law and order management involves a variety of work and priorities. This discussion focuses on three aspects of work: 1) Firearms control, especially the increase in control of dangerous goods to prevent violent criminal activities; 2) Rental housing management, including tightening up the management of mobile populations to prevent crime committed by migrants; and 3) Entertainment establishment management, such as strengthening the management of various entertainment establishments to crack down on illegal activities like prostitution, gambling, and the trafficking and abuse of drugs.

In Taiwan, street crimes are a primary concern among most criminologists. However, in recent years, crimes committed by corporations have increased greatly in this country. The harm created by corporate crime includes tremendous economic and physical costs. Ironically, corporate crime did not attract enough academic attention in this country. This research is the first empirical study concerning corporate crime in Taiwan.  Sponsored by National Science Council of Taiwan, this research used the empirical approach to collect data about causal factors of corporate crime in Taiwan. Interviews and a questionnaire survey were employed as the main data-collecting methods. The research sample was selected from a corporation that had a criminal record. The sample consisted of 34 employees including 12 managers and 22 low-level employees for interview and 300 employees for questionnaire survey. This corporation released toxic chemicals and caused hundreds of people including employees and neighborhood residents to get cancer. According to qualitative and quantitative data analysis, this research indicated the causal factors of corporate crime as: the failure of government regulation; the lack of self-regulation in corporation; the lack of public concern about corporate crime; the mechanistic structure of corporation; and the low self-control tendency of corporation managers.

Under Portuguese rule, gaming has been legalized in Macau since 1937 and this small former Asian colony has become known worldwide as the "Monte Carlo of the Orient".  Macau like Nevada has, "... built government around the gaming industry" (Zendaian 1993:13). Since 1988 more than 30% of government tax revenue is collected from the monopoly operator of the casinos, The Societe de Tourisimo de Macao (STDM), so that Macau may be said to be a Casino State.  This paper focuses on both the macro and the micro aspects of gambling and crime.  At the macro level, the formal legislation governing the gambling industry is analyzed and compared with practice in Macau casinos. Here the focus is upon who defines the law in Macau and in whose interest does the law serve. Through an examination of the role of the government and legislation in regulating the gambling industry, the question of whether the state is regulatory or permissive is discussed. The 'laws' on gambling are said to create or leave loopholes for Hong Kong and Macau triad involvement in the casinos, especially through the "bater ficha" business based on non-transferable chips. Although the idea or term "bater ficha" does not exist in the laws of Macau, the police monitor this practice. It is hypothesized that changes in casino management combined with cronyism are the main reason for the evolution of the "bater ficha" business. The function of triads and the role of violence in the casinos, especially in the "bater ficha" business are described. In this context the potential for capture and corruption of the regulators by elements of the gambling industry are also assessed. The complex relationship between the government, the STDM and the triads is undergoing rapid change in response to the change in sovereignty and the demand for more effective economic, legislative and regulative approaches in managing the gambling industry when the STDM's exclusive franchise expires in 2001. Critical theories are applied to explain the relationship between the gambling industry, the government and the triads.

The basic assumption in this research is that without men; there is no culture, and conversely, without culture, there are no men. The aim of this paper is to bridge the gap between the individual and sociological perspectives in criminological analysis, by advancing a cultural approach to the study of corruption. The paper presents a model for examining culture at different levels and its suitability in criminological study. Corruption offenses in Hong Kong and Japan are compared from the cultural perspective to determine whether culture is a dominant factor in the crime process - in its influence on encouraging or discouraging the deviant behavior of corruption, in how societies' treat corruption offenders and in promoting the attitudes and perception of it in the public, and in shaping the societal reaction to it.

(Abstract not available)

In contrast to the case of England and Wales and the United States, the rehabilitation model of probation within its inherent social work values remains the dominant approach to the supervision of offenders in the community in Hong Kong.  The primary aim of this paper is to explore the impact of the one-year probation sentence on 115 adult offenders aged from 18 to 35 and their perceptions of it.  My study uniquely uses offenders' first hand accounts of their experience, given in answers to questionnaires and semi-structured interviews, alongside a consideration of the reports of the probation officers.  While a few offenders pointed out the 'meaninglessness' of probation supervision, a majority tended to see probation as a means of reducing the risk of reoffending and restoring family relationships.  Bivariate and multivatiate analyses showed that in addition to probation variables, socio-economic and criminal history variables are closely related with the self-reported reoffending as a measure of outcome.  Finally a model is proposed to understand probation outcome amongst the Chinese offenders.

The news media select news in accordance with its "newsworthiness," a notion that includes public interest and profitability. Crime news always ranks high in terms of "newsworthiness" regardless of its prevalence. Homicide, as one of the most violent but rare crimes, is always a newsworthy event. In the past ten years, Hong Kong newspapers appear to devote more space and investigative activity on these cases, especially those that evoke "dramatic" and "tragic" images. Such cases are now reported in immense detail to give a full "story" and account for such lapses in moral virtue. In the last decade, around two thirds of the victims of the female homicide offenders are intimate family members. The offenders' own children and their husbands/lovers are most at risk. It is not difficult to "learn" the "story" and "know" the "killer" from the extensive newspaper reports due to the nature of these kinds of cases. The main aim of this paper is to describe how the newspaper depicts female homicide offenders and address two interrelated questions: how do reporters portray the homicide "story" and construct women offenders as deserving or undeserving victims, insane or evil (traitors to femininity) and; how much do newspapers reconstruct and (mis) represent the female subject compared to the primary investigative accounts? A concern here is to trace the effects of gender bias in the construction of homicide and the impact of this construction on attitudes toward female homicide offenders.

Many local academics and practitioners have drawn on the deterministic perspectives of control and subcultural theories as the basis for understanding adolescent drug use in Hong Kong. However, working experience with drug offenders suggested that traditional explanations were weak, in particular against their peers who went through the same era, but desisted from abusing drugs. Based on the criminal career orientation, I conceptualized a drug career model as an alternative to traditional explanations. Based on ethnographic data collected from three distinctive adolescent drug using peer cliques over a two year period, it became clear that the career model could not fully account for the onset, continuation, specialization, desistance, sometimes even the pathing of a drug trajectory. Alternatively, a lifestyle perspective based on the interactional model appeared to be more applicable in generating a better understanding as to how these youth perceive drug use, and a range of other contemporary behavioural patterns covering possibly sex, work, friendship, gangs, etc. In light of the preliminary findings of the study, the paper considers whether the career model or the lifestyle perspective is more parsimonious in understanding adolescent drug use in Hong Kong. Of course, as a practitioner, the choice will bring along corresponding strategies in addressing the problems of youth drug use.

This paper applies modernization theory to interpret trends in various kinds of crime in China over the 20-year period between 1978 and 1998.  The paper begins with a detailed description of patterns of crime in China, paying particular attention to the historical events that are likely to have affected both criminal offending and the recording of crime in the official statistics.  The paper then performs time series analyses on Chinese crime data to determine whether the recent economic reforms have had similar or different effects on selected types of property and violent offenses.

The limited effectiveness of the criminal justice system in crime control has long been recognized since the 1960s in the West and contributed to the initiation of various strategies of community crime prevention in order to better engage the public in the war against crime. In China, a country known for its legacy of collectivism and citizens mutual surveillance, a similarly inspired crime prevention program "Building Little Safe and Civilized Communities" [BLSCC] was launched in the early 1990s in the wake of the escalating crime problem associated with the reform era. This paper presents a study of the BLSCC in two communities in Shenzhen, one of the earliest Special Economic Zones in China characterized by rapid economic and population growth and soaring crime rates. This paper reviews various community crime prevention initiatives in the West and based on official documents and interviews with key persons, provides an account of the BLSCC program in Shenzhen. The results of a citizens survey of the perceptions of crime in both a 'model' and transitional Shenzhen community are used to explore differences between the two communities in terms of the social interactions between residents, the perception of crime and security in the communities, and their evaluation of the effectiveness of the BLSCC. The significance of the findings are discussed in relation to the viability of community approaches to crime control and perceptions of public and individual safety in a rapidly developing urban environment.

The pivotal position of anomie in Durkheim and Merton theory is unchallenged, but its operationalization of this concept has made little progress.  Using a measure of anomie developed recently, the current study will attempt to compare the different levels of anomie found in the two very different societies.  Data are from the random samples in China and the United States in the 1991 World Value Survey.  Furthermore, the regression analysis will reveal the social determinants of anomie in the two nations.  The results will shed empirical light on Merton's anomie theory as applied to the countries under study.  It is hoped that this comparison will stimulate interest in this area of study.

In the early days of the People's Republic of China, authorities spent merely three years to eradicate opium and drug problems that had placed China for over a century. The Chinese government performed a well-known miracle with mandatory rehabilitation for at least 200 million drug addictions at the time. Unfortunately, resurgent drug use has surfaced since the end of the 1970s, causing serious problems to the country. Under new circumstances, authorities continue to explore revolutionary solution ranging from anti-drug campaigns to drug addiction treatment projects. With the introduction of more diversified and scientific treatment methods, rehabilitation methods have matured and become successful. Most notably, the campaign "Building a Community without Drugs" was launched recently, playing an important role in reinforcing rehabilitation effects and drug addiction prevention, and providing timely prevention and treatment of relapse.

This paper examines change in the character of organizational priorities across the three core functions of American policing--crime control, order maintenance, service provision--in an era of community policing. Relying upon a panel data from national surveys of 200+ municipal police departments conducted in 1993 and again in 1996, the goal is to analyze the nature of contemporary organizational change in policing.  Two competing perspectives--those of contingency theory and institutional theory are tested for their ability to account for survey findings. The primary findings indicate that police priorities have remained largely unchanged during this period. Rather than representing a systematic adaptation to a changing environment, COP would seem to represent for many police agencies a method of strategic buffering of a largely unaltered core police operation reflective of the professional model.