By National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Mental, emotional, and behavioral (MEB) disorders—including mental illness and substance use disorders—are at the heart of several ongoing national crises and affect every U.S. population group, community, and neighborhood. Existing infrastructure responds to these crises predominantly with treatment and recovery, or addressing MEB disorders once they already exist, rather than working to prevent them. Available prevention services are insufficiently funded, fragmented, and better developed for substance use prevention than mental health promotion and for children and youth than for other age groups. Improved prevention services could help people thrive, avert the harms that accompany MEB disorders, and reduce the burden on an already overtaxed system. In response to a request from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (the National Academies) convened a committee of experts to develop a blueprint, including actionable steps for building and sustaining an infrastructure, for delivering prevention interventions for behavioral health disorders. The committee’s report, Blueprint for a National Prevention Infrastructure for Mental, Emotional, and Behavioral Disorders, presents its conclusions and recommendations. The committee asserts that the existing MEB disorder prevention infrastructure—partially present in other systems like education, health care, and human services—provides a foundation to build on and that creating another system would be inefficient. Instead, the report’s conclusions and recommendations focus on strengthening, coordinating, and funding existing structures to close gaps, prepare workers, and maximize available data to deliver needed interventions .

Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. 2025. 384p

By: U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center

Preventing targeted violence in America is everyone's responsibility. Far too often, communities have witnessed mass injury and loss of life at the hands of an attacker, only to learn that the perpetrator had a long history of threatening or concerning behaviors. In many cases, the attacker's behavior was witnessed by community bystanders, some of whom sought to report their concerns to public safety officials. Unfortunately, many communities lack the structured systems to receive, evaluate, and respond to these reports in a way that reduces the likelihood of a violent outcome. The framework presented herein is the latest NTAC [National Threat Assessment Center] offering intended to support the violence prevention efforts of state and local law enforcement agencies. The steps that follow describe how agencies can adopt the principles of the Secret Service model to proactively identify and intervene with those who intend to carry out acts of targeted violence in their communities. These steps are not intended to be prescriptive, but rather offer a scalable blueprint that can be implemented by agencies varying in size, structure, and resources, all of which share the Secret Service's mission of preventing targeted violence.

United States. Secret Service. National Threat Assessment Center, Oct. 2024

By: Louise E. Porter and Adam Graycar

Some places have no crime and some have a lot, and thus we study hotspots. Corruption is structured differently to crime, but hotspots still are notable. The difference is that hotspots are not places but clusters of activity. This paper analyses corruption cases from New York City to explore a way of identifying such clusters. Seventy-two cases were coded according to features that represent the elements of the crime triangle: offender and motivation, target and opportunity, and place and ability. Multidimensional scaling revealed three groups of cases, exhibiting different patterns of corrupt activity. Group one involved politicians involved in high value financial corruption. Group two primarily involved supervisors who created opportunities involving procurement and contracts. Group three involved inspectors, particularly in the infrastructure sector, who were involved with low value bribes to violate regulations. Each is discussed in relation to situational crime prevention principles to develop possible strategies for prevention.

Security Journal, Vol. 29 (3) 423-441.

By Pyman, Mark and Heywood, Paul M.

This open-access book provides accessible insight into how to tackle corruption in organizations and institutions. It explains how to recognize and analyze corruption issues, together with knowledge and advice on how they can be avoided, prevented, or minimized. It also provides a framework through which readers can examine what strategies are available to tackle corruption issues, a rationale for how to prioritize strategies depending on circumstances and context, and guidance on how to critique various options. The book will appeal to professionals and practitioners, as well as academics interested in governance and corruption.

Cham: Springer Nature, 2024.