v4

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Caribbean Journal of Criminology Volume 4

Edited by Corin Bailey PhD.

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Editorial Board

Corin Bailey PhD

Professor of Sociology, Social Inequality and Crime Director, Centre for Criminal Justice and Security,
The University of the West Indies.

Tarik Weekes MSc
Research Fellow, Centre for Criminal Justice and Security

Shazeeda Ali PhD
Professor and Dean
Faculty of Law
The University of the West Indies, Mona

 

Richard R. Bennett PhD
Professor and Department Chair
Department of Justice, Law & Criminology
American University


Christopher Birkbeck PhD
Professor
University of Salford, Manchester

 

Benjamin Bowling PhD
Professor
King’s College, London, England


John B. Braithwaite PhD
Professor
Australian National University
Regulatory Institutions Networks, College of Asia & the Pacific


Derek Chadee PhD
Professor
Department of Behavioural Sciences
University of the West Indies, St. Augustine

 

Marlyn Jones PhD
Professor
California State University, Sacramento


Janice Joseph PhD
Professor
Stockton University


Charles Katz PhD
Professor
School of Criminology and Criminal Justice
Arizona State University


Dacia Leslie PhD
Research Fellow
Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies The University of the West Indies, Mona


Ineke Marshall PhD
Professor
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Northeastern University


Slawomir Redo PhD
Visiting Lecturer
Faculty of Law
University of Vienna (Austria)


Randy Seepersad PhD
Lecturer and Coordinator of the Criminology Unit University of the West Indies, St. Augustine


Peter St Jean PhD
Associate Professor
North Park University, Chicago


Phillip Stenning PhD
Professor
School of Criminology and Criminal Justice
Griffith University

Introduction

The Caribbean Journal of Criminology (CJC) is a continuation of the Caribbean Journal of Criminology and Social Psychology (CJCSP) which was first published in 1996 and the Caribbean Journal of Criminology and Public Safety (CJCPS), published in 2008. This iteration of a journal for the advancement of criminology in the Caribbean is spearheaded by the UWI Institute of Criminal Justice and Security and the first Issue was published in April 2014. Since then, five Issues have been published. The journal welcomes papers focused on violence and crime perpetration, their con-trol and prevention and criminal justice systems. The CJC supports multi-disciplinary contributions in these areas and has been balancing articles with a theoretical or empirical bent. In the previous Issue, a farewell from the former Director of the Institute and Editor for CJC, Anthony Harriott was published. Harriott’s farewell outlined evolutionary changes associ-ated with the delivery of a journal concerned with the dissemination of research that sheds light on the pathways to a better understanding of crime and violence in the Caribbean. As the journal evolves in the next few years, the Editorship of the journal will be seeking to bring further innovations and developments that will benefit authors and our readers. These innovations will reflect movements in the wider operational prac-tice of journals and specifically criminology journals. One of these is the assignment of an impact factor to the journal and the other is the develop-ment of an Open Access facility which is already underway. Starting with the 2021 Issue, authors could pay an Article Processing Charge (APC) and have their article published open access after one year of publication date. It is expected that these innovations will expand the contributions into CJC by researchers studying crime in the Caribbean.

Articles

While numerous studies of bullying perpetration have been conducted across the world, relatively few studies have examined whether school climate towards bullying moderates the impact of low self-control on bullying. The purpose of this study was to test whether low self-control influences bullying perpetration at school; whether school climate towards bullying moderates the relationship between low self-control and bullying perpetration and whether gender differences would occur in this hypothesized relationship. This study utilized several regres-sion models with a total of 1,248 respondents (data from ten elementary schools in Port of Spain, Trinidad). The results indicated that low self-control, school climate towards bullying and gender had a significant influence on bullying perpetration in schools. In addition, school climate towards bullying moderated the effect of low self-control on bullying for male students but not for female students. The results suggest possible approaches for reducing bullying in schools in Trinidad.

Contemporary literature focused on the crime experience of individual Caribbean countries tends to focus exclusively on the region’s larger countries. To date, there is little academic literature dedicated solely to the crime experience of Antigua and Barbuda, any of the other countries comprising the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (the “OECS”) or Barbados. The data to which researchers gain access are often incomplete because, as is the case in Antigua and Barbuda, national criminal justice organizations in many of these countries do not collect crime data in a systematic or uniform manner over time, organizations are sometimes unwilling to divulge the data to non-governmental individuals, and the data collected are often not stored in a database that is conducive to easy extraction or manipulation. As a study focused exclusively on Antigua and Barbuda, this article contributes to the extant literature much needed longitudinal data on a country in the OECS and provides data that can facilitate evidence-based judgments and policy.

Book Review

The recently published monograph Gendered Responses to Male Offending in Barbados: Patriarchal Perceptions and Their Effect on Offender Treatment delimits the category of gender-based analysis relating to the study of crime in the Caribbean. Using, as the title suggests, the island of Barbados as his site of inquiry, researcher–scholar Professor Corin Bailey makes broader claims that address not only the motivation of male offenders but more critically situate systems of patriarchy as influential to decisions about punishment of male offenders who enter and move through the criminal justice system. Bailey’s work lies primarily at the intersection of criminology and gender studies as it examines “the role gender plays in various outcomes, such as offender perpetration and pun-ishment” (Bailey 2020: 5). However, it moves beyond the traditional scope of inquiry of male offenders to take up, as feminist scholars have in the past, the ways in which “variables such as perpetration, victimisa-tion, and sentencing/punishment can all reproduce and perpetuate” socially constructed gender stereotypes that have unequal outcomes for male offenders (Bailey 2020: 7). In other words, Bailey shifts the lens of gender towards male offenders to account for their understudied expe-rience of receiving harsher punishment than their female counterparts for similar offences. As such, in this study, Bailey presents masculinity and maleness as not just social identities but as critical categories to be engaged within discourses of criminological study in much the same way that femaleness has been. For Bailey, systems of patriarchy work to disenfranchise men of lower social standing in their encounters with the criminal justice system and result in disparate treatment compared to their female counterparts in terms of sentencing for similar criminal offenses. An intervention such as this should make this study of interest to scholars of criminology, gender, social inequality, race and poverty or any intersections thereof, and policymakers invested in criminal justice reform.