by  Ronald Makanga Kakumba

Mob justice is a form of extrajudicial punishment or retribution in which a person suspected of wrongdoing is typically humiliated, beaten, and in many cases killed by vigilantes or a crowd. Mob action takes place in the absence of any form of fair trial in which the accused are given a chance to defend themselves; the mob simply takes the law into its own hands. Mob justice is not only criminal but also amounts to a violation of human rights. Over the past decade, Uganda has seen a significant rise in the number of cases of mob justice. According to the Uganda Police Force’s (2013-2019) annual crime reports, 746 deaths by mob action were reported and investigated in 2019, compared to 426 in 2013, a 75% increase. “Mob kills 42 in 7 weeks,” the Daily Monitor reported in March 2019, citing police figures – an average of six lynchings a week. Homicides by mob action in Uganda occur mainly in response to thefts, robberies, killings, and reports of witchcraft. According to the 2015 Afrobarometer survey in Uganda, one in six Ugandan adults said they took part in mob justice during the preceding year or would do so if they “had the chance.” This suggests that mob justice is not just a fringe problem in Uganda but commands attention and requires collective action. Why would a substantial number of Ugandans resort to taking the law into their own hands as an alternative form of “justice”? Analysts have pointed to a number of factors that might contribute to a willingness to engage in mob justice. One is a lack of trust in the formal criminal justice system to administer fair and timely justice. A 2005 study in Uganda showed that mob actions were often motivated by widespread suspicion or misunderstanding of the justice system, especially concerning the procedure of police bail, under which suspected culprits can be temporarily released before the court process. …Statistical analyses show that a lack of trust in the police is associated with a willingness to engage in mob justice, while perceived corruption undermines trust and thus indirectly contributes to a willingness to join others in mob actions. Further, our analysis finds that being a victim of crime (physical assault), encountering problems in the court system, finding it hard to obtain police assistance, and having to pay a bribe to police or court officials are factors that make people more likely to say they would take part in mob action against suspected criminals.

  Afrobarometer Policy Paper No. 70.   Afrobarometer 2020, 17p.  

By Robert VargasFollow, Chris WilliamsFollow, Phillip O’SullivanFollow and Christina Cano

This Essay investigates Chicago city-government policy responses to the four largest homicide waves in its history: 1920–1925, 1966–1970, 1987–1992, and 2016. Through spatial and historical methods, we discover that Chicago police and the mayor’s office misused data to advance agendas conceived prior to the start of the homicide waves. Specifically, in collaboration with mayors, the Chicago Police Department leveraged its monopoly over crime data to influence public narratives over homicide in ways that repeatedly (1) delegitimized Black social movements, (2) expanded policing, (3) framed homicide as an individual rather than systemic problem, and (4) exclusively credited police for homicide rate decreases. These findings suggest that efforts to improve violence-prevention policy in Chicago require not only a science of prevention and community flourishing but also efforts to democratize how the city uses data to define and explain homicide.

University of Chicago Law Review: Vol. 89: Iss. 2, Article 5.

By Thomas Hogan  

History drives prosecutors and police. It may be time for prosecutors and police to drive history. There are four pillars of violent crime prevention that criminal justice actors can rely on to halt the current spike in homicides in America.Prosecutors and police are shaped by their times. After the discipline imposed by fighting in World War II and the orderliness of the 1950s, the American criminal justice system became less punitive in the 1960s, fueled by notions of flower power and the opinions of the Warren Supreme Court.[1] A great American crime wave followed, cresting with the extreme violence of the crack epidemic in the 1980s and early 1990s. American prosecutors, police, and politicians responded by pulling every lever available to them, desperate to restore order to increasingly dangerous cities. Prosecutors sought strict sentences. More police officers were deployed to the streets. Sophisticated computer programs were used to track crime. Mandatory minimum sentences and sentencing guidelines were imposed to constrain the discretion of judges. The strategies eventually worked—although nobody is sure exactly which responses worked and to what extent—leading to what became known as the great American crime decline. Crime rates fell for decades and even once-violent cities like New York became relatively safe, accompanied by persistent arguments that the U.S. incarcerated too many people to ensure this safety.In reaction to the illusion of a permanent victory over violent crime and the perception of over-incarceration, a new breed of prosecutors arrived on the American political scene in the 2010s, elected in liberal-leaning big cities. Called “progressive prosecutors,” these law-enforcement officials began to pull every lever in the opposite direction from that of their 1990s colleagues. They refused to prosecute entire categories of crimes, sought lesser sentences even for violent offenders, and viewed the police with open suspicion. ….Not surprisingly, violent crime began to rise again. The U.S. saw almost a 30% rise in homicides across the nation in 2020, a record for a one-year increase.[3] In 2021, homicides continued to climb, and many cities experienced the largest number of homicides in their history.[4] And even after courts reopened following the Covid era, cities as different as Portland, Milwaukee, and Albuquerque set new homicide records in 2022.There are vigorous debates about what caused this spike in homicides. Progressive prosecutors, de-policing, the Covid-19 pandemic, increased gun sales, violent protests, weakened pretrial detention and sentencing, and numerous other theories have been proposed by academics and law-enforcement professionals.

New York: The Manhattan Institute, 2023. 20p.

By Joel Wallman, Richard Rosenfeld, Randolph Roth

The twenty-five-year epidemic of opioid misuse in the United States has taken at least 750,000 lives through overdose. We undertook to learn whether this toll might have been accompanied by an increase in violence resulting from growth in the illicit opioid market, which, like most illicit drug markets, includes a risk of violence due to conflicts among sellers and between sellers and buyers. We found that increases in activity in this market were associated with—and arguably caused—increased levels of homicide. Using county opioid overdose rates as a measure of levels of transactions in the illicit market, we looked for an association between those rates and county homicide rates between 1999 and 2015. …Despite this growth in overdose rates during the period, homicide rates declined for both groups and in both Appalachian and non-Appalachian counties. … The finding of another harm wrought by the opioid epidemic provides another reason to pursue vigorous public-health efforts, with a strong emphasis on treatment, to stem the epidemic.   

New York:  The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, 2023. 20p.

By Brian Braganza and Nick Cardone

One of the first questions that emerged after the murders that took place in Nova Scotia on April 18 and 19, 2020, was: What was the role played by harmful expressions of masculinity generally, and male violence against women specifically. Even before much was known about the perpetrator, there were calls for an inquiry that would look at the murders through a feminist lens, and for a full exploration of his history of violence against women (Henderson, 2020). This report does not seek to draw conclusions on the motivations for the murders or how past behaviour may or may not have served as a warning. Instead, it was commissioned to explore the relationship between traditional concepts of masculinity and violence. Doing this requires us to look critically at a broad range of issues so omnipresent that we are often unaware of them  

Halifax, NS: The Joint Federal/Provincial Commission into the April 2020 Nova Scotia Mass Casualty, 2022. 87p.

By Theodoros Rakopoulos

From Clans to Co-ops explores the social, political, and economic relations that enable the constitution of cooperatives operating on land confiscated from mafiosi in Sicily, a project that the state hails as arguably the greatest symbolic victory over the mafia in Italian history. Rakopoulos’s ethnographic focus is on access to resources, divisions of labor, ideologies of community and food, and the material changes that cooperatives bring to people’s lives in terms of kinship, work and land management. The book contributes to broader debates about cooperativism, how labor might be salvaged from market fundamentalism, and to emergent discourses about the ‘human’ economy.

New York: Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books, 2018. 240p.

By Timon de Groot

Over the course of its history, the German Empire increasingly withheld basic rights—such as joining the army, holding public office, and even voting—as a form of legal punishment. Dishonored offenders were often stigmatized in both formal and informal ways, as their convictions shaped how they were treated in prisons, their position in the labour market, and their access to rehabilitative resources.  With a focus on Imperial Germany’s criminal policies and their afterlives in the Weimar era, Citizens into Dishonored Felons demonstrates how criminal punishment was never solely a disciplinary measure, but that it reflected a national moral compass that authorities used to dictate the rights to citizenship, honour and trust.

New York; Oxford UK: Berghahn Books, 2023. 250p.

By  Lorenzo Rodrigo Aldeco Leo, Jose A. Jurado, Aurora A. Ramírez-Álvarez

  This document studies the effect of the homicide rate on internal migration in Mexico. Reduced form evidence shows that net migration of skilled workers decreases into local labor markets where homicide rates increased after 2007, suggesting workers prefer destinations with lower homicide rates. This result is due to lower inflows, without effects on outflows, pointing to the existence of moving costs. To quantify the welfare cost of increasing homicides, we use workers' migration decisions and a spatial equilibrium model. Skilled workers' average willingness to pay to decrease the homicide rate by 1% is estimated at 0.58% of wages. The welfare cost is in the order of several points of GDP per year, depending on the assumptions. Workers who do not migrate bear the largest share of the overall welfare cost

Working Paper, 2022: 11 Mexico City: Banco de México 2022. 53p.  

By Cecilia Farfán-Méndez , Romain Le Cour Grandmaison , Nathaniel Morris

Despite the well-documented human costs of the war on drugs, and the growing evidence of the environmental impacts of illicit economies, the militarized repression of the illicit drug trade remains a central hemispheric security and cooperation strategy in Northern and Central American countries. Through a multi-disciplinary dialogue that combines history, sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science, this Special Issue critically interrogates why despite these failures the war on drug endures. Together, the contributors challenge explanations focused on state absence, weakening of the state, and ungoverned spaces and instead propose a research agenda that sheds light on the long-lasting, structural effects of the capitalistic integration of the region within the economy of illicit drugs. In particular, the Special Issue contributes to three existing and interconnected debates: First: the role of drug economies and illicitness on state formation, social inequalities, and development in Mexico and Central America. Second: the impact of illicit economies on local populations, and the connections between the licit and the illicit, margins and centers, and political orders and violence. Third: the variety of stakeholders that benefit from the war on drugs and that link the United States, Mexico, and Central America in licit and illicit fashions.

Journal of Illicit Economies and Development 4(2):102-112, 2022

By Charles Fain Lehman

While most Americans have focused on the Covid-19 pandemic, the nation’s other great epidemic has continued to burn. Drug overdoses now claim the lives of over 100,000 Americans every year, a rate that appears likely to continue or grow for the foreseeable future. While the crisis once was concentrated predominantly in rural, white communities, the introduction of novel synthetic opioids, particularly fentanyl, into the illicit drug supply has spread overdoses across urbanizations. Today, small-town and big-city leaders alike desperately need tools to fight back against the drug crisis. It can often seem as though drug policy is outside the ambit of local leaders, who lack the capacity to go after international traffickers or spend trillions of dollars on care. But local government, as the closest entity to the front lines of the crisis, plays a vital role in addressing it. This paper, therefore, explores options for local policymakers to respond to the drug crisis. In particular, it considers six frequently discussed local-scale policies: • Naloxone access and distribution • Investing in treatment capacity • Drug court programs • Wastewater tracking • Supervised consumption sites • Drug market interventions For each policy, this paper examines the evidence, offers estimates of costs, and provides caution where necessary. The overall goal is to give local policymakers a better understanding of what tools they have to more effectively tackle the other health crisis in their communities.  

New York: The Manhattan Institute, 2022. 19p.

By Courtney McKnight , Chenziheng Allen Weng, Marley Reynoso, Sarah Kimball, Lily M. Thompson, Don Des Jarlais

Background: As the proportion of drug overdose deaths involving fentanyl continues to increase in the US, monitoring exposure to and possible changes in intention to use fentanyl among people who use drugs (PWUD) is of great public health importance. This mixed methods study examines intentionality of fentanyl use among persons who inject drugs (PWID) in New York City during a period of unprecedently high rates of drug overdose mortality. Methods: Between October 2021 and December 2022, N = 313 PWID were enrolled in a cross-sectional study that included a survey and urine toxicology screening. A subset of N = 162 PWID also participated in an in-depth interview (IDI) examining drug use patterns, including fentanyl use and experiences with drug overdose. Results: 83% of PWID were urine-toxicology positive for fentanyl, though only 18% reported recent intentional fentanyl use. Intentionality of fentanyl use was associated with being younger, white, increased drug use frequency, recent overdose (OD), recent stimulant use, among other characteristics. Qualitative findings suggest PWID tolerance to fentanyl may be increasing, which could result in an increased preference for fentanyl. Concern about overdose was common with nearly all PWID using overdose prevention strategies to avoid it. Conclusion: The findings from this study demonstrate a high prevalence of fentanyl use among PWID in NYC, despite an expressed preference for heroin. …

International Journal of Drug Policy , Article in Press, May 2023

By Nicole Rafter

FROM THE PREFACE: “All early theories of crime were biological. Indeed, until the early 20th century, biological theories and criminology were virtually synonymous. But then biological theories were pushed aside by sociological explanations of criminal behavior. Although a few die hard eugenicists kept biological theories alive, by the end of World War II, when people realized what the Nazis had done in the name of biology, these explanations were firmly rejected and consigned to the dustbin of history--to stay there, many hoped, forever. Biological theorizing was not dead, however, but only dormant….”

NY. New York University Press. 2008. 326p. USED BOOK - CONTAINS MARK-UP

By Jonathan D. Rosen and  Hanna Samir Kassab 

  According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the Americas is the most violent region in the world. The Americas has a homicide rate of 16.3 per 100,000 people, while Africa had a homicide rate of 12.5 per 100,000 inhabitants. Europe, Oceania, and Asia had much lower homicide rates with three percent, three percent, and 2.9 percent, respectively (see Fig.  1.1).1 The Americas is also home to the most violent country in the world. In 2015, El Salvador surpassed Honduras as the most violent non-waring nation. Violence has exceeded the days of the country’s civil war, which lasted for more than a decade. In fact, experts note that at one point in 2015 El Salvador had one murder per hour. Jonathan Watts writes, “Last Sunday was, briefly, the bloodiest day yet with 40 murders. But the record was beaten on Monday with 42 deaths, and surpassed again on Tuesday with 43. Even Iraq—with its civil war, suicide bombings, mortar attacks and US drone strikes—could not match such a lethal start to the week.”2 In January 2017, the country saw a rare phenomenon occur: one day without a murder.3 Much of the violence in El Salvador has been a result of gang-related activities as well as the consequences of the government’s tough on crime strategies.4 El Salvador’s neighbors, Guatemala and Honduras, have also seen high levels of gang-related violence.5 Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández argued that 80 percent of the homicides that occur in this country are related to organized crime.  

New York:London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 165p.

By Hernan Mondani and Amir Rostami

Outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMGs) have received increased attention from both law enforcement agencies and the research community. This study investigates the criminal collaboration patterns of two OMGs with a long history of hostilities. We use government data on individuals registered as belonging to Hells Angels MC, Bandidos MC and individuals with multiple OMG memberships, and suspicion data from 2011 to 2016 to build co-offending networks. Our results show that members of multiple OMGs tend to have higher centrality and clustering. These members also have the highest levels of suspicions per capita, and most of the co-offending is related to nexus links involving multiple membership individuals. They can be described as ‘criminal nomads’, collaborating with individuals from different organisations. Our results suggest that core members tend to engage in white-collar crime to a greater extent than those on the periphery, which tend to engage more in violence and drug crime.

GLOBAL CRIME                                               2022, VOL. 23, NO. 2, 193–215

By John Pitts

Drawing upon research undertaken by the present author in East, North West and South London and the work of other UK social scientists, this article considers the evidence concerning the involvement of young people of African-Caribbean origin and Mixed Heritage in street gangs and gang crime in London (For the sake of brevity, I will simply refer to these young people as Black, not least because this is how they usually define themselves). It outlines the sometimes acrimonious debate about the relationship between race, crime and street gangs in the United Kingdom in the past three decades, concluding that while many of the claims made about this relationship may be exaggerated or simply untrue, the evidence for the over-representation of Black young people in street gangs in London is compelling. The article then turns to the changing social and economic predicament of some Black young people in the capital since the 1980s and its relationship with their involvement in gang crime. Finally, it considers the role of drugs business in the proliferation of the gang form and ‘gangsta’ culture and the involvement of growing numbers of younger Black people in County Lines drug dealing.

Youth Justice, Volume 20, Issue 1-2, April-August 2020, Pages 146-158

Edited by Sundari Anitha and Ruth Lewis  

Until recently, higher education in the UK has largely failed to recognise gender-based violence (GBV) on campus, but following the UK government task force set up in 2015, universities are becoming more aware of the issue. And recent cases in the media about the sexualised abuse of power in institutions such as universities, Parliament and Hollywood highlight the prevalence and damaging impact of GBV. In this book, academics and practitioners provide the first in-depth overview of research and practice in GBV in universities. They set out the international context of ideologies, politics and institutional structures that underlie responses to GBV in elsewhere in Europe, in the US, and in Australia, and consider the implications of implementing related policy and practice. Presenting examples of innovative British approaches to engagement with the issue, the book also considers UK, EU and UN legislation to give an international perspective, making it of direct use to discussions of ‘what works’ in preventing GBV.

Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press, 2018. 262p.

By Meenakshi Fernandes and Lenka Jančová  

  Corruption, which can be defined as the 'abuse of entrusted power for private gain', poses a significant threat in the European Union. Corrupt practices can lead to a misuse of public funds and can contribute towards an erosion of democracy and the rule of law. The European Union can do more to tackle corruption and curb its negative impacts on society. This report draws on a quantitative analysis of corruption in the EU with a focus on three aspects: i) democracy and the rule of law; ii) public trust in institutions; and iii) public procurement. Further EU action to tackle corruption could strengthen trust in public institutions and enhance regulatory certainty. In quantitative terms, the social and economic gains could reach up to €58.5 billion per year.  

 Brussels: EPRS | European Parliamentary Research Service, 2023.  78p.

By Ilia Gaglio, Jacopo Guzzon, Katarina Bartz, Luca Marcolin, Rrap Kryeziu, Emma Disley, Jirka Taylor, Shann Hulme

The present study to strengthen the fight against corruption in the EU aims at providing recommendations for possible EU measures in the area of corruption prevention and repression and to assess and compare the impacts of the identified policy options. The core problems, drivers and issues of the EU anti-corruption acquis, the need for and added value of EU action and the relevant policy objectives were identified through detailed desk research and numerous consultation activities. Overall, the assessment pointed to legislative and operational barriers that hinder both the prevention and the fight against corruption in the EU. Main barriers include significant differences in terms of legislative and administrative arrangements in place at the national level to fight against corruption, as well as a lack of adequate data collection and monitoring of corruption data and trends that prevents sufficient prevention of corruption in the EU. …

Publications Office of the European Union, 2022. 193p.

Edited by Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and Jana Warkotsch

This last title in the series covers the most important findings of the five yearsEU sponsored ANTICORRP project dealing with corruption and organized crime.How prone to corruption are EU funds? Has EU managed to improve governance in the countries that it assists? Using the new index of public integrity and a variety of other tools created in the project this issue looks at how EU funds and norms affected old member states (like Spain), new member states (Slovakia,Romania), accession countries (Turkey) and the countries recipient of development funds (Egypt, Tanzania, Tunisia). The data covers over a decade of structural and development funds, and the findings show the challenges to changing governance across borders, the different paths that each country has experienced and suggest avenues of reforming development aid for improving governance.

Opladen: Verlag Barbara Budrich, 2017. 128p.

Edited by Enrico Carloni, Diletta Paoletti  

The challenge of fighting corruption is strategic at a global and European level, and the inadequacy of the repressive and penal response alone has now been evidenced: corruption must not only be fought, but understood, and preventive administrative measures must be taken. Anti-corruption is not an issue that concerns only the judiciary branch, the legal system, and police authorities, but it is, above all, a challenge for society and institutions as a whole. And it is a challenge to be transformed, in particular, into a change in administrations and institutions, in their way of organizing and operating. This volume the result of the Project “Administrative Prevention through Targeted Anti-corruption MODels for candidate countries” – APTAMOD, co-funded by the European Union’s HERCULE III programme, which has conducted comparative law studies and high-profile research activities in the field of administrative prevention of corruption, with specific focus on Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia.

Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2022.  178p.