Crime and Punishment in Asia

Abstract

The dominance of Western models of crime and criminal justice and the nascent emergence of “borderless” criminological insights precipitated by forces of globalization and transnationalization raises serious questions about their universal applicability to explain crime across time and space. Amidst the dearth of criminological work on Asia, this introduction to the Special Issue on “Crime and Punishment in Asia” commits itself to developing and honing the frontiers of an “Asian criminology” by drawing scholarly attention to the empirical and contextual specificities of the region. Such an effort is not directed towards demarcating “Asia” as a socially and culturally distinct geopolitical entity from the “West”. Rather, it is to critically reflect upon the alleged and actual variances between Asian and Western societies including the broader differences in social orientation – collectivism vs individualism and duty-based moral obligations vs rights-based beliefs respectively as well as documenting the heterogeneity and particularities within Asia. To that end, crime in South Asian and Southeast Asian contexts and political and economic changes which have given rise to novel “strains” of crime and newer criminal opportunities, remain under theorized. Ultimately, the advancement of an Asian criminological discourse in this special issue is not to merely acknowledge scholarly attempts that transpose current Anglo-Saxon models onto Asian empirical contexts or reject them, but transform existing theories and develop regional alternatives that are validated by and arise from particular empirical investigations into crime and criminal justice across Asia.

The impact of road safety policies in a deregulated alcohol tax environment in Hong Kong: a 15‐year time series analysis

“…Kong is a relatively heavily policed territory: the police to population ratio are more than double that of comparable developed economies in Asia and elsewhere such as Singapore, Japan, United States, England and Wales [38]. Asian criminology is a developing field in contrast to Western (or Global North) criminology [39,40]; although there is a popular belief that the East Asian societies in China, Japan and South Korea are characterized by social harmony, collectivism and Confucian ethics [41] and are more risk averse [42,43], which may explain the immediate effects have greater effects where there are more vehicles per capita or higher consumption of alcohol [45].…”

Towards Culture-Inclusive Criminology in Asia

“…Despite the word, Asia, Liu (Liu et al 2017b(Liu et al , 2017c acknowledged that his scope is limited to Eastern Asia, particularly China because, as Liu mentioned (Liu et al 2017b(Liu et al , 2017c, there is a scarcity of literature in other Asian regions. Existing criminological knowledge (at least in English-written literature) is significantly skewed to the Eastern Asian region (Ganapathy and Balachandran 2016;Suzuki et al 2018).…”

Introduction: Punishment in global peripheries

“…But there are also emerging efforts that refer to wider peripheral regions, usually built on collaborative relationships between different authors, and often taking shape as special issues in academic journals and edited collections. For example, there have been several such efforts on penality in Latin America (Bergman and Fondevilla, 2021; Darke and Garces, 2017; Darke et al, 2021; Hathazy and Muller, 2016; Sozzo, 2022), Africa (Alexander and Kynoch, 2011; Braatz et al, 2022; Morelle et al, 2021) and Asia (Ganapathy and Balachandran, 2016; Lee and Karen, 2013).…”