By Horst Entorf and Hannes Spengler

According to the European Parliament, unemployment, social disintegration, the lack of an integrative policy, and the worsening of urban services and living conditions cause frustration and despair, especially among economically and socially disadvantaged groups, and constitute unfavourable conditions that might lead to delinquent behaviour. Furthermore increasing poverty and inequality are supposed to be crime-enhancing factors. Based on this view, the European Commission has put out to tender a research project titled "Development and validation of scientific indicators of the relationship between criminality, social cohesion and economic performance" which has been executed by ZEW during the period 1/12/1998 - 29/2/2000. The present publication provides the results obtained from this project. The study intends to contribute to a better understanding of the interactions between criminality, economic performance and social cohesion. We try to achieve this aim by evaluating the existing economic and criminological research (with a special focus on quantitative research) and by carrying out own empirical investigations on the basis of a panel consisting of national time series from the 15 EU member states, an international cross-section of nations and an unique set of regional panel data originating from eight EU member states. Our empirical results about causes of crime reveal the crime reducing potential of intact family values. A smaller number of divorces and earlier marriage significantly reduce delinquency. By the same token, less efficient child care as a consequence of lacking family cohesion might explain the crime enhancing effects found for increasing female labour force participation rates. Further evidence supporting the interdependence of crime and the labour market show up in significant parameter estimates for indicators of unemployment, fixed-term contracts and part-time working. Furthermore, we find that higher wealth is associated with higher property crime rates and more drug-related offences, and that in turn drug offences foster the incidence of property crime.

Mannheim: ZEW- Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research, 2000. 213p.

By Harald Dern, Roland Frönd, Ursula Straub, Jens Vick and Rainer Witt.

“The perpetrator isn’t from here!” This claim is an understandable defensive response exhibited by local people following a sexual homicide,1 particularly in cases involving a child victim. The contention is grounded more in belief than in knowledge, however, as very few of the perpetrators who are later identified travelled a great distance to the crime scene. One occasionally encounters this notion in police circles as well, and it often makes the process of identifying the perpetrator even more difficult. When cases of this kind remain unsolved, the investigating unit in charge frequently requests the appropriate operational case analysis unit to perform a case analysis.2 As a rule, such cases analyses include the development of an offender profile containing, to the extent possible, statements about the unidentified perpetrator’s probable age, prior criminal record and place or region of residence. These criteria within the offender profile are of utmost importance to local investigative authorities. On the basis of a combination of these criteria, which can be researched in databases, analysts can, for example, identify a group of potential suspects and/or establish a scale of priorities within a known group of suspects (keyword “profiling”).

Wiesbaden: Bundeskriminalamt , 2005. 101p.

By Cathy Haenlein and Vincent Opyene.

Uganda occupies a critical position as a logistics hub for transnational flows of illegally sourced wildlife. As a source, consolidation and transit country, it acts as a nexus state – a ‘one-stop shop’ for criminals looking to illegally buy and sell wildlife, launder the proceeds, and tie this in with other illicit activity, from trafficking in timber to drugs. In this context, illegal wildlife trade (IWT) in Uganda is highly lucrative for criminals. Yet, little is known about the associated money flows, despite strong momentum to address the finances of IWT at a global level. In parallel, little research has assessed Uganda’s record in disrupting these flows. While the country has taken tangible steps to target the finances of IWT, the effectiveness of its actions has not yet been analysed. Based on 35 semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, a rigorous review of open-source literature and analysis of confidential information, this paper assesses the relationship between IWT and illicit finance in Uganda and considers how effectively the country is responding to these threats. In doing so, the paper represents the most in-depth independent study of a single jurisdiction’s experience of and response to the finances of IWT to date.

London: Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, 2021. 54p.

By Karina Garcia.

Dominant scholarly approaches to drug trafficking violence (DTV) in Mexico generally explain its onset and escalation by focusing on one of four issues: a) the democratisation process in the 1990s and 2000s; b) the systemic corruption of the judicial and legislative institutions; c) a weak rule of law across the country; and d) the ‘war on drugs’ launched by former president Felipe Calderón (2006-2012). These approaches, however, fail to account for the discursive conditions that enable the perpetrators to engage in DTV. This thesis, therefore, proposes a new critical approach to our understanding of DTV by examining the life stories of thirty-three former narcos collected in Mexico between October 2014 and January 2015. Using a discourse analytical approach, I identify a set of meaning production regularities, uncovered through detailed interviews, which I conceptualise as narco discourse. In this discourse, informed by a neoliberal ethos, poverty is understood as a fixed condition, ‘poor people have no future’ and have ‘nothing to lose’. Under this logic, the ‘only’ way for them to enjoy life is to engage in illegal activities conceived as ‘la vida fácil’ [the easy life] which guarantee them ‘dinero fácil’ [easy money]. The narco discourse also produces the idea that ‘un hombre de verdad’ [a true man] embodies the normative characteristics of machismo. This masculinity, in turn, justifies male violence as ‘necessary’ in order to ‘survive’ in contexts of poverty. These three intertwined discourses of poverty, masculinity and violence enable the construction of DTV in instrumental terms, e.g. as ‘un negocio’ [a business’], as something ‘exciting’ and even as a source of empowerment. In this way, I demonstrate how DTV is discursively made possible by and for former narcos. This is a starting point for rethinking DTV not only as the result of corruption, or failed policies, but also as the product of the interplay between pre-existing social conditions and discourses produced and reproduced by perpetrators of DTV.

Bristol, UK: University of Bristol, 2018. 179p.

National Research Council.

Volume II takes an in-depth look at the various aspects of criminal careers, including the relationship of alcohol and drug abuse to criminal careers, co-offending influences on criminal careers, issues in the measurement of criminal careers, accuracy of prediction models, and ethical issues in the use of criminal career information in making decisions about offenders.

Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. 1986. 416p.

National Research Council.

By focusing attention on individuals rather than on aggregates, this book takes a novel approach to studying criminal behavior. It develops a framework for collecting information about individual criminal careers and their parameters, reviews existing knowledge about criminal career dimensions, presents models of offending patterns, and describes how criminal career information can be used to develop and refine criminal justice policies. In addition, an agenda for future research on criminal careers is presented.

Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. 1986. 458p.

By Anneke Koning and Lina Rijksen-van Dijke

Child sex tourism is a growing problem and a relatively new challenge for the Dutch national police, which is faced with the task of combatting child sexual abuse by Dutch citizens abroad. Little is known about travelling child sex offenders. In this literature review, information from (international) scientific research, Dutch policy reports, and other documents is analyzed to investigate the characteristics, motives and techniques (modus operandi) of (Dutch) child sex tourists. We conclude that this offender group is not homogeneous, and that different motivations (preferential/situational) and modus operandi (short stay/long stay/online) apply. The diversity of the offender group requires a variety of initiatives which are well-adjusted to the different offender types. The scarcity of research on this topic furthermore illustrates the necessity to gather more intelligence and conduct follow-up research.

Leiden: Leiden University, 2017. 47p.

R. Pena Gonzalez.

This study explores contexts of disorder and crisis, in which criminal actors gain legitimacy. By affirming that criminal groups are already social agents, this research argues that they gain political legitimacy to the extent that criminal groups engage in an authority-building process. Thus, it focuses on two instances in which criminal groups launched campaigns— or at least engaged in planned activities— in order to gain political and social legitimacy. La Familia Michoacana (LFM) and Los Caballeros Templarios (LCT) de Michoacán in Mexico, on the one hand, and Cosa Nostra (CN) in Italy, on the other, offer rich and instructive cases to examine. Precisely, the research asks for how these groups seek to forge legitimacy, as well as for what are their strategies for that purpose. The research opens two avenues of conceptual discussion.

Leiden: Leiden University 2020. 265p.

By Rebecca Stern.

In Home Economics: Domestic Fraud in Victorian England, Rebecca Stern establishes fraud as a basic component of the Victorian popular imagination, key to its intimate, as well as corporate, systems of exchange. Although Victorian England is famous for revering the domestic realm as a sphere separate from the market and its concerns, actual households were hardly isolated havens of fiscal safety and innocence. Rather, the Victorian home was inevitably a marketplace, a site of purchase, exchange, and employment in which men and women hired or worked as servants, contracted marriages, managed children, and obtained furniture, clothing, food, and labor. Alongside the multiplication of joint-stock corporations and the rise of a credit-based economy, which dramatically increased fraud in the Victorian money market, the threat of swindling affected both actual household commerce and popular conceptions of ostensibly private, more emotive forms of exchange. Working with diverse primary material, including literature, legal cases, newspaper columns, illustrations, ballads, and pamphlets, Stern argues that the climate of fraud permeated Victorian popular ideologies about social transactions. Beyond providing a history of cases and categories of domestic deceit, Home Economics illustrates the diverse means by which Victorian culture engaged with, refuted, celebrated, represented, and consumed swindling in familial and other household relationships.

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2008. 207p.

By Pérouse de Montclos.

Most of the academic literature on violence in Nigeria is qualitative. It rarely relies on quantitative data because police crime statistics are not reliable, or not available, or not even published. Moreover, the training of Nigerian social scientists often focuses on qualitative, cultural, and political issues. There is thus a need to bridge the qualitative and quantitative approaches of conflict studies.This book represents an innovation and fills a gap in this regard. It is the first to introduce a discussion on such issues in a coherent manner, relying on a database that fills the lacunae in data from the security forces. The authors underline the necessity of a trend analysis to decipher the patterns and the complexity of violence in very different fields: from oil production to cattle breeding, radical Islam to motor accidents, land conflicts to witchcraft, and so on. In addition, they argue for empirical investigation and a complementary approach using both qualitative and quantitative data. The book is therefore organized into two parts, with a focus first on statistical studies, then on fieldwork.

Leiden: African Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL), 2016. 217p.

Edited by CALS (Coalition of African Lesbians) and AMSHeR.

Violence against sexual minorities in Africa is rife. Persons belonging to or perceived to be members of the broad grouping ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI)’ are often victim of violence in African states. This violence is sometimes perpetrated by state actors, such as the members of the Police force, and more often by ordinary persons (non-state actors). By condoning violence by state actors, and by failing to diligently investigate, prosecute and punish the perpetrators of these acts, states fail to respect the basic right to security of some of its citizens. By condoning these actions, or by failing to act effectively, the state also violates its human rights obligations. The argument of this report is not that sexual minorities deserve special protection, but that they are entitled to the rights all other citizens have – the right to security, liberty, life, dignity, and a fair trial.

As members of the African Union, states are party to and should abide by their obligations under the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Charter). Like several other regional and international human rights instruments, the African Charter guarantees freedom from discrimination, and equal protection and equality of individuals and peoples’ before the law (articles 2, 3 and 19). The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Commission), the body monitoring compliance with the African Charter, has in various communications presented to it denounced acts of discrimination on several of the listed grounds of discrimination and has clearly established that ‘other status’ (in article 2 of the Charter) can be broadly interpreted to include grounds other than those explicitly listed under that provision of the African Charter. The Commission made its first pronouncement on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) issues in its Concluding Observations on Cameroon’s periodic report of 2005 by expressing concern about the upsurge in intolerance towards sexual minorities. Most recently, the Chairperson of the Commission issued a statement on in April 2013 stating that the he Commission ‘equally denounces violence committed against individuals based on their sexual orientation as part of its mandate to protect individuals from all forms of violence’.

Pretoria: Pretoria University Law Press, 2013. 57p.

Author Unknown.

Remarkable criminal trials, mysterious murders, wholesale murders, male and female poisoners, forgery and counterfeiting, bank and post office robberies, swindlers, highway robbery and railway crimes. Full and Authentic Account of the Murder by Henry Wainwright^ of his Mistress Harriet Lane: and an extended account of the the Whitechapel Murders by the infamous Jack the Ripper.

Toronto: Beaver Publishing Co., 1895. 38p.

By Frederick Howard Wines.

"Miscellaneous documents of the House of Representatives for the first session of the fifty-second Congress, 1891-92, volume 50, part 14…..This entire report treats of prisons, juvenile reformatories; almshouses; and benevolent institutions, together with insane paupers in institutions for the insane."

Washington, DC: GPO, 1896. 440p.

By Roy K. Anderson.

“ At a time when the drug-evil, as it is called, is attracting so much attention all over the world, it does not seem out of place to tell the public something about how conditions brought it about.”

Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1922. 104p.

By Albert W. Elliott.

“In the following pages, I purpose to lay bare the stark facts of the Social Evil, believing that public knowledge of conditions as they really are will prove a power for good; I will strive to tell the unflinching truth, pitiless though it appears, for therein lies the world’s only hope of freedom from error and vice. This book, my reader, is meat for strong men, not milk for babes. The author has devoted six years of his life to rescue work among fallen women, has studied the underworld from New Orleans to New York, from the Atlantic to the Pacific ; has entered on the course of his mission, more than three thousand houses of shame and talked with more than fifteen thousand inmates ; he has walked the valley of this terrible shadow meeting its blackened spirits face to face, searching their innermost secrets, praying and working for their deliverance, and crying from the depth of his soul over the hopeless tragedy of it all. Of the intimate, accurate, heart-crushing ex- perience thus gathered, this book is a faithful record.”

Atlanta, GA: Webb & Vary Co., 1914..

By Peter H. Grabosky.

Crime fascinates many members of the public. They are eager to know what forms it takes, whether kinds of crime change, what measures are taken to combat it. Sydney in Ferment draws widely on primary sources, many previously unpublished. It focuses on trends in criminal behaviour, political dissidence, collective violence and crime control policies in New South Wales from Phillip{u2019}s landing in 1788 to the early 1970s. It investigates variations in rates and types of crime and threats to public order and discusses changes in criminal law, the creation and development of police forces and trends in criminal procedure and penal form. Its conclusion on the relative weights to be given to the influence of short-term changes in policy on criminal justice and to fundamental social and economic factors will provoke spirited discussion. This book is a lively account both of crime itself and also of the changes in the moral attitudes of the officials and the public at large.

Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1977. 234p.

By Robert N. Willson.

“The following pages are published in the earnest hope that they may assist in the preservation of the American home circle through their influence upon the boy and the young man. Each of the four chapters was prepared for those who listened to it, and with no idea that it would eventually find its way into print. I have now arranged them in permanent form for the purpose of more widely introducing a difficult and delicate subject in a plain but thoroughly clean way. For years I have felt the need, as an individual and a physician, of a simple, and yet scientifically accurate, presentation of the world's great blemish, its causes, and effects, in such a form that I might safely place it in the hands of the American boy and girl. Each of the chapters comprising this little volume has been chosen with this end in view. Each has been utilized, moreover, in response to a desire, expressed openly and often, by men and women who have the integrity of American manhood deeply at heart.”

Philadelphia, Chicago, The J.C. Winston company , 1905. 174p.

By Jane Addams.

“Published in 1912 on the heels of Twenty Years at Hull-House and at the height of Jane Addams's popularity, "A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil" assesses the vulnerability of the rural and immigrant working-class girls who moved to Chicago and fell prey to the sexual bartering of what was known as the white slave trade. Addams offers lurid accounts--drawn from the records of Chicago's Juvenile Protection Association--of young women coerced into lives of prostitution by men who lurked outside hotels and sweatshops. Because they lacked funds for proper recreation, Addams argues, poor and socially marginalized women were susceptible to sexual slavery, and without radical social change they would perhaps be "almost as free" as young men. In addition to promoting higher wages and better living conditions, Addams suggests that a longer period of public education for young women would deter them from the dangers of city life. Despite its appeal to middle-class readers eager for tales of sexual excess and the rape of innocence, the press and prominent intellectuals criticized A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil for being disproportionately hysterical to its philosophical weight.”

New York: Macmillan, 1912. 219p.

Read/Download

By Increase Mather.

Or, a sermon (preached at the lecture in Boston in New-England the 18th day of the 1 moneth 1674, when two men were executed, who had murthered their master) wherein is shewed that excesse in wickedness doth bring untimely death.

Boston: John Foster, 1879. 25p.

By E.G. Redmond.

Or, Beware of shams, how they are worked and how to foil them - the tricks and methods of all kinds of frauds and swindlers, from the petty sneak-thief to the cleverest schemes of the expert bank robber, fully exposed for the protection of the American public. “For the protection of the community in general from all classes of depredators this book is intended. The methods of catching victims by fraudulent and swindling practices has never before been given in full to the public. We have now for the first time, in this book, given a truthful and reliable expose of the multifarious schemes, swindles and dodges practiced on the American public. Scarcely a day passes but the press reports depredations of one kind or another from all parts of the country. The burglar, safe-breaker, sneak-thief, swindler, confidence man, forger, check-raiser and counterfeiter are ever on the alert, and the reason these rascals are usually successful is owing to the fact that the public is unacquainted with the "* way they work. This book exposes all manner of thievery, swindling, robbery, etc. —the modus operandi—in a plain and practical way. For the protection of the people of America from all classes of thieves and rascals this work is written. It is the result of years of careful application and untiring work by experts, and will be found of inestimable value to the public. It is not a detective story, or work of fiction, but a book of facts, instructive, interesting and educational.”

Naperville, IL: J.L. Nichols & Co.1902. 411p.