Editorial

Abstract

We are pleased to bring in this issue (Vol. 44, Iss.3) a key contribution by John Braithwaite, Crime as a cascade phenomenon, followed by three critical reflections and analysis of that work. Braithwaite, in this analytic sketch, noted that “war tends to cascade across space and time to further war, crime to further crime, war to crime, and crime to war.” Drawing data from South Asia, Braithwaite examines crime through a cascade lens to help us visualise how just as crime tends to cascade; peacemaking can cascade non-violence, and crime prevention. He argued that viewing crime through the cascade lens and with self-efficacy and collective efficacy working as catalysts of crime prevention “opens up fertile ways of imagining macrocriminology.” Drawing examples from success stories on gun control and drunk driving from Australian experiences, Braithwaite highlights the importance of explicitly linking individual offenders from evidence-based micro-criminology to a macro-criminology of cultural transformation. Braithwaite’s article has received three critical reviews and comments. Susan Karstedt’s essay On Wake-up calls and metaphors observed that cascade lens could motivate new directions in criminological research while cautioning its limitation for “its potential as organizing structure for testing important propositions.” She suggests that to advance the cascade concept from a metaphor to an analytical tool, it needs to be made operational and testable. She further observed that it is critical to identify the connections between the broader structural conditions such as poverty and concentrated disadvantage and micro-level decision making. Echoing in a similar vein, Ed McGarrell notes that Braithwaite’s work puts emphasis on “crime prevention with the hope that research and practice can build upon the notion Cascades to make more substantial and sustained crime prevention effects” and draws scholars’ attention to several issues that can be explored through cascade framework. Finally, Jay Kennedy highlights that the self-efficacy and collective efficacy that Braithwaite identifies as “mediums through which crime and crime prevention flow are important factors for the sustenance and proliferation of crime prevention cascades, particularly when those cascades include elements of reintegrative approaches to the destigmatisation of criminal histories.” He argues that viewing Crime and crime prevention through the cascade lens given the role collective efficacy plays to “create socially positive rather than exclusionary practices.” In this issue, we also bring you three other articles. The first of these is by Erik Alda and his colleagues, who examine perceived fairness in criminal courts in seven countries in the Caribbean. The findings suggest that a critical indicator of courts’ perceived fairness is the perceived fairness of the police. Additionally, they also find that involvement in one’s community and crime victimisation are important predictors of perceived fairness in courts. The second article by Jina Lee and Ksenia Petlakh examine adolescents’ progression from marijuana use to other drugs in adulthood among South Korean inmates. Using a propensity matching technique on a sample of 202 inmates, the authors find that youth who were marijuana users in their adolescence had a higher risk of progressing to harder drugs such as opiates, hallucinogens, and other stimulants in adulthood. However, they did not find support for such progression to use of crack/cocaine use. In the final piece, a research note, Robyn Holder compares data from specialised domestic violence courts in three countries and found that a high degree of dissimilarity in the processes and components of these courts raising concerns about cross-national comparisons. She suggests that the application of a standardised data grid in court sites can minimise data variation INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE AND APPLIED CRIMINAL JUSTICE 2020, VOL. 44, NO. 3, 135–136 https://doi.org/10.1080/01924036.2020.1794217