An international competition was held in 2019 in conjunction with the 19th World Congress of Criminology. It was co-sponsored by the Education for Justice (E4J) Programme of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the International Society of Criminology. Ten papers were selected as winners by an international jury. Their authors received financial support to attend, be recognized and present their work at the Congress. This editorial piece presents details about the competition and the winning papers.

An international competition for best papers authored by young criminologists for presentation at the XIX World Congress of Criminology was held in 2019 sponsored by the Education for Justice initiative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the International Society of Criminology. This preface addresses the priorities and objectives of the Education for Justice initiative and places the competition within that framework.

Mainstream criminology has been mainly developed in the US and other English-speaking countries. With an expansion of criminology outside the English-speaking world, several scholars have started to cast doubts on the applicability of current mainstream criminology in their regions because it has failed to account for cultural differences. This question has led to a call for an “indigenized” criminology, in which knowledge and discourses are derived from or fixed to align with unique cultural contexts in each region. In this vein, Liu (2009, 2016, 2017a, 2017b) has proposed Asian Criminology. While it has significantly contributed to the development of criminology in Asia, we see two challenges in Liu’s Asian Criminology: lack of consideration for cultural diversity within Asia and its focus on the individualism–collectivism continuum. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to developing criminology in Asia, which we call culture-inclusive criminology. It builds on a premise that Asia consists of a variety of cultural zones, and therefore calls for a shift from the Euro-American view on culture towards an understanding of culture in its context. Its goal is to develop indigenized criminologies in each cultural zone of Asia under an umbrella of culture-inclusive criminology.

Substance use in adolescence relates to other problems such as involvement in violence and mental/physical health problems. This study aimed to identify substance use patterns in a considerable sample of Brazilian adolescents and to estimate the magnitude of the relationship between each pattern and violence involvement indicators, as aggressor and/or as victim, and of mental and general health. The data analyzed were collected from 6702 schoolchildren, within the scope of the National Survey of School Health, employing latent class analysis for reports of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and crack cocaine use. The five groups identified were compared regarding their involvement in violence and mental and general health aspects. Abstainers (18%) would neither make use of substances, nor be involved in violence or display health problems. Drinkers (26%) would tend to only make use of alcohol, but would not display the other problems either. Conventional Drug Users (28%) would tend to make use of alcohol and tobacco or alcohol and marijuana and would also be involved in violence, but would not display health problems. Polysubstance Users (23%) would tend to make use of alcohol, tobacco and marijuana and would be more frequently involved in violence. Hard Drug Users (5%) would tend to make frequent use of all substances in addition to also being more involved in violence, both as aggressor and victim, and would display mental/general health problems. Our findings reveal different levels of problems and reinforce the importance of varied prevention/treatment policies in order to meet specific demands.

Analyzing 1268 stratified random samples from one of the biggest cities in China’s Pearl River Delta with the zero-inflated Poisson model, this study identifies the factors associated with the onset and severity of spousal violence by males and females separately under the social exchange perspective. The results indicate that spousal violence follows gender symmetry in migrant families, and violence against men is mainly reflected in psychological violence. The new pattern of “cradle snatching” makes men fully protected in family relationships. However, women’s education level and economic independence do not represent a protective factor against violence from husbands. Patriarchal cognition is deeply rooted in migrant families, even though the family pattern has been changed and women’s status has improved in China. Young couples should contribute to the family according to their own abilities, and should not make either one feel wronged.

Social re-entry in the criminal justice system cannot be avoided since virtually all prisoners are released sooner or later. These initiatives are the outcome of a restorative justice approach which aims to reduce future offences by bringing back offenders to normal life by rehabilitation and restoration. Prisoners’ lives in prisons were very difficult in the Indian context till the last decade. Different rehabilitative approaches have been introduced inside prisons but, after release, the number of social re-entry initiatives is much less. The released face many psycho-social and economic issues which may destroy a person’s ability to adjust with the services provided. The national prison policy of India recommends aftercare services for the rehabilitation of released prisoners. The labelling and social stigma due to the crime hinders prisoners’ ability to re-enter society after release. In this context, the present paper explored the issues and challenges faced by the released prisoners during their social re-entry and came up with rehabilitative initiatives for a better restoration process in the Indian context.

The narrative-based approach acts as the only tool capable of creating and assigning a meaning to individual life stories, linking individuals to their actions. The use of narrative as a reference frame for understanding the motive of the crime therefore offers an innovative perspective into criminology and its forensic application. Through the stories of the criminals and the victims, of society, and the world of justice as a whole, doing narrative criminology means listening to and accurately analysing criminal life stories to shed some light and meaning on the obscure elements of reality that from time to time take shape as a violent act. After a review of the most recent literature in the criminological narrative area, the present work analyses the role of the criminologist as an expert who provides an essential contribution during investigation and trial phases. Moreover, the work proposes the use of a narrative approach and the contribution of a narrative criminologist in two different moments of the criminal procedure: during the investigation phase, through a preventive methodological narrative training of forensic experts, with emphasis on team work, and in the trial phase through the use of criminological interviews to assess criminal liability and dangerousness.

What is the purpose of our study? Being written on a social–psychological level, general strain theory (GST) has been tested among adolescent populations. However, what has been very rarely analysed is the response to strain by different types of offenders and diverse populations. This study is even more valuable if we mention that until the beginning of our research, GST or any other criminological theory had not been tested on any population in the Republic of North Macedonia. Why study an incarcerated population? This population has neglected needs, inhumane living conditions, overcrowded penitentiary institutions, high levels of recidivism and poor use of alternative measures. The experience of incarcerated women is generally less known compared with those of incarcerated men; they have a low level of participation in the total number of crimes in the country, and there is a lack of criminological research on female criminality in general. The data collected focused on the influence of strain and negative emotions on the level of criminality. The results should help us to answer whether strain leads to negative emotions; then does strain influence female criminality and its level; and do negative emotions intermediate in between strain and the level of criminality?

The connection between social identity and attitudes toward the criminal justice system (CJS) is an area of interest among criminologists and legitimacy scholars. Previous work has proposed a social identity theory of legitimation, positing that individuals categorize CJS officials as either in-group (i.e. legitimate authority) or out-group (i.e. illegitimate enforcer). Subsequently, how individuals perceive their CJS – including the sincerity of its commitment to the rule of law – is tied to this relationship. Those viewing the government as an out-group oppressor are less likely to accept its legitimacy. This article explores this thesis. From the perspective of system justification theory, how the CJS is categorized should depend on how strongly an individual identifies as belonging to a group disadvantaged by the CJS. System justification theorists hypothesize that system justification (including acceptance of system legitimacy) is more likely when members of disadvantaged groups believe that group interests are less important. Alternative models that explain attitudes toward the system by using social identity theory suggest the opposite: Those who identify more strongly with disadvantaged groups and hold their interests to be more important nonetheless justify oppositional systems and view them legitimately. The present study uses a sample of Black Americans (a disadvantaged group in the American CJS) to determine whether group identification predicts system justification.

The problem of identity theft is current all over the world. Nowadays we can even observe a tendency for an increasing occurrence of this kind of behaviour. The rapid development of new communication tools and the Internet has made it easier to commit a crime of identity theft than ever before. Despite this seemingly obvious trend in the world, in Poland since 2011, when this phenomenon was criminalized, convictions for identity theft are still one of the rarest situations. Identity theft as a proportion of general identified offences in 2017, according to Police statistics, was only .30%. The paper will present selected legal aspects of identity theft from the Polish Criminal Code, as well as criminological analysis of the phenomenon in Poland. The results of research on identity theft conducted in the District Court in Białystok on court files that ended in a final court judgment covering the years 2011–2016 will also be presented. In the course of the research process, seven cases were found and examined. The analysis was enabled by using a questionnaire, which included forty-nine questions grouped into categories, i.e. characteristics of the perpetrator of the crime, characteristics of the victim, description of the committed act, as well as the course of the pre-trial and judicial proceedings. In the paper, an attempt will be made to find an answer to the question of why the dark number of identity theft crimes in Poland is still great, and this will help characterize identity theft in the area of Białystok.

Fear of crime has been the focus of fruitful criminological investigation for the last 50 years. Simultaneously, the literature related to intimate partner violence has also been developing. Empirical studies have neglected the association between fear of crime and violence committed in private spaces, so this research seeks to provide an integrated approach to these concepts. Using the data from the first Brazilian National Victimization Survey, this research aims to explore how fear of violence in intimate relationships is associated with both individual and macro-contextual variables, in an ecological framework as proposed by Heise. Statistical analyses were conducted by aggregating data, and the analytical model integrated both individual- and macro-level variables and took the fear of intimate partner violence as the outcome variable. The results demonstrate a strong association between the fear of intimate partner violence and the individual-level predictors tested, especially previous victimization as well as social inequality (Gini coefficient). This way, results indicate that fear of crime manifests its predictors far beyond what the dyad “victim–aggressor” may suggest.

South African cash-in-transit (CIT) robberies appear to be in a state of flux. According to the Minister of Police, Mr Bheki Cele, the incidence of these crimes has steadily decreased due to rapid response by the police in arresting more than 200 suspects between June and November 2018. Given the rhizomatic, eclectic nature of this crime type – and possible mechanical linkages and/or linear causality within the genesis of the crime – it is debatable whether arrests and incarceration offer a long-term solution. CIT robbers interviewed for this study reported that they were career criminals, less likely to be rehabilitated and that incarceration was only an interruption to their career. These findings were backed by life-course theories. This article contends that if the South African Criminal Justice System wants to curb CIT robberies, an investigation into proactive methods for combating the crime should be developed and risk reduction strategies crafted. After investigating possible causes of CIT robberies, this research made recommendations based on holistic measures involving the public, family, and various government and non-governmental departments. The research was conducted for a Master of Arts degree in Criminology. A mixed-method approach was followed and 40 incarcerated offenders who committed robbery with aggravating circumstances participated in the study.