By Aidan Sammons and David Putwain

What does a criminological psychologist actually do? Most people picture a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, helping the police to solve crimes, but the reality is far more interesting and complex. Psychology and Crime offers a fascinating introduction to criminological psychology, providing the reader with a comprehensive grounding in everything from cognitive forensics to police interviewing. Concise, informative and accessible, the book explores a range of theories to understand criminal behaviour, from the physiological to the social. It covers a range of contexts within the criminal justice system where psychology offers unique insights, including police investigation, the perspective of witnesses and victims, and courtroom proceedings. Thoroughly updated throughout to reflect developments in the field, and featuring new chapters covering cybercrime, terrorism and insights from neuroscience, this edition also includes a student-friendly ‘Apply your learning’ feature and case studies to bring the research to life. Accessibly written for all levels and with concise coverage of both classic and contemporary psychological theory, this is the ideal book for anyone studying criminal or forensic psychology.

Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2019. 226p.

By Clive R. Hollin

Psychological theory and method have played a major part in shaping our understanding and interpretation of crime. Psychology and Crime supplies a timely and much-needed general text covering the range of contributions psychology has made both to understanding crime and responding to it. The book provides an accessible overview of theory and research from criminology, sociology, and psychology, focusing on three distinct themes. First, psychological theories about the offender are discussed, including the way in which mental disorder is defined. Second, the author analyses society's response to crime - the role of police and the courts. Finally, the book looks at crime prevention - both the rehabilitation of offenders and situational strategies for preventing crime.

London; New York: Routledge, 1989. 438p.

By Stephen P. Frank

This book is the first to explore the largely unknown world of rural crime and justice in post-emancipation Imperial Russia. Drawing upon previously untapped provincial archives and a wealth of other neglected primary material, Stephen P. Frank offers a major reassessment of the interactions between peasantry and the state in the decades leading up to World War I. Viewing crime and punishment as contested metaphors about social order, his revisionist study documents the varied understandings of criminality and justice that underlay deep conflicts in Russian society, and it contrasts official and elite representations of rural criminality—and of peasants—with the realities of everyday crime at the village level.

Berkeley, CA: London: University of California Press, 1999.

By Jonathan Daly; Jonathan Smele; Michael Melancon

Crime and Punishment in Russiasurveys the evolution of criminal justice in Russia during a span of more than 300 years, from the early modern era to the present day. Maps, organizational charts, a list of important dates, and a glossary help the reader to navigate key institutional, legal, political, and cultural developments in this evolution. The book approaches Russia both on its own terms and in light of changes in Europe and the wider West, to which Russia's rulers and educated elites continuously looked for legal models and inspiration. It examines the weak advancement of the rule of the law over the period and analyzes the contrasts and seeming contradictions of a society in which capital punishment was sharply restricted in the mid-1700s, while penal and administrative exile remained heavily applied until 1917 and even beyond. Daly also provides concise political, social, and economic contextual detail, showing how the story of crime and punishment fits into the broader narrative of modern Russian history. This is an important and useful book for all students of modern Russian history as well as of the history of crime and punishment in modern Europe.

London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 258p.

By Nancy Kollmann

This is a magisterial new account of the day-to-day practice of Russian criminal justice in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Nancy Kollmann contrasts Russian written law with its pragmatic application by local judges, arguing that this combination of formal law and legal institutions with informal, flexible practice contributed to the country's social and political stability. She also places Russian developments in the broader context of early modern European state-building strategies of governance and legal practice. She compares Russia's rituals of execution to the 'spectacles of suffering' of contemporary European capital punishment and uncovers the dramatic ways in which even the tsar himself, complying with Moscow's ideologies of legitimacy, bent to the moral economy of the crowd in moments of uprising. Throughout, the book assesses how criminal legal practice used violence strategically, administering horrific punishments in some cases and in others accommodating with local communities and popular concepts of justice.

Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 506p.

Edited by Jens Rydström and Kati Mustola

This book provides a coherent history of criminal law and homosexuality in Scandinavia 1842-1999, a period during which same-sex love was outlawed or subject to more or less severe legal restrictions in the Scandinavian penal codes. This was the case in most countries in Northern Europe, but the book argues that the development in Scandinavia was different, partly determined by the structure of the welfare state. Five of the most experienced scholars of the history of homosexuality in the region (Jens Rydström, Kati Mustola, Wilhelm von Rosen, Martin Skaug Halsos and Thorgerdur Thorvaldsdóttir) describe how same-sex desire has been regulated in their respective countries during the past 160 years. The authors with their backgrounds in history, sociology, and gender studies represent an interdisciplinary approach to the problem of criminalization of same-sex sexuality. Their contributions, consisting for the most part of previously unpublished material, present for the first time a comprehensive history of homosexuality in Scandinavia. Among other things, it includes the most extensive study yet written in any language about Iceland's gay and lesbian history. Also for the first time, the book discusses in detail same-sex sexuality between women before the law in modern society and presents previously unpublished findings on this topic. Female homosexuality was outlawed in Eastern Scandinavia, but not in the Western parts of this region. It also analyzes the modern tendency to include lesbian women in the criminal discourse as an effect of the medicalization of homosexuality and the growing influence of medical discourse on the law.

Amsterdam: Aksant Academic Publishers, 2007. 312p.

By Laura Y. Calderón

Mexico had the most violent year in its history in 2019, reporting 29,406 intentional homicide cases, resulting in 34,588 individual victims.1 However, violence remains a highly focalized phenomenon in Mexico, with 23% of all intentional homicide cases concentrated in five municipalities and three major clusters of violence with homicide rates over 100 per 100,000 inhabitants. Following the national trend, the state of Guanajuato also had its most violent year in 2019, with one of its largest cities featured in the country’s top five most violent municipalities. This paper will analyze the surge in violence in Guanajuato in 2019, comparing the number of intentional homicide cases with the increasing problem of fuel theft in the state, and describing some of the state and federal government measures to address both issues.

San Diego: Justice in Mexico, University of San Diego, 2020. 28p.

By Karina Garcia

This paper provides first-hand data regarding the perpetrators’ perspectives about their engagement in practices of drug trafficking-related violence in Mexico such as murder, kidnapping and torture. Drawing on the life stories of thirty-three former participants in the Mexican drug trade—often self-described as “narcos”— collected in the North of Mexico between October 2014 and January 2015, this paper shows how violent practices serve different purposes, which indicates the need for different strategies to tackle them.

San Diego: Justice in Mexico, University of San Diego, 2019. 37p.

By Jorge Cabat

Since the beginning of his administration, President Felipe Calderon launched a war against drug trafficking using the Army and the Federal Police. This strategy has had serious unintended consequences in terms of the level of violence. By August 2010, the government acknowledged that there were 28,000 drug-related deaths since December 2006. This violence has provoked hard criticisms of the Calderon Administration and some analysts have suggested that the decision to attack the drug cartels was motivated by political reasons in order to obtain legitimacy after a very close and polemic Presidential election in 2006. However, since the end of the Fox Administration there are parts of the Mexican territory controlled by drug traffickers, which no State can allow. The paper argues that even if the anti-drug strategy of Calderon has been very costly in terms of violence, there was no other alternative, as the other options were not viable at the beginning of the Calderon administration. From this point of view it is an inevitable war. The weak results achieved to date are due to the fact that the Mexican government does not possess the institutional and human resources to carry out this war. This explains the emphasis of the Mexican government on institutional building. However, this is a long-term solution. In the short term, everything suggests that the high levels of drug-related violence are going to continue.

México, D.F. : CIDE: 2010. 24p.

By Ko-lin Chin and Sheldon X. Zhang

n a country long associated with the trade in opiates, the Chinese government has for decades applied extreme measures to curtail the spread of illicit drugs, only to find that the problem has worsened. Burma is blamed as the major producer of illicit drugs and conduit for the entry of drugs into China. Which organizations are behind the heroin trade? What problems and prospects of drug control in the so-called “Golden Triangle” drug-trafficking region are faced by Chinese and Southeast Asian authorities?

In The Chinese Heroin Trade, noted criminologists Ko-Lin Chin and Sheldon Zhangexamine the social organization of the trafficking of heroin from the Golden Triangle to China and the wholesale and retail distribution of the drug in China. Based on face-to-face interviews with hundreds of incarcerated drug traffickers, street-level drug dealers, users, and authorities, paired with extensive fieldwork in the border areas of Burma and China and several major urban centers in China and Southeast Asia, this volume reveals how the drug trade has evolved in the Golden Triangle since the late 1980s. Chin and Zhang also explore the marked characteristics of heroin traffickers; the relationship between drug use and sales in China; and how China compares to other international drug markets. The Chinese Heroin Trade is a fascinating, nuanced account of the world of high-risk drug trafficking in a tightly-controlled society.

New York; London: New York University Press, 320p.

Edited by Bruce M. Bagley and Jonathan D. Rosen

In 1971, Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs. Despite foreign policy efforts and attempts to combat supply lines, the United States has been for decades, and remains today, the largest single consumer market for illicit drugs on the planet.

This volume argues that the war on drugs has been ineffective at best and, at worst, has been highly detrimental to many countries. Leading experts in the fields of public health, political science, and national security analyze how U.S. policies have affected the internal dynamics of Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Central America, and the Caribbean islands. Together, they present a comprehensive overview of the major trends in drug trafficking and organized crime in the early twenty-first century.

In addition, the editors and contributors identify emerging issues and propose several policy options to address them. This accessible and expansive volume provides a framework for understanding the limits and liabilities in the U.S.-championed war on drugs throughout the Americas.

Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015. 464p.

By Marcelo Bergman

This book describes the main patterns and trends of drug trafficking in Latin America and analyzes its political, economic and social effects on several countries over the last twenty years. Its aim is to provide readers an introductory yet elaborate text on the illegal drug problem in the region. It first seeks to define and measure the problem, and then discusses some of the implications that the growth of production, trafficking, and consumption of illegal drugs had in the economies, in the social fabrics, and in the domestic and international policies of Latin American countries.

This book analyzes the illegal drugs problem from a Latin American perspective. Although there is a large literature and research on drug use and trade in the USA, Canada, Europe and the Far East, little is understood on the impact of narcotics in countries that have supplied a large share of the drugs used worldwide. This work explores how routes into Europe and the USA are developed, why the so-called drug cartels exist in the region, what level of profits illegal drugs generate, how such gains are distributed among producers, traffickers, and dealers and how much they make, why violence spread in certain places but not in others, and which alternative policies were taken to address the growing challenges posed by illegal drugs.

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  With a strong empirical foundation based on the best available data, Illegal Drugs, Drug Trafficking and Violence in Latin America explains how rackets in the region built highly profitable enterprises transshipping and smuggling drugs northbound and why the large circulation of drugs also produced the emergence of vibrant domestic markets, which doubled the number of drug users in the region the last 10 years. It presents the best available information for 18 countries, and the final two chapters analyze in depth two rather different case studies: Mexico and Argentina.

Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018. 166p.

By Jakob Demant and Silje A. Bakken

Use of the internet has changed drug dealing over the past decade. While there is a growing understanding of the role of darknet drug markets, little is known about how drug dealing works on public online services such as social media. This study reports findings from a Nordic comparative study of social media drug dealing, which represents the first in-depth study of increasing levels of digitally mediated drug dealing outside cryptomarkets.

Lisbon, Portugal: European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA)m 2019. 22p.

By Nicolas Christin

Online anonymous marketplaces are a relatively recent technological development that enables sellers and buyers to transact online with far stronger anonymity guarantees than on traditional electronic commerce platforms. This has led certain individuals to engage in transactions of illicit or illegal goods.

This report presents an analysis of the online anonymous marketplace data collected by Soska and Christin [13] over late 2011–early 2015. In this report, we focus on drug supply coming from the European Union. Keeping in mind the limitations inherent to such data collection, we found that, for the period and the marketplaces considered.

Lisbon, Portugal: European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, 2017. 25p.

By United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)

The versatility of synthetic drugs and flexibility of their manufacture is driving a constant evolution of the illicit synthetic drug market. The dynamic nature of the market continues to present a significant challenge globally, requiring a multifaceted, comprehensive approach to address the problem. In November 2021, UNODC launched the Synthetic Drug Strategy as a framework to support countries in developing evidence and science-based responses to address this ongoing challenge. The strategy includes four spheres of action, namely, multilateralism and international cooperation, early warning on emerging synthetic drug threats, promoting science-informed health responses, and strengthening counter-narcotic interventions. East and Southeast Asia, which is home to one of the largest methamphetamine markets in the world, is a key region for implementation of the strategy. Amidst the continued impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and other recent developments, organised crime groups in the region have shown their adaptability and ingenuity to capitalise on the situation and expand their operations.

Vienna: UNODC, Global SMART Programme , 2022. 36p.

Edited by Giovanni Fiandaca

Where is a woman’s place in the mob? Does she even have one? Is the rise in women’s involvement in organized crime the darker side of their increased presence in the legitimate workplace, or simply a reworking of the mafia’s traditional male attitudes cloaked in the guise of women’s emancipation?

The insightful essays in Women and the Mafia seek to answer these questions from a wide range of academic disciplines and trace the portrait of women tied to organized crime in Italy and around the world. This book pulls back the code of silence and shines a light on the dark image of women entangled in organized crime.

The surprising first hand accounts of mafia women in Italy not only reveal women in power, "generals in skirts", but also tales of severe abuse and violence against women.

The book introduces us to the professional women of the Argentine "mafia state", Albanian human traffickers, spies for the Russian mob, runners for Brazilian numbers rackets, and the mystique of the American gangster moll.

New York: Springer, 2007. 300p.

By Selwyn Raab

For half a century, the American Mafia outwitted, outmaneuvered, and outgunned the FBI and other police agencies, wreaking unparalleled damages to America's social fabric and business enterprises while emerging as the nation's most formidable crime empire. The vanguard of this criminal juggernaut is still led by the Mafia's most potent and largest borgatas: New York's Five Families.Five Families is the vivid story of the rise and fall of New York's premier dons from Lucky Luciano to Paul Castellano to John Gotti and more. This definitive history brings the reader right up to the possible resurgence of the Mafia as the FBI and local law-enforcement agencies turn their attention to homeland security and away from organized crime. The paperback has been revised and updated, with a new epilogue focusing on the trial of the notorious "Mafia Cops."

New York: A Thomas Dunne Book for St. Martin's Griffin; 2006. 784p.

By Peter B. E. Hill

The Japanese mafia - known collectively as yakuza - has had an extensive influence on Japanese society over the past fifty years. Based on extensive interviews with criminals, police officers, lawyers, journalists, and academics, this is the first academic analysis in English of Japan's criminal syndicates. Peter Hill argues that the essential characteristic of Japan's criminal syndicates is their provision of protection to consumers in Japan's under- and upper-worlds. In this respect they are analogous to the Sicilian Mafia, and the mafias of Russia, Hong Kong and the United States. Although the yakuza's protective mafia role has existed at least since the end of the Second World War, and arguably longer, their sources of income have not remained constant. The yakuza have undergone considerable change in their business activities over the last half-century.

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  The two key factors driving this evolution have been the changes in the legal, and law-enforcement environment within which these groups must operate, and the economic opportunities available to them. This first factor demonstrates that the complex and ambiguous relationship between the yakuza and the state has always been more than purely symbiotic. With the introduction of the boryokudan (yakuza) countermeasures law in 1992, the relationship between the yakuza and the state has become more unambiguously antagonistic. Assessing the impact of this law is, however, problematic; the contemporaneous bursting of Japan's economic bubble at the beginning of the 1990s also profoundly and adversely influenced yakuza sources of income. It is impossible to completely disentangle the effects of these two events. By the end of the twentieth century, the outlook for the yakuza was bleak and offered no short-term prospect of amelioration. More profoundly, state-expropriation of protection markets formerly dominated by the yakuza suggests that the longer-term prospects for these groups are bleaker still: no longer, therefore, need the yakuza be seen as an inevitable and necessary evil.

Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 336p.

By Nicholas Pileggi

Nicholas Pileggi’s vivid, unvarnished, journalistic chronicle of the life of Henry Hill—the working-class Brooklyn kid who knew from age twelve that “to be a wiseguy was to own the world,” who grew up to live the highs and lows of the mafia gangster’s life—has been hailed as “the best book ever written on organized crime” (Cosmopolitan).

This is the true-crime bestseller that was the basis for Martin Scorsese’s film masterpiece GoodFellas, which brought to life the violence, the excess, the families, the wives and girlfriends, the drugs, the payoffs, the paybacks, the jail time, and the Feds…with Henry Hill’s crackling narration drawn straight out of Wiseguy and overseeing all the unforgettable action.

New York: Pocket Books, 1987. 400p.

By Robert M. Lombardo

This book provides a comprehensive sociological explanation for the emergence and continuation of organized crime in Chicago. Tracing the roots of political corruption that afforded protection to gambling, prostitution, and other vice activity in Chicago and other large American cities, Robert M. Lombardo challenges the dominant belief that organized crime in America descended directly from the Sicilian Mafia. According to this widespread "alien conspiracy" theory, organized crime evolved in a linear fashion beginning with the Mafia in Sicily, emerging in the form of the Black Hand in America's immigrant colonies, and culminating in the development of the Cosa Nostra in America's urban centers.

Looking beyond this Mafia paradigm, this volume argues that the development of organized crime in Chicago and other large American cities was rooted in the social structure of American society. Specifically, Lombardo ties organized crime to the emergence of machine politics in America's urban centers. From nineteenth-century vice syndicates to the modern-day Outfit, Chicago's criminal underworld could not have existed without the blessing of those who controlled municipal, county, and state government. These practices were not imported from Sicily, Lombardo contends, but were bred in the socially disorganized slums of America where elected officials routinely franchised vice and crime in exchange for money and votes. This book also traces the history of the African-American community's participation in traditional organized crime in Chicago and offers new perspectives on the organizational structure of the Chicago Outfit, the traditional organized crime group in Chicago.

Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013. 257p.