European Parliament

In July 2021, the European Commission tabled a proposal to establish a new EU authority to counter money laundering and the financing of terrorism (AMLA). This was part of a legislative package aimed at implementing the 2020 action plan for a comprehensive Union policy on preventing money laundering and the financing of terrorism. The AMLA would be the centre of an integrated system composed of the authority itself and the national authorities with an AML/CFT supervisory mandate. It would also support EU financial intelligence units (FIUs) and establish a cooperation mechanism among them. The Council achieved a partial political agreement on the proposal on 29 June 2022. In the European Parliament, the file was referred to the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) and the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE). The co-rapporteurs issued their joint report in May 2022. The joint committee report was voted on 28 March 2023 and the mandate to enter trilogues was granted by the plenary on 17 April 2023. Third edition. The 'EU Legislation in Progress' briefings are updated at key stages throughout the legislative procedure. The first edition was written by Carla Stamegna.

Brussels: European Parliament, 2020. 10p.

By Saša Đorđević

  Organized crime and corruption in the Western Balkans have been on the rise since the 1990s, following the war in former Yugoslavia in 1995 and the political-economic crisis triggered by the collapse of pyramid schemes in Albania in 1997. Accordingly, popular, journalistic and academic research on organized crime in these states – namely, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia – has also increased. In 1996, for example, the head of Belgrade’s criminal police, Marko Nicović, published the book Droga: Carstvo zla (Drugs: Evil Empire) about the history of organized drug trade and the current fight to curtail it. In 2001, the Serbian Interior Ministry mapped and systematically identified 118 organized criminal groups for the first time in the White Book.  In 2002, journalist Jelena Bjelica wrote a study on human trafficking in Europe and the Balkans. In 2005, journalist Miloš Vasić published an in-depth profile of the Zemun Clan, which he described as one of the most powerful criminal organizations in the Balkans during their heyday between 1999 and 2003. One of the first regional projects on the impact of organized crime on peace-building in the region was launched in 2006. Organized crime in the region also sparked interest among international scholars, such as Misha Glenny, who, in 2018, published McMafia, about the global rise in organized crime since the 1980s. Despite the surge in research on organized crime in the Western Balkans, the findings are still insufficient and lacking in certain respects. These works reflect three main trends of illicit economies in the Western Balkans. First, the geography of organized crime has advanced from heroin smuggling through the Balkan route to cocaine trafficking from Latin America to Western Europe, and to the region being a source of particular illicit goods such as weapons and cannabis.6 Second, the politics of illicit economies in the region has evolved from being an ecosystem of political protection for crime facilitators to organized corruption that enriches and shields those with power. Third, following the end of communism and regional wars, the lack of institutional capacity to provide tangible societal improvements resulted in only partial reforms in criminal justice systems across the region. This is despite the 1999 reforms in justice and home affairs fostered by the EU through the Stabilization and Association Process. The objective of this study prepared by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) is to systematically and strategically identify gaps in the current understanding of organized crime in the Western Balkans, and to suggest future areas of work that could help close these gaps and better understand illicit practices. This gap analysis maps existing knowledge, identifies  trends and emerging issues, and reveals the under-researched aspects of illicit economies in the region. With this approach, this study aims to better understand areas of uncertainty and initiate new studies more quickly. Identifying blind spots in the existing literature is a necessary step for creating a new research agenda, establishing strategic and funding priorities and designing research projects that can build the knowledge base, enhance analysis and contribute to evidence-based policymaking.10 Ultimately, this research agenda should aid in the prevention and disruption of organized crime both in the Western Balkans or perpetrated by criminals from the region. After first describing the methodology and data collection techniques of the gap analysis, the paper explains the scale, scope and impact of organized crime and corruption research in the Western Balkans. It then examines the main thematic focus of research on organized crime in the region – namely, criminal markets, criminal actors, and the resilience of state and non-state actors to organized crime and corruption. The third part lays out recommendations and further steps to better understand and increase knowledge of the illicit economies in the Western Balkans.   

 Geneva:  The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. 2023. 38p. 

By Gabriel Feltran,  Cecília Lero, Marcelli Cipriani, Janaina Maldonado, Fernando de Jesus Rodrigues, Luiz Eduardo Lopes Silva e Nido Farias

The paper proposes an explanation for the variations in homicide rates in Brazil in the past two decades. Based on the comparison of ethnographic experiences lived in the criminal universe of four capital cities (São Paulo, Porto Alegre, São Luís and Maceió), we propose two analytical strategies: 1) the breakdown of quantitative homicide rate data by victim profile, and 2) the construction of historical synopses of conflicts between factions at the local level. We demonstrate how homicide rates, in specific socio-demographic profiles, oscillate based on changes in conflicts between factions at the local level conflicts, and influence variations in the aggregate rates   

  Dilemas, Rev. Estud. Conflito Controle Soc. – Rio de Janeiro – Edição Especial no 4 – 2022 – pp. 349-386  

By Stephanie G. Stahlberg

Brazilian prison gangs have spilled out to the outside world and become criminal enterprises. The expansion of São Paulo’s Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and Rio de Janeiro’s Comando Vermelho into all regions and most states in Brazil signifies a major security concern for the country. A third player, Família do Norte (FDN), poses a challenge to the other organized criminal groups (OCGs), especially in the North region, where the FDN fights to retain control of the lucrative drug trading route through the Amazon. Although organized crime is believed to play a significant role in the violence level in Brazil, no study has been able to measure their presence and activity levels beyond one city or state. This dissertation develops a novel methodology for tracking criminal groups, by using the number of Google searches about each OCG in a given state and year. This method creates a proxy for the OCGs' presence and activity level, which is also used to generate a competition index. The analysis shows that OCG presence by itself does not explain homicide rates well; in fact, some states with high levels of OCG activity have relatively low homicide rates. However, in combination with a highly competitive scenario, the strong presence of these groups can translate into high levels of violence. When all three OCGs are present, the homicide rate is on average five points higher than when there are fewer OCGs present. In places where there is dominance of a single OCG, violence levels are lower. Findings from the data analysis and expert interviews reveal that the homicide reduction occurs because of higher levels of criminal market monopolization and criminal governance. Powerful OCGs replace the state and regulate violence in these communities, and are strong and threatening enough to prevent the state from challenging them directly. This study shows that a decrease in the homicide rate in the presence of OCGs should not be seen as a clear success, but rather as a warning sign that criminality may be more united and stronger.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2021. 176p.

By  Vanda Felbab-Brown

  This paper explores the trends, characteristics, and changes in the Mexican criminal market, in response to internal changes, government policies, and external factors. It explores the nature of violence and criminality, the behavior of criminal groups, and the effects of government responses. • Over the past two decades, criminal violence in Mexico has become highly intense, diversified, and popularized, while the deterrence capacity of Mexican law enforcement remains critically low. The outcome is an ever more complex, multipolar, and out-of-control criminal market that generates deleterious effects on Mexican society and makes it highly challenging for the Mexican state to respond effectively. • Successive Mexican administrations have failed to sustainably reduce homicides and other violent crimes. Critically, the Mexican government has failed to rebalance power in the triangular relationship between the state, criminal groups, and society, while the Mexican population has soured on the anti-cartel project. • Since 2000, Mexico has experienced extraordinarily high drug- and crime-related violence, with the murder rate in 2017 and again in 2018 breaking previous records. • The fragmentation of Mexican criminal groups is both a purposeful and inadvertent effect of high-value targeting, which is a problematic strategy because criminal groups can replace fallen leaders more easily than insurgent or terrorist groups. The policy also disrupts leadership succession, giving rise to intense internal competition and increasingly younger leaders who lack leadership skills and feel the need to prove themselves through violence. • Focusing on the middle layer of criminal groups prevents such an easy and violent regeneration of the leadership. But the Mexican government remains   deeply challenged in middle-layer targeting due to a lack of tactical and strategic intelligence arising from corruption among Mexican law enforcement and political pressures that makes it difficult to invest the necessary time to conduct thorough investigations. • In the absence of more effective state presence and rule of law, the fragmentation of Mexican criminal groups turned a multipolar criminal market of 2006 into an ever more complex multipolar criminal market. Criminal groups lack clarity about the balance of power among them, tempting them to take over one another’s territory and engage in internecine warfare. • The Mexican crime market’s proclivity toward violence is exacerbated by the government’s inability to weed out the most violent criminal groups and send a strong message that they will be prioritized in targeting......

Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2019. 29p.

By L. Musing

This report investigates the domestic legislation, and policies regarding the keeping and captive breeding of tigers and disposal of their parts in the EU, and the enforcement of these regulations. Six target countries were selected as a focus for this study: Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK, based on preliminary trade data analysis and suspected or known links to the captive tiger population and tiger trade nexus. Between February and July 2020, interviews and consultations were conducted through written questionnaires and video-calls with stakeholders, including the CITES Management and/or Enforcement Authorities of the six target countries, European and national zoo associations, and relevant NGOs. CITES trade data for the period 2013 through 2017 were used to analyse reported legal trade patterns involving tigers to and from the EU, and data for the same time period from two seizures databases: EU-TWIX and TRAFFIC’s Wildlife Trade Information System (WiTIS), were used to assess the EU’s involvement in the illegal trade of tigers and their parts and derivatives.

Cambridge, UK: TRAFFIC, and World Wildlife Fund, 2020. 53p.

By E.Y. Sy and K. Krishnassamy 

Over 90 percent of the Philippine Pangolins documented to have been seized from illegal trade over the last two decades have been seized in the last two years of the period, says a new TRAFFIC study. The estimated equivalent of 740 Critically Endangered Philippine Pangolins were seized from illegal trade in the country between 2000 and 2017. However, between 2018 and 2019, an estimated 6,894 pangolins were seized suggesting a stunning nine-fold increase in pangolins seized between the two periods

TRAFFIC, Southeast Asia Regional Office, Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia.2020. 28p.

By GlobeScan

  The research questions and results reported herein are provided on a confidential basis to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). WWF is free to use the findings in whatever manner it chooses, including releasing them to the public or media, after consultation with GlobeScan on the use and dissemination of the data. GlobeScan Incorporated subscribes to the standards of the World Association of Opinion and Marketing Research Professionals (ESOMAR). ESOMAR sets minimum disclosure standards for studies that are released to the public or the media. The purpose is to maintain the integrity of market research by avoiding misleading interpretations. If you are considering the dissemination of the findings, please consult with us regarding the form and content of publication. ESOMAR standards require us to correct any misinterpretation.  

World Wildlife Fund, 2020. 83p.

By Hai Thank Luong

As one of the earliest countries in the Southeast Asia region, Vietnam joined the CITES in 1994. However, they have faced several challenges and practical barriers to preventing and combating illegal wildlife trade (IWT) after 35 years. This first study systematically reviews 29 English journal articles between 1994 and 2020 to examine and assess the main trends and patterns of the IWT’s concerns in Vietnam. Findings show (1) slow progress of empirical studies, (2) unbalanced authorship between Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese conducting their projects, (3) weighting of wildlife demand consumptions in Vietnamese communities rather than investigating supply networks with high-profile traffickers, (4) lacking research in green and conservation criminology to assess the inside of the IWT, and (5) need to focus on potential harms of zoonotic transmission between a wild animal and human beings. The article also provides current limitations before proposing further research to fill these future gaps.

Laws 11: 64. https://doi.org/10.3390/laws 11040064 

By Education for Nature

Vietnam's Revised d Penal Code came into effect in January 2018. The revised law is much tougher on wildlife crime and, in general, is sufficiently effective in deterring crime if applied universally. By some accounts, the revised Criminal Code is the “ideal law” as it closes loopholes, increases punishment for serious offenses, and incorporates a foundation on which the criminal justice system can effectively deter wildlife crime. According to the new Penal Code, activities including hunting, catching, killing, rearing, caging, transporting, and/or trading of endangered, precious, and rare species or their parts and derivatives shall be deemed criminal offenses, depending on the number of animals involved. The revised Penal Code has also added “possession” as a criminal offense, closing a critical loophole that previously allowed criminals to escape with mere fines for keeping frozen tigers, rhino horn, and other endangered species and their products.   

  Species fully protected under the new Penal Code include endangered species listed under Decree 160 [2013] and its subsequently updated list of protected species under Decree 64 [2019], species listed under Group I of Decree 06, and species listed under Appendix I of CITES. The Penal Code also affords greater protection to species that are not listed on the aforementioned Decree 64, Decree 06, or Appendix I of CITES, permitting authorities to criminally charge offenders if they are engaged in illegal activities involving large quantities of animals. This new aspect of the Penal Code strengthens the hand of law enforcement dealing with criminal networks that smuggle large quantities of animals such as snakes or freshwater turtles that may not be specifically protected under endangered species laws.  

Hanoi: Education for Nature, 2021. 12p.

  By Antônio Sampaio

This report concludes a research project conducted by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), with support of Germany’s GIZ, that examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic challenges accompanying it on criminal governance in cities. The project aims to study how gangs and other non-state armed groups operating in illicit economies have altered their activities in light of the new circumstances in areas of criminal governance, and how governments and civil society have responded. We define criminal governance as instances in which armed criminal groups set and enforce rules, provide security and other basic services – such as water, electricity or internet access – in an urban area, which may be a part or the whole of an informal settlement or a neighbourhood. The project uses a comparative methodology, drawing from semi-structured interviews feeding into five separate case studies. The data is then synthesized in a final report that analyzes and summarizes the main trends. A fuller description of the methodology can be found in the final report.  The case studies in this project are Tumaco (Colombia), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), San Salvador (El Salvador), Nairobi (Kenya) and Cape Town (South Africa)  

Geneva, SWIT: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. 2021. 39p.

Tomáš Divia, Indra Oosting, and Gerard Wolters

In this study, we investigated the relation between the different stages of women trafficking (i.e. recruitment, entrance, accommodation, labor, and finance) and the structure of five criminal networks involved in women trafficking in the Netherlands (Ns ranging from 6 to 15). On the one hand, it could be argued that for efficiency and avoidance of being detected by law enforcement agencies, the network structure might align with the different stages, resulting in a cell-structured network with collaboration between actors within rather than across stages. On the other hand, criminal actors might prefer to collaborate and rely on a few others, whom they trust in order to circumvent the lack of formal opportunities to enforce collaboration and agreements, resulting in a core-periphery network with actors also collaborating across stages. Results indicate that three of the five networks were characterized by a core-periphery structure, whereas the two other networks exhibit a mixture of both a cell-structured and core-periphery network. Furthermore, using an Exponential Random Graph Model (ERGM), we found that actors were likely to form ties with each other in the stages of recruitment, accommodation, and exploitation, but not in the stages of transport and finance.

European Journal of CriminologyOnlineFirst, November 28, 2021

By Lisa B. Puglisi, Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, and Emily A. Wang

As with past pandemics of influenza, COVID-19 tore through US prisons and jails; however, the COVID-19 pandemic, uniquely, has led to more health research on carceral systems than has been seen to date. Herein, we review the data on its impact on incarcerated people, correctional officers, health systems, and surrounding communities. We searched medical, sociological, and criminology databases from March 2020 through February 2022 for studies examining the intersection of COVID-19, prisons and jails, and health outcomes, including COVID-19 incidence, prevalence, hospitalizations, and vaccination. Our scoping review identified 77 studies—the bulk of which focus on disease epidemiology in carceral systems, with a small minority that focuses on the efficacy or effectiveness of prevention and mitigation efforts, including testing, vaccination, and efforts to depopulate correctional facilities. We highlight areas for future research, including the experiences of incarcerated people and correctional staff, unanticipated health effects of prolonged quarantine, excess deaths due to delays in healthcare, and experimental studies on vaccine uptake and testing in correctional staff. These studies will enable a fuller understanding of COVID-19 and help stem future pandemics.

Annual Review of Criminology 

By The Mixed Migration Centre and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

“A Roadmap for Advocacy, Policy Development and Programming: Protection in Mixed Movements along the Central and Western Mediterranean Routes 2021” is an edited volume that presents key recommendations from more than 40 researchers, protection actors, policy-makers and people with a displacement experience from North, West, East and the Horn of Africa as well as Europe and North America, who came together in February 2021 for a Policy Workshop convened by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and Mixed Migration Centre (MMC). Recommendations are drawn from 25 research papers aimed at informing policy, programming and advocacy. The volume aims to be a roadmap for strategic engagement with different asylum and migration stakeholders at local, national and international levels. It offers concrete ways forward for a number of issue-areas key to the protection of people on the move: the important role of local authorities and community-based approaches to protection, the need for a stronger focus on children and youth on the move, and more sustainable approaches to combatting trafficking in persons, to name a few.

Mixed Migration Centre and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees : 2021. 132p.

By Stuart Strome and Read Hayes

Organized Retail Crime (ORC) is large-scale theft or fraud of consumer products by groups of professional criminals. ORC includes more than just in-store theft, encompassing a variety of retail crimes, including shoplifting, gift card fraud, receipt and return fraud, ticket switching, cargo theft, as well as associated crimes such as forgery, money laundering, transportation of stolen goods across state lines, and racketeering. Due in part to the ability to easily resell certain items, ORC groups often target high-demand products (Clarke 1999; Smith 2018). ORC is a perennial problem for retailers, costing them billions of dollars in lost sales. According to one report, ORC is responsible for a loss of $700,000 per every one billion dollars in sales (NRF 2017, ). Furthermore, ORC affects almost every category of retail, as 94% of retailers reported being victims. Therefore, understanding this costly problem, and its relationship to other types of crime is key to understanding how to better combat ORC. The rise of ORC as an endemic phenomenon coincides with the increase in illicit use and sale of opioids in the United States. Deaths from opioid overdose exceeded 42,000 in 2017, and deaths from powerful synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, have doubled between 2015 and 2017 (Morgan and Jones 2018), . A recent publication places the costs of the opioid crisis at $500 billion, although estimates range as high as $1 trillion (Ryan 2018). Indeed, this epidemic has coincided with a rise in arrests for opioid possession, and there is some speculation that the opioid crisis is related to recent rises in the homicide rate (Rosenfeld 2018, ; Kennedy and Abt 2016). However, while a recent article by CNBC sheds light on the potential relationship between the opioid crisis and ORC, there is little systematic study on that relationship (Brewer and Zamost 2017). More importantly, understanding the relationship between ORC and the opioid crisis necessitates better understanding what drives opioid offenders, and how their patterns of crime, and motivations, differ from other offenders.  

Gainesville, FL: Loss Prevention Research Council, 2019? 12p.

By The Mixed Migration Centre

This study focuses on the protection experiences of Ethiopian nationals, travelling east out of Ethiopia via irregular overland journeys towards Saudi Arabia for labour employment. This so-called Eastern Route has been the major mixed migration route for Ethiopian irregular labour emigration for well over a decade. A limited number of Ethiopians also apply for asylum with UNHCR in Yemen but the vast majority travel on north to the Yemen/Saudi border.

Ravenstone Consult, 2023. 72p.

By Chesa Boudin   

As San Francisco District Attorney, I was elected in late 2019 on an ambitious platform focused on ending mass incarceration and decreasing  racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Little did I imagine that my first year in office would bring an acute national focus to the exact issues on which I had campaigned. Two phenomena have, thus far, largely defined the year 2020. First, the COVID-19 pandemic, which continues to have a grossly disparate impact on communities of color2 and on those living and working in prisons and jails. Second, a national Black Lives Matter movement grew in response to the murder of George Floyd—potentially the largest national movement in U.S. history—demanding police accountability and criminal justice reform with a focus on racial equity. The nation’s collective response to these developments—how the country navigates an unprecedented national health crisis and an unprecedented protest movement—will have lasting implications for myriad aspects of American life, including the criminal justice system. COVID-19 and the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement created a tremendous impetus for wide-ranging criminal justice reform, including decarceration and police accountability. Although some criminal justice jurisdictions have actively resisted change, and others have simply been unprepared for it, San Francisco was ready. After all, San Francisco voters had just elected me on explicit promises to deliver many of the reforms now in the national spotlight, and we were changemaking   

110 J. Crim. L. & Criminology Online 23 (2020).   

By Thea Johnson   

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, activists and advocates have rightly focused their attention on the immediate need to decrease the number of people in jails and prisons.1 Jails and prisons have been ravaged by the  virus and defendants are at real risk of illness or death in those spaces.2 But as the crisis continues and the backlog of criminal cases grows, defendants face additional risks. This essay focuses on one such risk: the heightened risk for coerced and false pleas during the crisis. The vehicle by which the criminal system resolves most criminal cases—the plea bargain —is ripe for abuse and overuse in the best of times. Unfortunately, now is far from the best of times, and as I outline here, there are several reasons why the usual risk factors for coercive plea bargaining are exacerbated during this public health crisis. Furthermore, despite recent efforts to reform the plea system, the pandemic risks entrenching many of the most negative characteristics of plea bargaining even more deeply. Quite simply, the coercive nature of plea bargaining will get worse in a system that is backlogged and unable to hold jury trials for several months. Many states are not counting the delays caused by the coronavirus toward a defendant’s speedy trial clock, which means the cases can remain active for long periods of time and without any risk to the prosecutor that the case will be dismissed for lack of prosecution. For a defendant in this backlogged system, with a case hanging over her head and a speedy trial clock without finality, the plea will be her only option. In such an environment, coercive pleas can and will flourish. This essay proceeds in three parts. Part I of the essay discusses the particular concerns related to coercive plea bargaining during the COVID-19 crisis. Part II offers solutions to these issues and suggests that this moment may provide opportunities for creative problem-solving capable of outlasting the virus. Finally, Part III discusses some silver linings of the crisis for the criminal system at large and the practice of plea bargaining in particular. Like many other recent pieces about the impact of coronavirus on the criminal justice system, this essay addresses the current crisis in the hopes that it will teach us important lessons about the system more broadly. By seeing some of the worst parts of the system exposed through COVID-19, we may be able to better meet future challenges and tackle some of the underlying daily injustices of the modern criminal process.  

110 J. Crim. L. & Criminology Online 1 (2020).

By Ryan T. Cannon   

You have been arrested. You are put in handcuffs and transported to a local jail where you are fingerprinted and photographed. The crime you are charged with is not serious or violent, but you have prior criminal convictions, or perhaps a history of not coming to court when told—making you ineligible for a future release on your own recognizance. Bail was set, but like most others in the cell you occupy, you cannot pay even the smallest bond. You are facing a period of pretrial detention. A week passes without being brought to see a judge for your arraignment. Then another week passes. If you are lucky, you may have spoken to an attorney on the phone, but no one has come to the jail to see you. All around, individuals are beginning to talk about a mysterious new illness. As you continue to sit in pretrial detention, the spread of the novel coronavirus among prisoners rises quickly. By the week of April 22, 2020 the number of confirmed cases in prisons grew three-fold—from 1,643 to  6,664.1 By the middle of September, 2020 the count was up to 132,677, with 1,108 reported deaths. Mass testing reveals that the number of prisoners who have contracted the virus is far greater than expected, partly because of the number of people who carry the virus without exhibiting symptoms. Many facilities cannot conduct mass testing of inmates, and others choose not to test at all. For you and the inmates around you not yet infected, precautionary measures are largely nonexistent. You are locked in a facility where social distancing—the primary method for avoiding transmission—is practically impossible. It is unlikely that you have ready access to hand sanitizer or face masks.  Prisons and jails begin using solitary confinement as a method of quarantining..... 

110 J. Crim. L. & Criminology Online 91 (2020)

By Lauren Rebecca Smith | Steve Sharman | Amanda Roberts

Background: There is evidence that prisoners have the highest rate of problem gambling in any population, but little is known about the nature of in-prison gambling, the motives for it or how it relates to prior gambling behaviour. Aims: To investigate the prevalence and type of gambling prior to prison and the prevalence, type, and reasons for gambling in prison. Methods: Two hundred and eighty-two male volunteers in a Category B male prison in England completed a questionnaire which included the Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI). Results: One hundred and twenty-six (45%) reported gambling in prison, with eighty-one (30%) of participants reporting that gambling was a normal part of prison life. Pre-prison behaviour, whether type of index offence or prior gambling, had little relationship to in-prison gambling. Frequency of gambling in prison increased with increasing PGSI risk category. The most common types of gambling in prison were card/dice games, sports and ball games, while the most common motives were entertainment, excitement or sense of challenge and to win prizes, with significant differences in motive between PGSI risk categories. Prison canteen items formed the most common currency gambled. People within the higher PGSI risk category were more likely to have borrowed items from other prisoners. 7 Conclusions: Our research has added to existing literature by identifying high rates of gambling in prison and showing that prisoners' perceptions of gambling are as a normal part of prison life. Findings suggest that screening and support should be available to manage gambling in prison, including support to reduce gambling-related debt, particularly given associations between debt and violence in prison. Relief from boredom and need for excitement were among the most common reasons for gambling in prison, indicating that there is a need to provide a more appropriately stimulating prison environment.

Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health 43(6): 389-403, 2022