This article focuses attention on “official graffiti” or regulatory signs typified by highway signs and the most invasive and emblematic piece of official graffiti, the prohibition circle with its diagonal red slash used in the iconic representation No Smoking. Establishing the range and pervasiveness of official graffiti in everyday life (as prohibitions, warnings, advisories, instructions, etc.), the authors approach these visual manifestations from the standpoint of the sociology of governance and analyze them as important instances of government at a distance. They explore the varieties and forms of such regulation and trace their expansion from public space to quasi-public space and to the private realm. Locating the texts and icons of official graffiti within implied or express discursive frameworks, the authors point to the construction of objects and subjects of regulation and to regulatory agents as “absent experts” and address the key role of the construction of danger and the link to insurance principles in a “risk society.” They also examine resistance through actions of defacement and avoidance that result in the complex order and disorder of surfaces and spaces. Official graffiti manifests a distinctive form of hegemony that is exercised through the small, daily acts of everyday governance.

The authors set out two key hypotheses. To address these hypotheses, (1) that inmates (deviants) reject the rules of the conventional order and (2) that they consciously do so as part of a subcultural group, the authors examine offenders' ideals about sanctions for rule breaking. The prison culture literature emphasizes the existence, most prevalent in custodial-oriented institutions, of an inmate subculture characterized by opposition and solidarity. These generalizations are primarily sustained by examining inmates' conformity with staff rules and expectations. This leaves open the question whether this solidary opposition and rejection of conventional norms extends beyond prison walls to broader societal norms regulating deviance. To measure the overall pattern and the relative importance of legally relevant and irrelevant criteria, the researchers obtained responses from a random sample of incarcerated offenders to vignettes describing criminal acts and other potential determinants of sanctions. Neither hypothesis was supported. Inmate sanctioning ideals most nearly resemble, in quality and quantity, those that they individually attribute to the contemporary judiciary. Yet most inmates believe that the other inmates, in contrast with themselves, would reject a coherent system of legal sanctions. The authors discuss the implications of the resulting (collectively self-contradictory) myth of inmate lawlessness.

A citizen's judgment of wrongdoing in an organizational setting may depend on characteristics of the citizen, of the accused, or both. In 1993, random sample surveys exploring judgment of corporate wrongdoing were carried out in Washington, DC (N = 602), Tokyo, Japan (N = 600), and Moscow, Russia (N = 597). Respondents heard hypothetical vignettes about wrongdoing in organizations and were asked to judge the actor's responsibility and related issues; they also provided demographic information and recounted their attitudes toward corporations. Education was more powerfully related than social class to responsibility judgments. In the United States, education's effects on responsibility were indirect, operating through attitudes toward obedience and toward corporate accountability. Russian and Japanese results were unmediated by attitudes. It appears that responsibility is primarily a function of sociolegal factors (such as aspects of the case) and secondarily a function of social characteristics and the sense of similarity or difference they engender. The article concludes by discussing general issues in accountability within corporate settings across cultures.

We specify and test a rational choice model of corporate crime. This model includes measures of the perceived costs and benefits of corporate crime (for both the firm and the individual), perceptions of shame, persons' assessment of the opprobrium of the act, and contextual characteristics of the organization. Consistent with this model, we find that intentions to commit four types of corporate crime are affected by sanction threats (formal and informal), moral evaluations, and organizational factors. Net of the various incentives and disincentives for corporate crime, persons' personal moral code was found to be a very important source of inhibition. In fact, when moral inhibitions were high, considerations of the cost and benefit of corporate crime were virtually superfluous. When moral inhibitions were weak, however, persons were deterred by threats of formal and informal sanctions and by organizational context. We contend that theoretical models of corporate crime and public policy efforts must contain both instrumental (threats of punishment) and deontological (appeals to morality) factors.

This essay examines the restructuring of policing currently taking place in developed democratic societies. It argues that restructuring is occurring under private as well as government auspices and will have profound effects on public safety, equity, human rights, and accountability. These effects are discussed, along with the trade-offs they represent for public policy. The driving forces behind restructuring are fear of crime, the inability of government to satisfy society's longing for security, the commodification of security, the rise of mass private property, and cultural individualism. The essay concludes with a prediction about the future of policing and suggests policies that are needed to avoid restructuring's harmful effects.

We discuss capriciousness in decisions to charge homicide defendants with capital crimes. We propose using Shannon Information to assess capriciousness in a charging system and apply Shannon Information to analyze new data from San Francisco County, California. We show that about two-thirds of the potential systemic capriciousness is removed by the explanatory variables available. The one-third remaining is dependent on inherently unstable features of charging practices that necessarily produce capriciousness.