By Stephen Machin, Matteo Sandi:

Research studying connections between crime and education is a prominent aspect of the big increase of publication and research interest in the economics of crime field. This work demonstrates a crime reducing impact of education, which can be interpreted as causal through leveraging research designs (e.g., based on education policy changes) that ensure the direction of causality flows from education to crime. A significant body of research also explores in detail, and in various directions, the means by which education has a crime reducing impact. This includes evidence on incapacitation versus productivity raising aspects of education, and on the quality of schooling at different stages of education, ranging from early age interventions, through primary and secondary schooling and policy changes that alter school dropout age. From this evidence base, there are education policies that have been effective crime prevention tools in many settings around the world.

Bonn, Germany: IZA – Institute of Labor Economics, 2024 59p.

Bennett, Phil; Cucos, Radu; Winch, Ryan

From the document: "The intersection of AI and transnational crime, particularly its application in human trafficking, represents an emerging and critically important area of study. This brief has been developed with a clear objective: to equip policymakers, law enforcement agencies, and the technology sector with the insights needed to anticipate and pre-emptively address the potential implications of AI on trafficking in persons. While we respond to the early instances of the use of AI by transnational criminal organisations, such as within Southeast Asia's cyber-scam centres, a more systemic approach is required. The potential for transnational criminal organisations to significantly expand their operations using AI technologies is considerable, and with it comes the risk of exponentially increasing harm to individuals and communities worldwide. It is imperative that we act now, before the most severe impacts of AI-enabled trafficking are realised. We have a unique time-limited opportunity--and indeed, a responsibility--to plan, train, and develop policies that can mitigate these emerging threats. This report aims to concretise this discussion by outlining specific scenarios where AI and trafficking could intersect, and to initiate a dialogue on how we can prepare and respond effectively. This document is not intended to be definitive, but rather to serve as a foundation for a broader, ongoing discussion. The ideas presented here are initial steps, and it will require innovative thinking, adequate resourcing, and sustained engagement from all sectors to build upon them effectively."

Organization For Security And Co-Operation In Europe. Office Of The Special Representative And Co-Ordinator For Combating Trafficking In Human Beings; Bali Process (Forum). Regional Support Office .NOV, 2024

UNITED STATES. CONGRESS. HOUSE. SELECT COMMITTEE ON THE STRATEGIC COMPETITION BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY

From the document: "The fentanyl crisis is one of the most horrific disasters that America has ever faced. On average, fentanyl kills over 200 Americans daily, the equivalent of a packed Boeing 737 crashing every single day. Fentanyl is the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18-45 and a leading cause in the historic drop in American life expectancy. It has led to millions more suffering from addiction and the destruction of countless families and communities. Beyond the United States, fentanyl and other mass-produced synthetic narcotics from the People's Republic of China (PRC) are devastating nations around the world. It is truly a global crisis. The PRC, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is the ultimate geographic source of the fentanyl crisis. Companies in China produce nearly all of illicit fentanyl precursors, the key ingredients that drive the global illicit fentanyl trade. The House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (Select Committee) launched an investigation to better understand the role of the CCP in the fentanyl crisis. This investigation involved delving deep into public PRC websites, analyzing PRC government documents, acquiring over 37,000 unique data points of PRC companies selling narcotics online through web scraping and data analytics, undercover communications with PRC drug trafficking companies, and consultations with experts in the public and private sectors, among other steps. [...] [T]he Select Committee found thousands of PRC companies openly selling [...] illicit materials on the Chinese internet--the most heavily surveilled country-wide network in the world. The CCP runs the most advanced techno-totalitarian state in human history that 'leave[s] criminals with nowhere to hide' and has the means to stop illicit fentanyl materials manufacturers, yet it has failed to pursue flagrant violations of its own laws."

UNITED STATES. CONGRESS. HOUSE. SELECT COMMITTEE. 16 APR, 2024. 64p.

Edited by Marisa J. Fuentes and Deborah Gray White  

The 250th anniversary of the founding of Rutgers University is a perfect moment for the Rutgers community to reconcile its past, and acknowledge its role in the enslavement and debasement of African Americans and the disfranchisement and elimination of Native American people and culture. Scarlet and Black documents the history of Rutgers's connection to slavery, which was neither casual nor accidental-nor unusual. Like most early American colleges, Rutgers depended on slaves to build its campuses and serve its students and faculty; it depended on the sale of black people to fund its very existence. Men like John Henry Livingston, (Rutgers president from 1810-1824), the Reverend Philip Milledoler, (president of Rutgers from 1824-1840), Henry Rutgers, (trustee after whom the college is named), and Theodore Frelinghuysen, (Rutgers's seventh president), were among the most ardent anti-abolitionists in the mid-Atlantic. Scarlet and black are the colors Rutgers University uses to represent itself to the nation and world. They are the colors the athletes compete in, the graduates and administrators wear on celebratory occasions, and the colors that distinguish Rutgers from every other university in the United States. This book, however, uses these colors to signify something else: the blood that was spilled on the banks of the Raritan River by those dispossessed of their land and the bodies that labored unpaid and in bondage so that Rutgers could be built and sustained. The contributors to this volume offer this history as a usable one-not to tear down or weaken this very renowned, robust, and growing institution-but to strengthen it and help direct its course for the future. The work of the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Population in Rutgers History.

New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017. 222p.

ByThomas D. Akoensi, Justice Tankebe

Using an experimental vignette design, the study inves-tigates the effects of criminal records on the hiring deci-sions of a convenience sample of 221 human resource(HR) managers in Ghana. The HR managers were ran-domly assigned to read one of four vignettes depicting job seekers of different genders and criminal records:male with and without criminal record, female with and without criminal record. The evidence shows that a criminal record reduces employment opportunities for female offenders but not for their male counter-parts. Additionally, HR managers are willing to offer interviews to job applicants, irrespective of their crim-inal records, if they expect other managers to hire ex-convicts. The implications of these findings are dis-cussed.

The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, online first, May 2024

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 H. Ucko and Thomas A. Marks

Organised crime is not going well. According to the 2021 Global Organized Crime index, ‘the global illicit economy simply continue[s] along the upward trajectory it has followed over the past 20 years, posing an ever-increasing threat to security, development and justice – the pillars of democracy’ (Global Initiative, 2021, p. 8). Wherever governments seek to draw the line, criminal actors find profitable ways of crossing it; wherever governments fail to deliver on human need, criminal actors capitalise on citizens’ desire or despair. As of now, more than three-quarters of the world’s population ‘live in countries with high levels of criminality, and in countries with low resilience to organized crime’ (Global Initiative, 2021, p. 12). On aggregate, the associated activity amounts to an illicit form of governance, furnishing alternative services to a wide range of clients, be they the vulnerable and weak or a covetous elite. The breadth of organised crime, its clandestine nature, and its blending of creative and destructive effects make it difficult to counter. In past SOC ACE research, we argued that the response to organised crime often shares certain pitfalls with counterterrorism, at least since 9/11 (Ucko & Marks, 2022c). Both efforts have been stymied by 1) conceptual uncertainty of the problem at hand; 2) an urge to address the scourge head on (be it violence or crime), without acknowledging its socioeconomic-political context; and, therefore, 3) unquestioned pursuit of strategies that miss the point, whose progress is difficult to measure, and which may even be counterproductive. This convergence is based on the common features of the two phenomena, which are both concerned with i) collective actors, who ii) use violence and coercion among other methods; and who have iii) corrupting, or outright destructive effects on society. Though organised crime is not consciously political in its ideological motivation, it is – like terrorism – deeply political in its origins, activities, and effects. Given the conceptual overlap, and the common pathologies that undermine response, the lessons from countering terrorism are relevant also to the countering of organised crime. Focusing on the concept of ‘irregular warfare’, our past research identified six key lessons, touching upon 1) the socio-political embeddedness of the problem, 2) the tendency to militarise the response, 3) the mirror-imaging of state assistance programmes, 4) the invaluable role of community mobilisation, 5) the dearth of strategy, and 6) the need to engage more closely with questions of political will. As argued elsewhere, these challenges point to a need for greater strategic competence both in assessing the problem of organised crime and in designing a response (Ucko & Marks, 2022c).

To generate this strategic competence, this follow-on report sets out an analytical toolkit to assist planners and policymakers with the crafting of strategy. This ‘Framework of Analysis and Action’ builds upon lessons – negative and positive – learned via years of experience with irregular warfare, defined by the Department of Defense as ‘a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant population(s)’ (U.S. Department of Defense, 2007, p. 1).1 It is a framework that finds its origins within the U.S. National Defense University’s College of International Security Affairs (CISA), where for two decades it has been used to teach strategic planning for complex and intensely political challenges (Ucko & Marks, 2022a). The framework consists of two parts: the Strategic Estimate of the Situation (which maps the problem, explores its drivers, frames, and methods, and critiques the current response) and the Course of Action (which uses the strategic estimate to design an appropriate strategy, guided by a theory of success). The framework is in this report adapted for organised crime, to enable the mapping of relevant actors and the crafting, thereby, of a viable response. By design, the framework responds to the six key lessons identified in our earlier work. This report goes through the framework and explains its adaptation to organised crime. Appendix A provides a summation of the toolkit, a ‘user’s guide’, that will facilitate application of the framework. Testing to date suggests great potential and we look forward to sustaining a dialogue with those engaged with countering organised crime to further evolve this toolkit. Indeed, since the beginning, this framework has been a living product, enriched by theoretical application in the classroom and practical use in the field.

SOC ACE Research Paper No. 19. Birmingham, UK: University of Birmingham, 2023. 45p.

By Ben Grunwald and Jeffrey Fagan

In 2000, the Supreme Court held in Illinois v. Wardlow that a suspect’s presence in a “high-crime area” is relevant in determining whether an officer has reasonable suspicion to conduct an investigative stop. Despite the importance of the decision, the Court provided no guidance about what that standard means, and over fifteen years later, we still have no idea how police officers understand and apply it in practice. This Article conducts the first empirical analysis of Wardlow by examining data on over two million investigative stops conducted by the New York Police Department from 2007 to 2012. Our results suggest that Wardlow may have been wrongly decided. Specifically, we find evidence that officers often assess whether areas are high crime using a very broad geographic lens; that they call almost every block in the city high crime; that their assessments of whether an area is high crime are nearly uncorrelated with actual crime rates; that the suspect’s race predicts whether an officer calls an area high crime as well as the actual crime rate; that the racial composition of the area and the identity of the officer are stronger predictors of whether an officer calls an area high crime than the crime rate itself; and that stops are less or as likely to result in the detection of contraband when an officer invokes high-crime area as a basis of a stop. We conclude with several policy proposals for courts, police departments, and scholars to help address these problems in the doctrine.

California Law Review 345-404 (2019

By Billy Kyte | Giulia Roncon

With the aim to support individuals in building resilient communities working to prevent, counter, and limit the damage of environmental crime, this handbook documents the challenges faced by defenders working in the environmental crime field and provides guidance to support their resilience.

The first section of the handbook analyzes definitional understandings of environmental crime and explores the impacts and harms it can perpetuate. The second section assesses the risks and challenges commonly faced by environmental defenders, including an assessment of their needs, and explores emergent regional issues that may play a part in such vulnerabilities. The final section presents a repository of best practices and tools that can help stakeholders to access available resources and to mitigate the potential risks they face.

The handbook draws from consultations involving nearly 100 prominent figures from civil society and media across Africa and Asia. Whilst findings are therefore geographically specific to some extent, our work confirms that the challenges experienced by environmental defenders in these regions were replicated globally as well. Although each country and regional context is different, the handbook outlines strategies that could be broadly implemented to support the community of stakeholders dedicated to tackling environmental crime worldwide.

Geneva, SWIT: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC). 2023.

By Damon L. Perry

In Britain, no one has the right not to be offended. Words or actions that are taken by some as offensive – whether they relate to religion, sexuality or race – are not criminal as long as they are not intentionally hostile and meant, or likely, to incite hatred. The statutory guidance on Non Crime Hate Incidents, revised in March 2023, is consistent with the law in this regard. It states: “Fundamentally, offending someone is not, in and of itself, a criminal offence. To constitute an offence under hate crime legislation, the speech or behaviour in question must be threatening, abusive or insulting and be intended to, or likely to, stir up hatred”. Yet, this does not seem to be fully acknowledged in Britain’s schools. As this revealing survey of over a thousand teachers from YouGov and Policy Exchange demonstrates, since the Batley Grammar School protests, a small but significant proportion of British teachers have self-censored to avoid offence on religious grounds – 16%. (That proportion is slightly higher for teachers of certain subjects, including almost a fifth of all English teachers and art teachers – 19%). In areas with the largest Muslim populations, around 10% fewer teachers do not self-censor than those in areas with the smallest Muslim populations. A worrying proportion believe that – regardless of a teacher’s intentions – images of the prophet Muhammad should never be used in classrooms, even in the teaching of Islamic art or ethics: In addition to the 55% of teachers that would not personally use an image of Muhammad independently from the Batley Grammar School protests, an additional 9% said they personally were less likely to use it as a result of the events in Batley. The case of the teacher at Batley Grammar who went into hiding after death threats thus appears to have had a significant impact on teachers’ confidence and willingness to use materials that fall within the scope of the law. Alarmingly, half of British teachers believe that if blasphemy-related protests led by activist and advocacy groups occur outside their schools, there would be a risk to their physical safety. Despite most teachers thinking that headteachers get the balance right – between supporting them to use materials that are on the right side of the law but which might offend, and ensuring no offence is caused – they are clearly in need of greater confidence in the support they can expect from their headteachers and, in the case of activist-led protests outside their school gates, the police. Recent events have given further impetus to concerns regarding the physical safety of teachers and the security at schools. On 13 October, 2023, in Arras, France, a literature teacher, Dominque Bernard, was killed in a knife attack; the suspect, an Islamist extremist, was looking for teachers  of history or geography. The case has been compared to that of Samuel Paty, the teacher who was killed three years ago by an Islamist extremist for showing cartoons of Muhammad to a class on freedom of expression. Both teachers have been described by President Macron as champions of the values of the French republic. Although this tragic incident took place across the Channel, France’s battle with Islamist extremism is one shared with the UK. Closer to home, in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks on hundreds of civilians in Israel on 7 October, protests on the streets of the UK against Israeli reprisals in the name of the Palestinian “resistance” have demonstrated alarming levels of hateful extremism and antisemitism.5 Some Jewish schools were forced to close on 13 October, when Hamas called for a “Global Day of Jihad”, and several Jewish schools were vandalised with red paint. The atmosphere has been fraught. The Department for Education wrote to school leaders “to ensure that any political activity from pupils in response to the crisis does not create an ‘atmosphere of intimidation’”  etc.

London: Policy Exchange, 2024. 51p.

By  James B. Jacobs and Kerry T. Cooperman

In 1988, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani brought a massive civil racketeering suit against the leadership of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), at the time possibly the most corrupt union in the world. The lawsuit charged that the mafia had operated the IBT as a racketeering enterprise for decades, systematically violating the rights of members and furthering the interests of organized crime. On the eve of trial, the parties settled the case, and twenty years later, the trustees are still on the job.

Breaking the Devil’s Pact is an in-depth study of the U.S. v. IBT, beginning with Giuliani’s lawsuit and the politics surrounding it, and continuing with an incisive analysis of the controversial nature of the ongoing trusteeship. James B. Jacobs and Kerry T. Cooperman address the larger question of the limits of legal reform in the American labor movement and the appropriate level of government involvement.

New York; London: NYU Press, 2011. 320p.

By Jakiyah Bradley

In recognition of Black History Month, this TMI brief examines the ramifications of attempts by anti-truth groups to remove or whitewash our nation’s history and legacy of racism from K-12 public school classrooms. The Legal Defense Fund (LDF) fights tirelessly for safe, inclusive, and high-quality education, and we believe that proper education requires an honest, accurate, and comprehensive understanding of our past to create a more just and inclusive future. The current efforts to silence discussions on race and its intersections with inequalities based on sexuality and gender are not the first attempts to distort and erase U.S. history. This is a centuries old war on truth that continues to evolve. Today’s attacks on truth are born out of a broader history where a small minority tries to use their power and privilege to eclipse racial justice progress. One way in which truth is attacked is through controlling the narratives told in children’s history textbooks, a practice dating back to the U.S. Civil War.

New York: NAACP Legal Defense Fund , Thurgood Marshall Institute, 2023, 12p

By Chielozona Eze

Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination is an interdisciplinary reading of justice in literary texts and memoirs, films, and social anthropological texts in postcolonial Africa.  Inspired by Nelson Mandela and South Africa’s robust achievements in human rights, this book argues that the notion of restorative justice is integral to the proper functioning of participatory democracy and belongs to the moral architecture of any decent society. Focusing on the efforts by African writers, scholars, artists, and activists to build flourishing communities, the author discusses various quests for justice such as environmental justice, social justice, intimate justice, and restorative justice. It discusses in particular ecological violence, human rights abuses such as witchcraft accusations, the plight of people affected by disability, homophobia, misogyny, and sex trafficking, and forgiveness.  This book will be of interest to scholars of African literature and films, literature and human rights, and literature and the environment.

Abington, Oxon, UK: New York: Routledge,    185p.

By Justyna Sempruch

In Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature, Justyna Sempruch analyzes contemporary representations of the “witch” as a locus for the cultural negotiation of genders. Sempruch revisits some of the most prominent traits in past and current perceptions in feminist scholarship of exclusion and difference. She examines a selection of twentieth-century US American, Canadian, and European narratives to reveal the continued political relevance of metaphors sustained in the archetype of the “witch” widely thought to belong to pop-cultural or folkloristic formulations of the past. Through a critical rereading of the feminist texts engaging with these metaphors, Sempruch develops a new concept of the witch, one that challenges traditional gender-biased theories linking it either to a malevolent “hag” on the margins of culture or to unrestrained “feminine” sexual desire. Sempruch turns, instead, to the causes for radical feminist critique of “feminine” sexuality as a fabrication of logocentric thinking and shows that the problematic conversion of the “hag” into a “superwoman” can be interpreted today as a therapeutic performance translating fixed identity into a site of continuous negotiation of the subject in process. Tracing the development of feminist constructs of the witch from 1970s radical texts to the present, Sempruch explores the early psycho-analytical writings of Cixous, Kristeva, and Irigaray, and feminist reformulations of identity by Butler and Braidotti, with fictional texts from different political and cultural contexts.

West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2008. 198p.

Edited by Jude Browne and Maeve McKeown

What is Structural Injustice? is the first edited collection to bring together the voices of leading structural injustice scholars from politics, philosophy and law to explore the concept of structural injustice which has now become a central feature of all three disciplines and is considered by many to be a ‘field of study.’ The volume features specially selected original and essential works on structural injustice. The volume provides a range of disciplinary, ontological and epistemological perspectives on what structural injustice is and includes feminist and post-colonial theories to interrogate how structural injustice exacerbates and reproduces existing inequalities and relations of power. This book aims to become a touchstone text for those interested in the different ways we can understand structural injustice, how it manifests, how it relates to other forms of injustice, who is responsible for its redress and the different ways we might go about it. This book will appeal to a wide audience of students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, as well as the general academic population, experts on structural injustice, interested practitioners in politics and members of the public.

Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2024. 305p.

By Anna Sergi

Abstract In large commercial seaports policing and security efforts to counter the drug trade, especially cocaine, do not appear to be effective beyond a mere displacement effect. In the port of Piraeus, Greece, (perceived) rising quantities of cocaine have led to calls for further securitisation of the port to curb illicit trafficking. This article will present the current trends of countering and disrupting cocaine at the port of Piraeus and question how these efforts, together with the growth of the port, are affecting the overall territory of and around the port. This article will first argue that the (perceived) increase in cocaine trade towards/in the port of Piraeus has activated a ‘utopia of security’ in the policing and security responses at the port. This utopia of security leads to paradoxes when it comes to being effective against organised crime in the port. The article will conclude by discussing the possibility of a different approach, one of displacement of countering efforts rather than of cocaine flows. This different approach can also rebalance the focus of policing and security authorities on the relationship between the port and its territory. 

European Journal of Criminology 1–21 © The Author(s) 2023 

By the Brookings-AEI Working Group on Criminal Justice Reform

U.S. criminal justice figures continue to make us numb, elected officials and citizens alike. Yes, we know the U.S. incarcerates more people per capita than any other country in the world. Yes, we know that when we rank the per capita rate of incarcerations, the U.S. is followed closely by countries like El Salvador and Turkmenistan. We know that our recidivism rates are too high, and that we police our racial/ethnic minority communities too much and too often with tragic results. We know our fellow citizens, mainly people of color, living in those communities continue to suffer from higher rates of crime and police violence. And, lastly, we know these conditions prevail even though U.S. crime rates have fallen to 50-year lows (even considering the recent COVID-era surge) making America about as safe as it was in the 1950s. It is almost as if over policing, prosecution, and imprisonment are habits that the United States just cannot break. 

For two decades now, there has been a bipartisan effort to tackle these systemic problems. Action by President George W. Bush in the mid-2000s to foster improved reentry pathways for men and women returning from prison opened the door to the passage of the bipartisan Second Chance Act and hundreds of millions of dollars in investment in programs designed to reform numerous aspects of the criminal justice system including mandatory minimum sentences and felony hiring initiatives. President Barack Obama expanded and accelerated these initiatives adding his own programs including  Banning the Box, presidential commissions on 21st century policing and mass incarceration, as well as pilot programs to reinstitute access to Pell Grants for prisoners. Just last year, President Trump signed the First Step Act beginning the process of reforming sentencing practices and providing funding for training and vocational education for incarcerated people to be more prepared for the labor market after prison. And now President Joe Biden has promised to accelerate criminal justice policy with an eye toward reforming the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, of which he was a principle author, to reduce crime and incarceration. By slow and steady steps, we are moving away from “tough on crime” policies that created the world’s largest prison population and one of its costliest and, from the perspective of rehabilitation and recidivism, most ineffective criminal justice systems. George Floyd’s death at the hands of police last spring and the frequent, though less-noticed, events like it in other American cities, towns, and rural areas, has added new urgency and momentum to the drive to reform our criminal justice system. Unfortunately, the debate has too often collapsed into an unhelpful binary: “support the blue” or “abolish the police.” Either of these poles would tend to have a negative impact on the very communities who have suffered disproportionately under our current criminal justice and law enforcement policies. Excessive policing and use of force, on one hand, and less public safety and social service resources on the other, can both be detrimental to communities that are exposed to high levels of criminal activity and violence. We must find a path of genuine reform, even transformation, that fosters safer, more peaceful, and more resilient communities.   

This volume is a “down payment” on the policy debate America needs right now to continue moving toward a criminal justice system—police, courts, prison, reentry, community supervision—that is focused on the safety, health, and well-being of communities rather than on maintaining a harsh, semi-militarized revolving door system from which, for too many, there is often no escape. The essays in this volume are intended to provide policymakers in Congress and the Biden Administration with research-grounded guidance and insight on core issues and strategies that can sustain bipartisan support for critically needed criminal justice reforms. Our authors come from a broad spectrum of domains and policy perspectives. In fact, most chapters paired scholars, practitioners, and thought leaders from different disciplines and political ideologies. In this regard, each of their chapters concisely summarize the state of research on a given topic and offer bipartisan recommendations for short-, medium- and long-term reforms that will move each of the key sectors of the criminal justice system toward a more humane and effective footing.

Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2021. 95p.

By Thomas Hofmarcher, Anne Leppänen, Anna Månsdotter, Joakim Strandberg, Anders Håkansson

Background: Illegal drug use is a public health concern with far-reaching consequences for people who use them and for society. In Sweden, the reported use of illegal drugs has been growing and the number of drug-induced deaths is among the highest in Europe. The aim of this study was to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date estimation of the societal costs of illegal drug use in Sweden, relying as much as possible on registry and administrative data. Methods: A prevalence-based cost-of-illness study of illegal drug use in Sweden in 2020 was conducted. A societal approach was chosen and included direct costs (such as costs of health care, social services, and the criminal justice system), indirect costs (such as lost productivity due to unemployment and drug-induced death), and intangible costs (such as reduced quality of life among people who use drugs and their family members). Costs were estimated by combining registry, administrative, and survey data with unit cost data. Results: The estimated societal costs of illegal drug use were 3.7 billion euros in 2020. This corresponded to 355 euros per capita and 0.78 % of the gross domestic product. The direct and intangible costs were of similar sizes, each contributing to approximately 40 % of total costs, whereas indirect costs contributed to approximately 20 %. The largest individual cost components were reduced quality of life among people who use drugs and costs of the criminal justice system. Conclusion: Illegal drug use has a negative impact on the societal aim to create good and equitable health in Sweden. The findings call for evidence-based prevention of drug use and treatment for those addicted. It is important to address the co-morbidity of mental ill-health and drug dependence, to develop low-threshold services and measures for early prevention among children and young adults, as well as to evaluate laws and regulations connected to illegal drug use.

International Journal of Drug Policy, Volume 123, January 2024, 104259

By Letizia Paoli, Luke Thomas Joseph Cox

Background: Like many other goods and services, performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs), and particularly androgenic anabolic steroids (AAS), are increasingly discussed and promoted by social media influencers. Little, however, is known about the influencers specialized in PIEDs and which drugs and services they promote and sell. Aims: Against this background, the study has been intended to identify prominent influencers specialized in PIEDs, examine the market activities they engage in, and assess the latter’s legality. Methods: We first searched the clean internet to identify prominent PIED influencers. Second, we conducted a sixmonth-long, non-reactive digital ethnography of the social media accounts of 20 influencers and, via a content analysis, identified the market activities they engage in. Third, we assessed the latter’s legality, primarily using the EU legislation as a benchmark. Findings: The selected influencers are all current or former bodybuilders, predominantly male and from the United States. Many of them have developed a considerable number of followers, in three cases exceeding one million. They engage in various market activities that span the whole spectrum of legality, from legal to illegal, with many activities having an uncertain, but often dubious, legal status. Conclusions: Though they may promote harm reduction for some users, PIED influencers also promote the public acceptance of PIED use beyond the bodybuilding community and enhance access to PIEDs for millions of people. Multifaceted policy interventions are required, aiming at preventing influencers from becoming a major source of information on, and route of access to, PIEDs.

International Journal of Drug Policy, Volume 123, January 2024, 104246

By Roger Bate

With the stated aim of increasing revenue and discouraging smoking, Pakistan raised tobacco duties over the past five years. The result empowered illicit actors, with a flourishing of illicit production and smuggling of cigarettes. Revenue rose initially, only to fall back as untaxed products proliferated. While organized crime and local production interests were the big winners, smoking rates have remained largely unchanged. Pakistan’s authorities have tried to resolve the problem through better enforcement and lowering of duties for certain products, but overall the lesson learned is that rapid duty increases have significant negative effects that are difficult to reverse when illegal supply cannot be controlled.

Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 2018. 10p.