By Indra de Soysa

Democracy and the level of economic development correlate tightly. While some argue that egalitarian conditions inherent in democracies reduce homicide, others suggest that it is economic development that matters. This study evaluates competing theory and tests the democracy—homicide link using homicide data defined as death due to interpersonal violence and novel data on a variety of democracies. The results show that democracies associate positively with homicide, and egalitarian democracy shows the strongest effect. The level of economic development is negative on homicide and substantively large. The basic results are robust to alternative data, estimating method, and to omitted variables bias.

The British Journal of Criminology, 2024, 22 p.

By Mary Louise Frampton, Ian Haney Lopez, and Jonathan Simon

Since the 1970s, Americans have witnessed a pyrrhic war on crime, with sobering numbers at once chilling and cautionary. Our imprisoned population has increased five-fold, with a commensurate spike in fiscal costs that many now see as unsupportable into the future. As American society confronts a multitude of new challenges ranging from terrorism to the disappearance of middle-class jobs to global warming, the war on crime may be up for reconsideration for the first time in a generation or more. Relatively low crime rates indicate that the public mood may be swinging toward declaring victory and moving on.
However, to declare that the war is over is dangerous and inaccurate, and After the War on Crime reveals that the impact of this war reaches far beyond statistics; simply moving on is impossible. The war has been most devastating to those affected by increased rates and longer terms of incarceration, but its reach has also reshaped a sweeping range of social institutions, including law enforcement, politics, schooling, healthcare, and social welfare. The war has also profoundly altered conceptions of race and community.
It is time to consider the tasks reconstruction must tackle. To do so requires first a critical assessment of how this war has remade our society, and then creative thinking about how government, foundations, communities, and activists should respond. After the War on Crime accelerates this reassessment with original essays by a diverse, interdisciplinary group of scholars as well as policy professionals and community activists. The volume's immediate goal is to spark a fresh conversation about the war on crime and its consequences; its long-term aspiration is to develop a clear understanding of how we got here and of where we should go.

New York; London: NYU Press, 2008.256p

by Stephanie Brewer and Ana Lucia Verduzco

Mexico’s federal government is increasingly militarizing civilian tasks within and outside the realm of public security. Previous presidents presented militarization as a temporary measure that would allow time to strengthen civilian institutions—though in practice, military deployment became the permanent model, largely at the expense of prioritizing other security and justice strategies and institutions. The current government, however, promotes a broad militarization of civilian tasks in the long term, including through the militarization of the National Guard. The power and roles of the armed forces are growing without effective civilian controls over their actions. While the levels of serious human rights violations attributed to the military have fallen following the end of former president Felipe Calderón’s term, such violations continue to occur. More broadly, Mexico continues to experience historic levels of violence, and the vast majority of crimes go unpunished. Without minimizing positive reforms and steps forward, access to justice remains a fundamental challenge. In this context, it is crucial to improve criminal investigations and strengthen the capacities and accountability of the country’s police institutions. The military’s growing list of civilian tasks is a trend that will not be easily reversed, but demilitarizing public security and consolidating civilian institutions is the necessary route to strengthen the rule of law. In the meantime, the government must install effective civilian controls over the armed forces.

Mexico: WOLA- Adovcacy for Human Rights in Mexico, 2023, 61p.

By Ken Opala

Despite the August 2022 elections proceeding relatively smoothly, there is still a clear nexus between politics and crime in the country.

Election violence remains a major problem in Kenya despite attempts by the state and other actors to tackle it. Ahead of the country’s fifth general election, held on 9 August 2022, state agencies, the media and civil society predicted the re-emergence of gangs and militias keen to influence its outcome. Although the elections went off relatively smoothly there is still a clear nexus between politics and crime.

ENACT-Africa, 2023. 24p.

By Christopher Hernandez-Roy and Rubi Bledsoe

A journalist recently made an apt joke about living under President Daniel Ortega’s dictatorship: “Hi, I am from Nicaragua, and I represent your future. I am living what you will be experiencing soon enough: harassment, persecution, and threats to your lives and imprisonment,” he said to a group of Northern Triangle colleagues by way of introduction. This anecdote recalls Charles Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in his 1843 novella A Christmas Tale, where the ghost portends the demise of Ebenezer Scrooge. In this context, it portends the death of democracy in the Northern Triangle, and the dire effects of democratic backsliding. Up until very recently, the conditions in Nicaragua were starkly different from its neighbors. The Ortega regime is a dictatorship that persecutes and detains opponents at will and with complete impunity. Nicaragua’s Northern Triangle neighbors have been democracies, even if imperfect ones. However, in 2019, the election of Nayib Bukele as president of El Salvador marked the beginning of a stark shift in the anti-crime strategy of the country and a turn toward authoritarian tendencies. The new leader opted to suspend constitutional guarantees and engage in mass incarceration in order to fight crime and gang violence, setting off alarm bells across the region, as concerns grew over democratic backsliding. The self-identified “coolest dictator in the world,” used his background in marketing and social media branding to propel an extreme version of mano dura, or “zero tolerance,” to fight crime. Three years later, Honduras and other countries have taken notice of the appeal of these tactics and are now replicating it, or considering it, in whole or in part. This is a slippery slope for the region and a precedent that poses a great danger to the hemisphere’s democracies.   

Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2023. 12p.

By Matthew Simonson, Matthew Lacombe, Jon Green, and James Druckman

The last decade has given rise to substantial concern about democratic backsliding in the U.S. Manifestations include decreased trust in government, conspiratorial beliefs, contentious protests, and support for political violence. Surprisingly, prior work has not explored how these attitudes and behaviors relate to gun-buying, an action that provides people with the means to challenge the state. The researchers address this topic by focusing on individuals who took part in the unprecedented gun buying surge during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a survey with over 50,000 respondents, they find that— relative to other Americans—pandemic gun buyers are more likely to distrust government, believe in conspiracies, protest, and support political violence. Moreover, the authors find that gun buyers who hold anti-government views and attend protests are especially likely to say they bought guns for political reasons. The researchers’ findings highlight a crucial dynamic underlying the recent spike in gun sales with consequences for American democracy.

Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, Institute for Policy Research, 2022. 62p.