The Internationalization of Criminology? A Content Analysis of Presentations at American Society of Criminology Conferences

Abstract

This research uses a content analysis of the presentations at the American Society of Criminology conferences in the 1990s to examine the internationalization of American criminology. During this decade, developments external to the American Society of Criminology, as well as internal developments, suggested that the disciplines of criminology and criminal justice were becoming increasingly internationalized. Internationalization is desirable for a number of reasons: increasing the external validity of theory; increasing global “best practice” in criminal justice; and reducing pockets of impunity as crime becomes increasingly transnational. Content analyses of conference proceedings are rare in the literature but offer an alternative to content analyses of journals and textbooks. Abstracts were coded as to their international or comparative nature, the country affiliations of presenters, the topics covered, and panel format and their placement in the program. The findings reveal that despite some progress, criminology in the United States can still be said to be largely based on single country analyses and US‐centric in nature.

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Teresa García Villalón in data entry. This article was made possible in part due to a Research Assistance Fund award from the Office for the Advancement of Research of John Jay College of Criminal Justice. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable critique.

Notes

1. “At the March 2001 ACJS meeting, 7.1 percent of the panel sessions addressed comparative issues (18 of the 253 sessions). At the 2005 meetings in Boston, 9.5 percent of the sessions were so oriented (29 of the 306 sessions). At the ASC meetings in November 2001, 2.6 percent of the sessions dealt with comparative issues (11 of the 422 sessions), while 6.7 percent of the sessions in Denver in 2008 were comparative (28 of the 415 sessions). These data were collected from the programs of both organizations” (Bennett 2004:21).

2. After 1999, the American Society of Criminology ceased printing abstracts. They are available for one‐by‐one retrieval only on the ASC webpage, a practice which unfortunately discourages future content analyses.

3. The American Society of Criminology usually releases an addendum to the program with corrections and paper withdrawals on the first day of the conference. Such addenda were not taken into consideration for the coding of data for this research.

4. “The American Society of Criminology is an international organization concerned with criminology, embracing scholarly, scientific, and professional knowledge concerning the etiology, prevention, control, and treatment of crime and delinquency” (http://www.asc41.com).

5. It is also important to consider the case of research conducted by transplanted, bicultural criminologists. Examples would be Englishman Christopher Birkbeck's work on Venezuela in Venezuela, US‐born Elizabeth Stanko's work in the UK and US‐based Belgian Mathieu Deflem's work on international police collaboration. Unfortunately, the data in the ASC program do not permit me to include this nuance in the present research, since they do not report the national origin of presenters.

6. Emerging categories in international/comparative research are those of globalized research (Boyle and Preves 2000; Merry 2005) as well as supranational criminal justice and criminology (see http://www.supranationalcriminology.org).

7. I acknowledge that an author's affiliation is a crude measure of their national perspective. As mentioned previously in footnote 6, the more criminologists migrate, the less we can assume that a scholar affiliated with a certain country's university represents that country's national perspective. Furthermore, given the multicultural nature of many nations at present, it is hard to assume that indeed there exists such a thing as a national perspective. However, the data used offered no other means to measure the author's or authors' national origin or cultural perspective.

8. The American Society of Criminology conference last four days, starting on a Wednesday and ending on a Saturday. The time slots vary year to year. Specifically, for the years covered in this research, early morning “poor” time slots were those commencing on any day of the conference at 8:00 a.m. in 1991, 1995, and 1997, and 8:15 a.m. in 1999, and Saturday afternoon poor time slots were those commencing at 1:15 p.m. and 3:00 p.m. in 1991 and 1:30 p.m. in 1993.

9. The results in Figure 1 and Table A.1 are not exactly the same because some abstracts permitted coding only of the continent(s) under study, while others permitted a detailed coding of the country or countries under study.

10. The collapsed variables were created as follows: following the coding scheme in Table 1, Codes 3, 11, 10, 4, 5, and 12 constitute “Comparative” research: code 1 constitutes “US‐affiliated, US studied” research, and codes 6, 2, 8, 7, and 9 constitute “non‐US‐based, non comparative research.”

11. This finding is puzzling, given that the supposed difference between the two largest societies of criminology and criminal justice in the United States, the American Society of Criminology and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, is the emphasis on criminology versus criminal justice.

12. Poster sessions have since been introduced at American Society of Criminology conferences. They did not exist in the 1990s.

13. The International Center of the National Institute of Justice commissioned a study of transnational partnerships among criminal justice and criminology scholars. Similarly, the National Science Foundation funded the Law and Society Association to foster transnational partnerships, by incentivizing the creation of transnational research groups.