Over the past two decades around the world, people's social lives are increasingly occurring within online digital spaces. Throughout this transition, social media platforms have been struggling to govern an increasing number of complex social phenomena that have carried over from our offline world to these new social platforms, ranging from bullying and harassment to the sale of illicit goods. In their attempts to build out systems to govern these issues, many platforms have drawn inspiration from models borrowed from the offline world familiar to criminologists. In this review, we draw attention to the field of online trust and safety. We provide an overview of the ways platforms have developed tools and systems to govern the people, content, and interactions that take place on their platforms while also looking at the way the field itself has developed rapidly over the past few years. Lastly, we look at research that exposes opportunities for promising paths forward to govern these digital social spaces, highlighting the ways that criminology research can positively contribute toward building vital online communities.

Criminology is haunted by state-structured biases. We discuss five. (a) With the spatial boundaries and the binary deontology they use to count crime, governments draw researchers into an ecological fog and sometimes fallacy. (b) All legal systems encourage criminologists to promote untenable implications of socially stratified criminality. (c) To degrees that vary by time and place, the scope of criminological research is compromised by methodological nationalism. (d) State agencies use chronologies that repeatedly draw researchers away from examining the nonlinear temporalities that shape variations in criminal behavior. (e) State agencies produce data that facilitate explaining the why of crime, but scientific naturalism would first work out what is to be explained. We recommend a criminology that begins by describing causal contingencies in social life independent of governments’ labeling of crime.

US cities have recently increased the share of their budgets devoted to policing and decreased the share devoted to social services. However, a growing body of research demonstrates that social services can durably reduce crime, raising the question of whether spending more on police and less on social services reduces crime in the short term only to increase it in the long term. This review addresses this question by first recounting recent trends in municipal budgeting. Then, it summarizes the causal evidence for which local government functions best reduce crime, focusing on policing, education, employment, and housing. Research suggests that education spending efficiently and durably reduces crime with fewer negative externalities than policing but with longer delays. Evidence that housing and employment spending suppresses crime is promising but nascent. Finally, the review recommends turning renewed scholarly attention to government budgets and the root causes of crime trends.

We propose the concept of short-term mindsets as an alternative to self-control as envisioned in Gottfredson & Hirschi's self-control theory (SCT). We lay out a competing perspective, short-term mindsets theory (STMT), based on this novel concept. STMT assumes that short-term mindsets are partly rooted in enduring individual differences and in part develop in response to criminogenic environments, events, and experiences. STMT connects individual-level perspectives to sociogenic views by explaining how several risk factors of crime (e.g., negative parenting, delinquent peers, substance use) all impact on short-term mindsets. Exposure to one risk factor encourages short-term mindsets that, in turn, make exposure to other risk factors more likely, thereby increasing the likelihood of crime. We show that STMT enjoys stronger empirical support than SCT, better aligns with other theory, and can account for phenomena typically considered at odds with, or outside the purview of, SCT.

Born of sociology while absorbing ideas and scholarship from other specialties, criminology can legitimately tout its interdisciplinary bona fides. Yet within the field, integration and cross-pollination across subject areas is, far too often, absent. Concentrating on corporate crime and summarizing the literature across a variety of different domains, I demonstrate that criminology, as a discipline, benefits from knowledge generated by corporate crime scholarship and vice versa. I discuss why it is essential to build a multidisciplinary knowledge base that informs and draws from corporate crime scholarship while also addressing critical epistemological challenges and knowledge gaps that confound integrative efforts. I conclude with potential areas of synergy ranging from the theoretical (organizational life cycle/life course and decision-making in different contexts) to new/old forms of crime and crime control associated with the emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Throughout much of the United States, progressive chief prosecutors (PCPs) have campaigned for office by pledging to end mass incarceration and reduce disparities therein. In this review, we summarize the progressive prosecution movement and the evidence base concerning PCPs. We attribute the rising number of PCPs to a disjuncture between the criminal justice policy preferences of state-level policymakers and voters. Although voters, especially in urban areas, prefer reforms aimed at reducing excessive punitiveness and increasing fairness, state-level policymakers have been reluctant to enact such reforms. PCPs bridge this gap by using their authority to implement local reforms without altering state laws. We detail the number of PCPs leading prosecution in urban counties, examine their characteristics, discuss the controversies surrounding PCPs, and critically review the emerging body of evidence concerning the influence of PCPs on sanctioning and public safety.

This article considers the relationship between crime and governance in the peripheries of the Global North. It draws on examples from across the Global South to show how conceptualizations of crimes are impacted by history, politics, and socio-economic contexts and how crime is influenced by, and in turn influences, governance practices. The review centers on four arguments: Western ideologies and epistemologies are inadequate for conceptualizing the nexus between crime and governance in the Global South; understandings of crime must be informed by knowledge of contextual harmscapes; models of crime control and policing do not always capture the hybridity and plurality of everyday governing practices in the Global South; and crime dynamics intersect with governance structures to create complex challenges for state control. The review highlights the need for scholars and practitioners to adopt historically and contextually informed approaches to theorizing the governance of criminalized harms in the Global South.

Extreme risk protection orders (ERPOs) are designed to protect against firearm violence and are a relatively new policy tool in the United States. As of April 2024, 21 states and the District of Columbia have enacted ERPO laws. This article presents a systematic review of the literature concerning ERPO laws, their use, and their effectiveness. Four main domains are considered in relation to the literature landscape: (a) formulation and passage of ERPO laws, (b) legal analyses of ERPO laws, (c) ERPO implementation, and (d) evaluations of ERPO laws. Thirty-six articles met our inclusion criteria and were analyzed. This systematic review provides the existing evidence regarding ERPO implementation and effectiveness and carves a pathway forward for future research, policy, and practice.