By Kees Koonings, Dirk Kruijt

Show moreSince the turn of the century more people in Latin America have been killed or otherwise afflicted by violence and insecurity than during the times of dictatorship, repressive regimes, guerrilla uprisings, and armed conflict (1960s–1990s). Latin America has turned into what is on average the most lethal region in the world in terms of homicide rates. The 2013 Regional Human Development Report (UNDP 2013, v) mentions that “in the last decade, more than one million people have died in Latin America and the Caribbean as a result of criminal violence”. In 2012, Latin America’s citizens represented only 8 percent of the world’s population; however, they produced around 37 percent of the world’s homicides in that year (Chioda, 2017, 1). Since then, regional statistics have not really improved.1 Formally at peace and formally democratic, one of the most salient aspects of this violence is that it is not explicitly directed at acquiring or defending state power. Rather, it is labelled ‘criminal’ or ‘social’ and includes not only everyday forms of direct violence and coercion but also institutional and symbolic forms of violence. These dimensions, in turn, rest upon a long history of social inequality, exclusion, and elite privileges that are often enveloped as structural violence. Except for drug-related violence corridors in Colombia, Central America and Mexico, Latin American violence is largely urban (Koonings & Kruijt, 2015). According to the Mexican NGO Seguridad, Justicia y Paz (2020), of the 10 most lethal cities of 300,000 inhabitants or more in the world in 2020, seven are Mexican. Of the 50 most lethal cities, 40 are Latin American or Caribbean: 17 are Mexican, 11 Brazilian, six Venezuelan, two Honduran, two Colombian, one Jamaican, and one Puerto Rican. Of the remaining cities, five are American and five SouthAfrican.2 What is behind these dismal statistics? After the disappearance of the dictatorships and the re-democratisation process in the course of the 1980s new and violent non-state actors emerged, not aiming at revolutionary political transformations like the former guerrilla groups but aspiring to become a ‘regular’ element with prestige and negotiating power in the economy and society. They operate in criminal, violent, clandestine or at least extra-legal ambiences. But they are not hidden or invisible. They vigorously put forth their claims to local, municipal, regional, and national involvement. They control larger or smaller territories or commercial corridors for smuggling, levy taxes on ‘their’ people, provide ‘protection’ by eliminating ‘adversaries’ (legal or illegal competitors) and try to establish an economy of uninterrupted profits and a society of continued legal impunity, replacing official rule of law by criminal justice and extra-legal order making. So, despite the apparent non-political nature of this system of violence, it does have farreaching repercussions for social life as well as for politics, governance, the law, and the state. In this contribution we seek to examine the implications of contemporary violence in Latin America for order making and governance. The article is developed as follows. As a starting point we combine two concepts, namely protracted hybrid conflict and criminal governance, to frame the paradox of violence in Latin America. This paradox rests on the proposition that chronic violence coincides with formally democratic states that are, in a conventional sense, not at war. We will then look briefly at the historical context of violence, state and hybrid order making in Latin America. Subsequently we will explore three specific and intersecting mechanisms of criminal governance in Latin America: state capture, layered micro-sovereignty, and statetransgression.

By Nazgol Ghandnoosh and Sabrina Pearce

The U.S. criminal legal system stands at a crossroads. The United States remains a world leader in incarceration, locking up its citizens at a far higher rate than any other industrialized nation.

Between 1972 and 2009, the number of people imprisoned grew nearly 700%, while crime rates declined dramatically after peaking in 1991. Imprisonment levels slowly scaled back, achieving a 25% decline between 2009 and 2021. Then, the prison population has resumed its growth, according to the most recently available data. The prison population grew in 2022 and in 2023, 39 states increased their prison populations.

The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to a seismic increase in the most serious crime, homicide, which has fortunately declined to pre-pandemic levels. By 2024, homicide rates were 49% lower than their peak level in 1991. Violent and property crime rates overall have reached historic lows: 2024’s violent crime rate was 53% lower than its peak-1991 level and the property crime rate was 66% lower.

While crime rates are at historic lows, Americans deserve greater levels of community safety. A growing number of elected officials at the local, state, and federal levels have moved to overturn successful criminal justice reforms and revert to the failed playbook of mass incarceration, while the federal government has cut funding for important crime-prevention programs. Instead, policymakers should respond to crime upticks with evidence-based responses, while correcting the counterproductive, costly, and cruel responses of the past.

Excessive reliance on imprisonment in the United States is ineffective at addressing crime, diverts resources from effective public safety investments, upends family stability, contributes to trauma, and disproportionately harms communities of color. A vast body of research has established that we can advance community safety while reducing prison admissions as well as scaling back sentences for both those entering prisons and those already there

By Jennifer Franks

The Department of Homeland Security's Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program gives agencies cybersecurity tools to strengthen the networks and systems they use to meet their missions.While the program has met two of its goals, it lacks sufficient guidance for managing network security and data protection. The program generally supports government-wide cybersecurity initiatives, but DHS's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency hasn't finalized all plans for how CDM can provide support. For example, the agency hasn't fully updated the program's cloud asset management guidance.

We recommended DHS address these issues

Washington, DC: U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2025. 46p.

By Graeme R. Newman

This essay critiques a study by Copes and Vieraitis regarding the "bounded rationality" of identity thieves, arguing that a focus on offender psychology and rationalizations is insufficient for developing effective crime reduction policies[cite: ]Newman contends that current criminal justice approaches rely too heavily on punishment and victim vindication, which, while politically satisfying, fail to reduce the prevalence of identity theft.

The author advances the following arguments regarding the development of effective policy:

* Policies based on the "deep psychology" of offenders or their denial of victims are largely fruitless because these rationalizations are often unconscious defense mechanisms. Instead of asking “why” offenders commit crimes, policy should focus on “how” they are accomplished.

* Newman distinguishes between crime mitigation (reducing damage to victims) and crime prevention (reducing the number of crimes)[cite:. While legislation and credit reporting agencies have improved mitigation efforts for victims, these measures do not address the root causes of the crime.

* Effective prevention must target the technological and business arrangements that create opportunities for theft. This involves shifting focus from the offender to the "significant players" (businesses) who can implement standard security procedures, such as the use of PINs for credit cards, to harden targets.

* The essay concludes that businesses often view fraud merely as a cost of doing business rather than a crime to be prevented[cite:. Therefore, the government must establish policies that compel businesses to accept responsibility for crime reduction and eliminate the opportunities they create through their products and services[cite.

Criminology and Public Policy Vol. 8. Issue 2.

By Arthur MacDonald.

The narrative in Volume 1 asks many pointed questions: What does it mean to be “abnormal”? Who decides? And how have these judgments shaped modern science, education, and criminal justice?

First published in 1893, Arthur MacDonald’s Abnormal Man is one of the earliest American attempts to systematically study human difference through the emerging tools of psychology, anthropology, and criminology. Drawing on international research—from European criminal anthropology to American child-study movements—MacDonald sought to classify the physical, mental, and moral traits considered “aberrant” in his era. His work reflects the hopes and anxieties of a society confronting rapid industrialization, immigration, social change, and new scientific approaches to crime and mental health.

To the modern reader, Abnormal Man reveals both the ambition and the pitfalls of nineteenth-century science. Its pages contain pioneering observations about child development, deviance, and social responsibility, alongside early theories—now discredited—about heredity, physiognomy, and race. What emerges is a vivid and sometimes unsettling portrait of a culture striving to understand human variation without the benefit of modern psychology or ethical safeguards.

The Read-Me.org edition Volume 1 presents Abnormal Man as both a historical artifact and a gateway to critical reflection. It illustrates how scientific thought evolves, how cultural bias can shape research, and how early debates about abnormality laid the groundwork for contemporary approaches to mental health, special education, criminology, and social policy. To make such work, much of it controversial then as it is today, minimally believable, requires extensive documentation. The voluminous Bibliography of Abnormal Man reproduced here in Volume 2, contains all that Macdnald referred to within his detailed exposition. To some, his arguments may seem unsupported, or lacking in evidence. But he left no stone untuned as this amazing bibliographical documentation of all relative contemporary research

A foundational text at the crossroads of science and society, Abnormal Man invites readers to explore the origins of modern debates about deviance, diversity, and the boundaries of the “normal.”

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2025. 240p.

By Matthew Bonn, Chelsea Cox, Marilou Gagnon. et al.

The International Guidelines on Human Rights and Drug Policy recommend that States commit to adopting a balanced, integrated, and human rights-based approach to drug policy through a set of foundational human rights principles, obligations arising from human rights standards, and obligations arising from the human rights of particular groups. Following two years of consultation with stakeholders, including people who use drugs, NGOs, legal and human rights experts, UN technical agencies and Member States, the Guidelines “do not invent new rights. Rather, they apply existing human rights law to the legal and policy context of drug control to maximise human rights protections, including in the interpretation and implementation of the drug control conventions.” In respect of the Guidelines and its obligations under UN human rights treaties, Canada must adopt stronger and more specific commitments for a human rights-based, people centered and public health approach.3 This approach must commit to the removal of criminal penalties for simple possession and a comprehensive health-based approach to drug regulation.

Ottawa, ONT: Royal Society of Canada, 2024. 52p.

By David Garland

This review situates the recent, radical challenges to American criminal justice—calls to end mass incarceration, defund the police, and dismantle systemic racism—within the broader social and economic arrangements that make the US system so distinctive and so problematic. It describes the social structures, institutions, and processes that give rise to America's extraordinary penal state—as well as to its extraordinarily high rates of homicide and social disorder—and considers what these portend for the prospect of radical change. It does so by locating American crime and punishment in the structural context of America's (always-already racialized) political economy—a distinctive set of social structures and institutional legacies that render the United States more violent, more disorderly, and more reliant on penal control than any other developed nation. Drawing on a broad range of social science research findings, it argues that this peculiar political economy—a form of capitalism and democratic governance forged on the anvils of slavery and racial segregation and rendered increasingly insecure and exclusionary in the decades following deindustrialization—generates high levels of social disorganization and criminal violence and predisposes state authorities to adopt penal control as the preferred policy response.

Annual Review of Criminology v. 6. 2023, 20pg