G. Westlake, B., & Bouchard, M. (2016). Criminal careers in cyberspace: Examining website failure within child exploitation networks. Justice Quarterly, 33(7), 1154-1181.
Publicly accessible, illegal, websites represents an additional challenge for control agencies, but also an opportunity for researchers to monitor, in real-time, changes in criminal careers. Using a repeated measures design, we examine evolution in the networks that form around child exploitation (CE) websites, over a period of sixty weeks, and determine which criminal career dimensions...
Kreager, D. A., Schaefer, D. R., Bouchard, M., Haynie, D. L., Wakefield, S., Young, J., & Zajac, G. (2016). Toward a criminology of inmate networks. Justice Quarterly, 33(6), 1000-1028.
The mid-twentieth century witnessed a surge of American prison ethnographies focused on inmate society and the social structures that guide inmate life. Ironically, this literature virtually froze in the 1980s just as the country entered a period of unprecedented prison expansion, and has only recently begun to thaw. In this manuscript, we develop a rationale...
Barratt, M. J., Potter, G. R., Wouters, M., Wilkins, C., Werse, B., Perälä, J., Pederson, M. M., Nyugen, H., Malm, A., Lenton, S., Korf, D., Klein, A., Heyde, J., Hakkarai, P., Asmussen, V., Tom, F., Decorte, T., Bouchard, M., & Blok, T. (2015). Lessons from conducting trans-national Internet-mediated participatory research with hidden populations of cannabis cultivators. International Journal of Drug Policy, 26(3), 238-249.
Background: Internet-mediated research methods are increasingly used to access hidden populations. The International Cannabis Cultivation Questionnaire (ICCQ) is an online survey designed to facilitate international comparisons into the relatively under-researched but increasingly significant phenomenon of domestic cannabis cultivation. The Global Cannabis Cultivation Research Consortium has used the ICCQ to survey over 6000 cannabis cultivators across 11...
Gallupe, O., Bouchard, M., & Davies, G. (2015). Delinquent displays and social status among adolescents. Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 57(4), 439-474.
Adolescents with high social status are more important than others in determining the delinquent involvement of the peer group. Yet relatively little is known about how delinquency and analogous acts and traits affect social status. We examine whether adolescents who display a capacity for delinquency enjoy greater social status (popularity/centrality). Two models of delinquency display...
Gallupe, O., Bouchard, M. (2015). The influence of positional and experienced social benefits on the relationship between peers and alcohol use. Rationality and Society, 27, 40-69.
An assumption of peer influence research is that being connected to an alcohol-using peer group is associated with personal alcohol use. However, most research assesses peer influence through simply counting the number of peers involved in a particular behavior or the amount of that behavior within a person’s peer group. Rarely considered is the fact...
Potter, G., Barrat, M., Malm, A., Bouchard, M. et al. (2015). Global patterns of domestic cannabis cultivation: a comparison of sample characteristics and patterns of growing across eleven countries. International Journal of Drug Policy, 26, 226-237.
This article aims to provide an overview of: demographic characteristics; experiences with growing cannabis; methods and scale of growing operations; reasons for growing; personal use of cannabis and other drugs; participation in cannabis and other drug markets; contacts with the criminal justice system for respondents to an online survey about cannabis cultivation drawn from eleven...
Bouchard, M., & Lussier, P. (2015). Estimating the size of the sexual aggressor population. In A. A. Blokland and P. Lussier (Eds.), Sex Offenders: A Criminal Career Approach (pp. 351-372). Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons.
Several key parameters were introduced by criminal career researchers to better understand the longitudinal sequence of offenses committed by individuals. Two of the four key parameters defined and described by criminal career researchers are: participation and frequency. Criminal career researchers posited that participation and frequency are two distinct phenomena that may be driven by different...
Amirault, J., & Bouchard, M. (2015). A group-based recidivist sentencing premium? The role of context and cohort effects in the sentencing of terrorist offenders. International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice, 43(4), 512-534.
Despite recent interest in terrorism little is known about the sentencing of terrorist offenders, and the impact of cohort effects on the sentencing patterns of offenders over the course of a terrorist campaign remains virtually unexplored. The ‘recidivist sentencing premium’ states that offenders who continually engage in criminal activities should be sanctioned more harshly as...
Barratt, M. J., Potter, G., Bouchard, M., Blok, T., Christensen, A., Decorte, T., Frank, V., Hakkarainen, P., Klein, A., Lenton, S., Malm, A.E., Perala, J., Werse, B. and Wouters, M. (2015). Trans-national internet-mediated participatory research with hidden populations: Lessons from the ICCQ. International Journal of Drug Policy, 26, 238-249.
Internet-mediated research methods are increasingly used to access hidden populations. The International Cannabis Cultivation Questionnaire (ICCQ) is an online survey designed to facilitate international comparisons into the relatively under-researched but increasingly significant phenomenon of domestic cannabis cultivation. The Global Cannabis Cultivation Research Consortium has used the ICCQ to survey over 6000 cannabis cultivators across 11...
Nguyen, H., Malm, A., Bouchard, M. (2015). Production, perception, and punishment: Restrictive deterrence in the context of cannabis cultivation. International Journal of Drug Policy, 26, 267-276.
American authorities have invested extraordinary resources to keep up with the growth in cannabis cultivation, and state-level cannabis laws have been changing rapidly. Despite these changes, little research on the relationship between criminal justice sanctions and grower behaviours exist, in particular research that examines restrictive deterrence - the altering of an illegal behaviour as opposed...
McCuish, E. C., Bouchard, M., & Corrado, R. (2015). The search for suitable homicide co-offenders among gang members. Journal of contemporary criminal justice, 31(3), 319-336.
Little is known about homicide co-offending networks at the individual gang member level. Of particular interest is whether and to what degree gang members who are selected to participate in murder are different from those who are not. The current study constructed the co-offense network of 18 participants from the Incarcerated Serious and Violent Young...
Bouchard, M. (2014). Outils et méthodes pour la construction et l’analyse des réseaux illicites sur Internet. Revue Internationale de Criminologie et de Police Technique et Scientifique, 67, 317-337.
On sait maintenant que l’arrivée du Web a complètement changé la donne en ce qui concerne l’exploitation des jeunes à des fins sexuelles, alors que pédophiles et autres amateurs de pornographie juvénile profitent désormais de la toile pour consommer, distribuer, échanger du matériel. Ils profitent également de ces réseaux virtuels pour «socialiser» avec d’autres qui...
Athey, N., Bouchard, M., Decorte, T., Frank, V., Hakkarainen, P. (2013). Cannabis Cultivation and Detection: A Comparative Study of Belgium, Finland, and Denmark. Drugs: Education, Prevention, Policy, 20, 203-215.
Research on cannabis cultivation has identified several factors associated with a grower's likelihood of detection by law enforcement. However, these studies are difficult to compare, as they drew from different data sources and methods, and have focused on only one geographical location. This article revisits the issue of detection using a large sample of cannabis...
Athey, N., Bouchard, M. (2013). The BALCO scandal: The social structure of a steroid distribution network. Global Crime, 14, 217-237.
The current study revisits the notorious Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) scandal involving the production and distribution of an undetectable anabolic-androgenic steroid to professional athletes from late 1990s until 2003. Multiple sources are reviewed to re-create the social structure of BALCO and examine whether it formed a close-knit community or instead multiple communities defined around...
Bouchard, M., Amirault, J. (2013). Advances in research on illicit networks. Global Crime, 14, 119-122.
This paper introduces the contributions included in the special issue of ‘Advances in Research on Illicit Networks’. It situates the collection of papers in the growing trend of studies applying network methods to illicit networks. Link to full text on Global Crime
Nguyen, H., Bouchard, M. (2013). Need, connections, or competence? Criminal achievement among adolescent offenders. Justice Quarterly, 30, 44-83.
Variations in criminal performance have been much less explored than other parameters of criminal careers. We explore the factors associated with differential criminal achievement in a sample of 154 adolescent offenders involved in cannabis cultivation. Drawing from theories of earnings attainment, we examine the role of drug use, criminal social capital and criminal human capital...
Bouchard, M., Beauregard, E., Kalacska, M. (2013). Journey to grow: Linking process to outcome in target site selection for cannabis cultivation. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 50, 33-52.
The objective of this study was to test whether there is a relationship between characteristics of the journey to an outdoor cannabis cultivation site and the total number of plants grown. Spatial data on the location of a sample of 132 cultivation sites derived from aerial detection policing efforts is used. TwoStep cluster analysis is...
Gallupe, O., Bouchard, M. (2013). Adolescent parties and substance use: A situational approach to peer influence. Journal of Criminal Justice, 41, 162-171.
This study takes a situational approach to testing criminogenic peer influence effects on substance use by examining audience characteristics at the last two parties that adolescents attended. We examine the applicability of situational approaches to social learning theory and symbolic interactionist perspectives on criminogenic peer group effects.We found that higher levels of substance use are...
Bouchard, M. (2013). Merging Computing and Crime Science: The Development of a Web-Crawling Tool to Investigate Cybercrime. Translational Criminology, 15-21.
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Gravel, J., Bouchard, M., Descormiers, K., Wong, J., Morselli, C. (2013). Keeping promises: Logic models, and the design of a new classification of gang control strategies. Journal of Criminal Justice, 41, 228-242.
We argue that inadequate frameworks to compare similar gang control strategies, and the scarcity of well-designed evaluations have hindered our ability to determine the effectiveness of existing programs. This article proposes a new typology of gang control strategies to use with logic models as tools to improve gang program evaluation. Link to full text on...