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CRIMINOLOGY

NATURE OR CRIME-HISTORY-CAUSES-STATISTICS

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A Qualitative Evaluation of a Fentanyl Patch Safer Supply Program in Vancouver, Canada

By Alexa Norton, Andrew Ivsins, Elizabeth Holliday, Christy Sutherland, Thomas Kerr, Mary Clare Kennedy

Background: The ongoing overdose crisis in Canada has prompted efforts to increase access to a “safer supply” of prescribed alternatives to the unregulated drug supply. While safer supply programs predominantly distribute hydromorphone tablets, the Safer Alternatives for Emergency Response (SAFER) program in Vancouver, Canada offers a range of prescribed alternatives, including fentanyl patches. However, little is known about the effectiveness of fentanyl patches as safer supply. Drawing on the perspectives and experiences of program participants, we sought to qualitatively evaluate the effectiveness of the SAFER fentanyl patch program in meeting its intended aims, including reducing risk of overdose by decreasing reliance on the unregulated drug supply. Methods: As part of a larger mixed-methods evaluation of SAFER, semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with 17 fentanyl patch program participants between February 2022 and April 2023. Thematic analysis of interview data focused on program engagement, experiences, impacts, and challenges. Results: The flexible program structure, including lack of need for daily dispensation, the extended missed dose protocol, and community pharmacy patch distribution fostered engagement and enhanced autonomy. Improved management of withdrawal symptoms and cravings due to steady transdermal dosing led to reduced unregulated drug use and overdose risk. Participants also experienced economic benefits and improvements in overall health and quality of life. However, skin irritation and patch adhesion issues were key barriers to program retention. Conclusion: Our findings demonstrate the value of including fentanyl patch safer supply in the substance use continuum of care and offer insights for innovations in delivery of this intervention.

International Journal of Drug Policy Volume 131, September 2024, 104547

Rise of Online Antisemitism in Arabic Six Months Post October 7 Narrative Analysis and Call to Action

By VERED ANDRE’EV, OMAR MOHAMMED, LARA PORTNOY

Often referred to as the “world’s oldest hatred”, antisemitism, Jew-hatred, or Judeophobia has led to mass expulsions, pogroms, massacres, and the largest genocide in human history – the Holocaust. Hatred against the Jewish people can be traced across history and geography, evolving with global events, trends, and local cultures. Today, antisemitism is experiencing a worldwide revival, with the events of October 7th, 2023, and the resulting Israel-Hamas war serving as an impetus to major spikes in hateful rhetoric and violent action. Antisemitic incidents were already at historic highs; they have increased further. Antisemitism is an issue of serious concern that requires public attention and policy response. As stated in November 2022 by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), “antisemitic incidents and hate crimes violate fundamental rights, especially the right to human dignity, the right to equality of treatment and the freedom of thought, conscience and religion”. According to the Anti-Defamation League’s Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2023, “In 2023, ADL tabulated 8,873 antisemitic incidents across the United States. This represents a 140% increase from the 3,698 incidents recorded in 2022 and is the highest number on record since ADL began tracking antisemitic incidents in 1979.” When assessing antisemitism in Arabic-speaking countries, the situation is even more disturbing. The ADL’s Global 100 survey, first launched in 2014, measures antisemitic beliefs across 100 countries, revealing notably high levels in Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), with index scores reaching 74% in Saudi Arabia and 93% in the West Bank and Gaza (Weiberg, 2020). Antisemitism in the Arab world has deep historical roots, intensified by figures like Muhammad Rashid Rida in the early 20th century, who used antisemitic rhetoric in response to political Zionism. This hatred has been embedded in Arab political discourse for over a century, often framed in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, where conspiracy theories portray Jews as a global malevolent force. Islamist movements, emerging in the 1920s, have perpetuated these antisemitic views, depicting Jews as historical enemies and untrustworthy partners in peace. The legacy of antisemitism includes influential texts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which were widely disseminated in the Arab world and continue to influence perceptions today (Winter & Link, 2024).

Washington, DC: Program on Extremism at George Washington University , 2025. 35p.

The Learning Disabilities and Challenges (LDC) Suite of Accredited Offending Behaviour Programmes An Uncontrolled Before-After Evaluation of Clinical Outcomes

By Rebecca Hubble

The Learning Disabilities and Challenge (LDC) suite are accredited offending behaviour programmes delivered by His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) in custody and the community for adults assessed as having mild impairments in intellectual and adaptive functioning. There are four programmes within the suite: Becoming New Me Plus (BNM+), New Me Strengths (NMS), Living as New Me (LNM), and the Heathy Sex Programme (HSP). Our interim outcome evaluation attends to BNM+ and NMS only. This is because LNM and HSP are secondary programmes, i.e., they are intended to be delivered after completion of a primary programme. BNM+ is for men with LDC assessed as high or very high risk of reoffending, who present with at least one or more strong criminogenic needs across multiple domains and have a general violence, intimate partner violence and/or sexual offending conviction(s). NMS is designed for people with any offence convictions, who have been assessed as medium or above risk of reoffending, with sufficient levels of criminogenic need addressed by the programme. The aim of this interim outcome evaluation was to determine whether BNM+ and NMS participants were making positive progress against programme targets reflected in the Success Wheel Measure (SWM). The SWM, designed by HMPPS, is the core metric for measuring participant progress against programme targets for participants of BNM+ and NMS. The assessment domains are: (1) Managing Life’s Problems, (2) Healthy Thinking, (3) Positive Relationships, (4) Healthy Sex (for those with a sexual offence conviction only), and (5) Sense of Purpose (desistance from crime). The research also aimed to identify if individual (relating to the person) or programme delivery factors affected changes in SWM scores, and whether these changes varied between assessment domains.

Ministry of Justice Analytical Series 2024

London: Ministry of Justice, 2024. 48p.

Safer for All: A Plan to End Street Homelessness for People with Serious Mental Illness in NYC

By New York City. Office of the Comptroller General

In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, a series of high-profile, random, and tragic acts of violence have heightened New Yorkers’ attention to people living on the streets and subways with serious mental illness. Following the killing of Michelle Go in January 2022 by an individual with a long history of psychosis, 37 more people were pushed off subway platforms in just over a year. In November 2023, New York Times reporters highlighted nearly 100 random attacks by mentally ill, homeless New Yorkers “failed by a system that keeps making the same errors.”

In recent weeks, the sense of crisis has been amplified by more heartbreaking incidents. On November 18, 2024, Ramon Rivera – who cycled on and off the streets with serious mental illness for years – went on a stabbing spree, killing 3 people in broad daylight in midtown Manhattan. On December 9, a jury acquitted Daniel Penny of the killing of Jordan Neely, whose failures by the system were legion. On Sunday, December 22, 2024, Debrina Kawam who was herself homeless was cruelly burned to death on an F train at the Coney Island station. On New Year’s Eve, another New Yorker was pushed onto the tracks into an oncoming train. New Yorkers’ sense of safety on subways and in their own neighborhoods has plummeted.

In response to mounting safety concerns, New York City and State have launched a slew of initiatives and legislative efforts to confront the issue of street homelessness for people with serious mental illness. But the efforts are piecemeal. People continue to fall through the cracks and there is little public confidence that things will change.

The Adams Administration has ineffectively coordinated a Continuum of Care (CoC) – and the results are devastating. Outreach teams lose track of clients. Hospitals release patients back to the street after a few hours because there aren’t enough inpatient beds to treat them. Judges cannot refer people into programs proven to reduce recidivism and increase adherence to treatment because there are no slots.[9] Jails place just 3% of discharged people with serious mental health challenges into supportive housing.

An audit by the Comptroller’s office in 2024 of the City’s Intensive Mobile Treatment (IMT) program for homeless New Yorkers with the most severe histories of mental illness found that the City inadequately measured whether the program was decreasing incarceration because of a lack of coordination among City agencies, that outcomes and treatment measures were inconsistent, and that placements into stable housing had declined precipitously.

Despite these persistent failures, evidence from other cities – and indeed, even from New York City – argues strongly that this crisis can be solved with more diligent leadership.

Data shows that there are approximately 2,000 people with serious mental illness at risk for street homelessness cycling through City streets, subways, jails, and hospitals. At that scale, a better-coordinated system is within the grasp of a city with the resources and capacity of New

York. Indeed, the City is already spending billions on outreach, police overtime, city jails, shelters, and emergency hospitalizations, but City Hall has continuously failed to coordinate these efforts effectively to solve the problem.

At the heart of that better-coordinated system, this report centers a “housing first” approach, which evidence shows has had great success in Philadelphia, Houston, Denver, other cities throughout the United States and around the world, and even in New York City. Housing first combines existing housing vouchers and service dollars to get people off the street and directly into stable housing with wraparound services.

Data shows that 70-90% of people experiencing street homelessness with serious mental illness will accept permanent housing with a coordinated outreach strategy, and that it will keep them stably housed, off the street, and better connected to the mental health services that will stabilize them.

Of course, a strategy that is 70-90% effective does not work 10-30% of the time. For those instances, New York City will need better processes for mandated treatment. Sometimes, individuals need to be hospitalized, either voluntarily or involuntarily when they are a danger to themselves or others. For an effective continuum of care, New York should thoughtfully amend its laws to allow a wider range of medical professionals to place or keep individuals in hospitalization and required the consideration of an individual’s full medical and behavioral history.

On any given day, there are approximately 1,400 people with serious mental illness detained in NYC jails, including Rikers Island. There is an urgent need to ensure these individuals are provided with adequate mental health care while they are in detention, and before they are discharged and return back to their communities. Instead, the City releases most of these individuals without receiving mental health treatment and without placement into housing, increasing the likelihood of returning to unsheltered homelessness. In addition, individuals assigned by court order to “assisted outpatient treatment” (AOT) face significant challenges including homelessness. Without stable housing, adherence to the required treatment plans becomes more difficult, undermining the effectiveness of AOT programs.

In all these cases, ultimately individuals need to be connected to stable housing – when they are discharged from jail, when they leave the hospital, or while they are in AOT – or else they will simply return to the street, where they are far more likely to go without treatment and continue in a declining spiral. That’s why a housing first approach is a central element of any effective plan.

With better coordination and management from City Hall, with a “housing first” approach that evidence suggests will work most of the time, and with more effective mandated treatment options when it doesn’t, New York City can dramatically reduce – and even effectively end – street homelessness of people with serious mental illness.

New York: New York City Office of the Comptroller General, 2025. 99p.

Swedish Crime Survey 2024

By Karolina Kamra Kregert

The main purpose of the Swedish Crime Survey (SCS) is to study trends in self-reported exposure to crime, fear of crime, confidence in the criminal justice system and crime victims' contact with the criminal justice system in the Swedish population (16-84 years). The survey also aims to describe differences among population groups, such as differences between men and women or among different age groups. This chapter presents a selection of the indicators included in the report, to summarise the results and provide an overall picture of trends and patterns. Note that, in the context of the SCS, exposure to crime refers to events that occurred during the previous calendar year, meaning that SCS 2024 refers to exposure to crime in 2023. Fear of crime refer to perceptions over the past year, while unsafety and confidence in the criminal justice system refer to perceptions at the time the questionnaire was answered. Trends Exposure to sexual offences, threats and bicycle theft have decreased, while fraud has increased There is a decreasing trend in the proportion of the population who state that they have been exposed to sexual offences, threats and bicycle theft. Exposure to sexual offences has significantly decreased in this year's survey (3.8 % in 2023, compared to 4.7 % in 2022), and after a sharp increase in the period 2012-2017, has begun decreasing instead. The proportion of respondents having been exposed to threats has also decreased (7.4% in 2023, compared to 7.7% in 2022), with an evident decreasing trend since 2020. Before that, there was an increase between 2014 and 2019. Furthermore, the proportion of households exposed to bicycle theft has decreased for the fourth consecutive year. Both sales fraud and card and credit fraud have increased in this year's survey. For sales fraud, an increasing trend has been observed since the first measuring point (2016), with a significant increase in this year's survey (from 6.1%, in 2022, to 6.9%, in 2023). Card and credit fraud have increased in the last two years, having previously decreased in 2020 and 2021. In terms of exposure to robbery, there was a decreasing trend as of 2020, but in this year's survey the proportion is the same as the previous year. For assault, pickpocketing, online harassment, harassment, burglary and car theft, the proportion has remained stable over the last three to four years.

English summary of Brå report 2024:8

Stockholm: Swedish National Council on Crime Prevention, 2024. 30p.

Crime Radiation Theory: The Co-production of Crime Patterns Through Opportunity Creation and Exploitation

By Shannon J. Linning , Kate Bowers and John E. Eck

Considerable research shows that crime is concentrated at a few proprietary places: addresses and facilities. Emerging research suggests that proprietary places may radiate crime: activities at a place increase the risk of crime in the area around it. Weaknesses in the research create uncertainty about radiation, so we need more rigorous research. To conduct this research, we need a theory of crime radiation that operates at two spatial levels: the proprietary place and the area. This paper describes such a theory. Our theory states that crime radiation stems from the interaction between place management decisions at the place and offenders searching for opportunities in the area. Place managers create crime opportunities inside and outside their places. Offenders exploit place managers’ creations by deliberately searching for opportunities or by chancing upon the opportunities. The ways place managers and offenders interact gives rise to three types of crime radiation: hot dot, veiled dot, and cold dot. Finally, we propose questions crime scientists should answer to better understand crime radiation.

Crime Science (2024) 13:32

Scarlet and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History

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.

Criminal record and employability in Ghana: A vignette experimental study

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

Urgent and long overdue: legal reform and drug decriminalisation in Canada

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.

The End of Intuition-Based High-Crime Areas

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

"Blasphemy" in Schools : Self-Censorship and Security Fears Amongst British Teachers

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.

Whose History? How Textbooks Can Erase the Truth and Legacy of Racism

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

Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination: We, Too, Are Humans

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.

Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature

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.

What Is Structural Injustice?

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.

  A Better Path Forward for Criminal Justice: A Report 

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.

FOR A A BROADER UNDERSTANDING OF UNDERSTANDING OF CORRUPTION AS AS A A CULTURAL FACT, AND ITS INFLUENCE IN IN SOCIETY

By Fernando Forattini

This brief brief article intends to to demonstrate some of the problems with the main theories on corruption and introduce the reader to the new field of Anthropology of Corruption, a type of of research that tries to understand one of the most pressing issues nowadays through a nonbinary point of view, but trying to to understand the root of of corruption, and its its multifaceted characteristic, especially through its cultural aspect; and why it is, contemporarily, the most it is, the most effective political-economic political-economic discourse discourse – - most most at at the the times used in a populistic fashion, at the the expense of of democratic institutions. Therefore, we we will will briefly analyze the three main theoretical strands on corruption and point at some of its faults; then indicate to the reader what are the main goals Anthropology of Corruption, and what questions it seeks to answer; of and, and, finally, the the political impact that corruption discourses have on society, and its perils when on its instrumentalized in populistic discourses.

Academia Letters, Article 2245.. 2024

Desistance as an Intergenerational Process

By Christopher Wildeman and Robert J. Sampson

Nearly 35 years ago, Sampson and Laub popularized the concept of desistance from crime and isolated core factors that promote and inhibit this process. In this article, we introduce the concept of intergenerational desistance and provide guidance on measuring and explaining this process, encouraging researchers to think of the life-course of crime in terms of both individuals and generations. We first review research on the intergenerational transmission of family criminality and criminal justice contact, relying also on research outside of criminology to highlight how using broader conceptions of the family, including social parents, entire generations, and three (or more) generations could enliven this area. Bridging these literatures allows us to then introduce the concept of intergenerational desistance and elaborate on the concept of intergenerational escalation and demonstrate how they can be measured using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN). We close by developing a research agenda for considering intergenerational desistance and escalation in ways that enhance our understanding of how the life-course of crime, criminal justice contact, and other troubles in life (e.g., with alcohol, drugs, and mental health) progress through families.

Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 7, Page 85 - 104

Cultural Criminology: A Retrospective and Prospective Review

By Lynn S. Chancer

This review looks at the main ideas that have animated cultural criminology in the past while suggesting new directions the perspective might follow going forward. It discusses early definitions and subject matters; the historical contexts within which cultural criminology was initially welcomed; and cultural criminology's special emphasis on the importance of studying emotions as well as rationality to fully comprehend crime and criminality. Three older critiques of cultural criminology and one lesser known one are also outlined: theoretical vagueness; under-emphases on class, structural factors, and conjunctural analyses; insufficient attention to gender and intersectionality; and, a relatively less discussed concern, prioritizing symbolic interactionism rather than sometimes tapping Freudian psychosocial concepts when investigating matters of individual agency. I argue that cultural criminology distinctively recommends multidimensional analyses as called for by the complex character of crime itself. Finally, drawing on and in agreement with Jonathan Ilin's work, I suggest that cultural criminology should routinely consider three levels both theoretically and methodologically: the macro (structural); the meso (cultural); and the micro (individual). The review concludes with examples that, if taken up in future research, would further widen cultural criminological interests, associations, and commitments to multidimensionality.

Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 7, Page 129 - 142

Group Threat and Social Control: Who, What, Where, and When

By Matt Vogel and Steven F. Messner

Group threat theory has stimulated an impressive number of studies over the course of the past several decades. Our review takes stock of this literature, focusing on core issues of concern to the criminological community. We begin by documenting the theoretical origins of group threat theory and discussing the early research informed by the theory. We then highlight the ways in which criminologists have built on and extended the early research by expanding the theory's scope, clarifying mechanisms, and addressing methodological issues. In our concluding remarks, we direct attention to the more consequential limitations of the work to date and offer suggestions about areas for fruitful growth in the future

Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 7, Page 39 - 58