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Violence is a powerful resource, and boxing is a legitimised version. This book aims to give the reader a powerful tale of legitimacy, and also a darker, more sinister version of illegitimate violence and the men that perpetrate it. I question common tropes that suggest boxing is a panacea for all social ills, and unpick the criminal justice responses to youth crime and the well- intended misgivings that boxing is the cure. Boxing is seen as a ‘male preserve’ (Dunning 1986), and policy makers and parents, as well as criminal justice agencies, believe that the structured disciplining environment of the gym is enough to combat criminogenic attitudes and violent behaviour. I dispel this myth.

Kris McPherson writes of his experience of imprisonment in Scotland, his life in crime and his struggle to leave both behind him. Assembling powerful arguments from his prison life and his studies with The Open University, McPherson provides compelling insights into what criminologists have started to call ‘desistance’. McPherson’s unique synthesis of scholarship and penal experience is an outstanding example of “making good with criminology”. It offers personal tribute and testimony to the influence of Scottish criminologist Fergus McNeill and his colleagues.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the concept of Climate Change Criminology. Climate Change Criminology rests upon the four pillars of crime and harm; global connectedness and ecological justice; causes and consequences; and power and interests. These are separate but inextricably linked domains of analysis, interpretation, and critique. Each area demands novel ways of thinking about the problem, employing methods and approaches that necessarily push the boundaries of contemporary criminological theory and the purview of modern criminal justice institutions. In several important respects, Climate Change Criminology parallels work which focuses on ‘social harm’ as a constitutive concept. What makes a social harm ‘social’ is the fact that it does not stem from natural causes; it is intrinsically caused by humans. Analysis and response to this is central to the project of Climate Change Criminology.

This chapter presents a variety of explanations and typologies relating to the crime–climate relationship. It is clear that there are many specific causes for particular kinds of crime, and that it is the immediate variables, persons, and contexts that shape what occurs, why, where, and how. It is also apparent that temperature and climate changes do have an impact on human behaviour, and these are related to broader structural factors such as global warming. Moreover, government policy and market responses to climate change become important variables in the rise of new crimes and the movement of criminal networks and individuals into domains that hitherto did not exist. The carbon emissions credit market, for example, is precisely such a phenomenon. For Climate Change Criminology, it is imperative to keep developing sustained analyses of climate-related crimes.

This concluding chapter summarises the main propositions and areas of concern for Climate Change Criminology. It also emphasises the role of criminologists as public intellectuals and political activists, and the necessity that there be stewards and guardians of the future. This translates into prioritising research, policy, and practice around climate change themes. For criminologists, this means that they need to go beyond parochial viewpoints and those perspectives that frame harm in terms of national or regional interests. Their loyalty has to be to the planet as a whole, rather than being bound by a narrow prescriptive patriotism based on nation. Ultimately, the endeavour of Climate Change Criminology should be to create the conditions for a future that is more forgiving and generous rather than exploitive of humans, environments, and animals.

Are there only crimes against humanity (Derrida, 2002)? Certainly not. And Wildlife Criminology aims to expose the range of crimes against non-humans that are overlooked, ignored, and hidden and argues for an expansion of the criminological gaze to include harms against wildlife. This chapter examines the future of wildlife criminology in relation to each of the chapter topics to demonstrate the wealth of research that is possible, which can challenge the exploitation and suffering that is a fundamental feature of many aspects of our societies. This chapter revisits wildlife as property, food (and other ‘products’), sport, reflectors of violence, and victims of human violence as well as their plight to achieve rights and justice. There is much more research and advocacy to be done to improve the lives of wildlife and the health of the planet, this chapter ends with thoughts on some of what can be done.

The youth’s narratives can add depth to many literatures, and chapter one reviews some of the core assumptions within the fields of youth violence, critical youth studies, and punishment in the juvenile justice system and schools. Chapter one also includes a brief review of the colonial history of Hawai‘i.

Having outlined the purpose of the book in Part I, in the last chapter, chapter 2 reviews existing US and British gang literature. This chapter breaks down the gang concept and analyse literature form three resulting perspectives: the environment; the structure; and activities. This allows aspects of the gang to be analysed while also accounting for a holistic picture as well. The chapter then looks to explain how research has gradually brought closer concepts of ‘the gang’ and ‘drug harms’ - in that drug distribution has become a central feature when conducting gang research. After reviewing gang research the chapter then provides a brief overview on organised crime literature. This explains how aspects of the gang, at all levels, has come to be tied to various aspects of organised crime terminology. As a consequence, such perceptions retain potentially net-widening and criminalising properties.

While chapter 2 outlined gang research in three main ways - context, structure, and literature – the discussion was largely situated within the wider US, European, and broader UK context. Yet Scottish gang literature was excluded. This chapter looks at gang research in the Scottish context more specifically and as such can essentially be broken into two parts. The first part of this chapter looks at Scottish gang literature in much the same format that the previous chapter explored gang research more broadly. This means looking at gang structure, activity and context. The second half of the chapter is dedicated to exploring in detail some of those reasons which have contributed to the stagnation of Scottish gang literature and how gangs are believed to be in the Scottish arena. This is explained by exploring several contributory factors, ranging from gang narratives, conducting gang research, socio-economic influences, amongst other reasons.

This chapter begins by detailing the theoretical, political, and research coordinates of a Critical Criminology that coalesced into an orthodox Marxist position in the course of the 1980s and 1990s. It then goes on to discuss the challenges now facing the field of Critical Criminology. It acknowledges from the outset that, globally, there are several critical criminological communities of identification and articulation and divergent thematic paths. To varying degrees they are antagonistic towards the conventional criminological complex. The chapter's primary geographical reference point is the UK as it is the geo-political context that has generated what is viewed to be the most forceful orthodox position.

In this chapter I examine the structural positioning of young men and how this translates into the appeal and desisting elements of boxing. Building upon criminological theories, I present arguments that elaborate on how the sport of boxing is appealing in its promotion of physical capital, money and peer admiration, and also how the logic of the gym reinforces the logic of the streets. In short, the lessons learnt and the masculine discourses inherent in the boxing gym reinforce the discourses of the streets, and the men who attend the gym are well versed in its translation. Seen in this light, the boxing gym merely acts as a site of incapacitation and is therefore not contributory to a process of desistance or cognitive transformation (Giordano 2002; Maruna 2001)

This chapter explores the categorization of the criminal of passion in the second half of the nineteenth century, in Italy. In this period, legal and medical scholars switched the focus of the criminological debate from the crime to the criminal, looking at the criminal of passion as a social and physiological being. The attempts of the Italian Positivist School and its critics to understand and define crime-of-passion perpetrators fostered and furthered the analysis of the physiology and psychology of human emotional phenomena, highlighting the complex link between the soma, the psyche, and emotions.

The chapter examines the causes of the formation of two different penological identities in Europe and the United States and their characteristics, focusing on the distinction between US pragmatism and European doctrinarism. It analyses the foundation of the International Union of Penal Law, the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, the International Prison and Penitentiary Congresses, and other congresses and publications to show how the peno-criminological reform movement was driven by a renewed interest in legal comparison. The chapter also investigates how penal reformers and criminologists such as Liszt, Saleilles, Cuche, Pound, Ferri, and other adherents to the Italian Positivist School made a different use of legal history to uphold and legitimize their new proposals.