By Sharon White-Harrigan, Michelle Feldman, Zachary Katznelson, Dana Kaplan, Michael Rempel and Joanna Weill

On Rikers Island, the widespread violence, dysfunction, and lack of access to basic services mean no one leaves better off than when they went in. The roughly 300 women and gender-expansive people incarcerated at Rikers are uniquely vulnerable.* They face an elevated risk of sexual abuse and retraumatization.1 Over 80 percent are being treated for mental illness and 27 percent have a serious mental illness. Many are victims of domestic violence. Seventy percent are caregivers, and incarceration has profoundly negative consequences for their children and families. Almost 90 percent are held before trial, mostly due to unaffordable bail. Last fiscal year, the city spent over $550,000 to keep a single person locked up at Rikers for a year.2 New York City is legally required to close Rikers by August 2027. The city is on track to replace the Rikers jail complex with four borough-based facilities closer to courthouses, lawyers, families, and service providers. Women and gender-expansive people, most of whom are currently housed at the Rose M. Singer Center on Rikers (“Rosie’s”), are slated to be relocated to a new facility in Kew Gardens, Queens (see box below). The deaths of 31-year-old Mary Yehudah and the other eight people incarcerated at Rikers who have died this year—underscore the importance of shutting the jails as soon as possible.3

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New York: Center for Court Innovation, 2022. 40p.

By Rosemary L Barberet

"Women, Crime and Criminal Justice speaks to the need for a new book that offers a global and diverse approach to the study of women and criminology. Despite an explosion of interest in international women's issues such as femicide and trafficking in women, criminological books in the area have previously focused predominantly on domestic issues. This is the first fully internationalized book to focus on women as offenders, victims and justice professionals. It provides background, as well as specialized information that allows readers to comprehend the global forces that shape women and crime; analyze different types of violence against women (in peacetime and in armed conflict); and grasp the challenges faced by women in justice professions such as the police, the judiciary and international peacekeeping. Provocative, highly topical, engaging and written by an expert in the field, this book examines the role of women in crime and criminal justice internationally. Topics covered include: the role of globalization and development in patterns of female offending and victimization, how a human rights framework can help explain women's crime, victimization and the criminal justice response, global women's activism, international perspectives on violence against women, including femicide, violence in conflict and post conflict settings, sex work and sex trafficking, women's access to justice, as well as the increased role of women in international criminal justice settings.

London; New York: Routledge, 2014. 248p.

A Historical Sketch 1672-1916 by S. M. Edwardes. “A perusal of the official records of the early period of British rule in Bombay indicates that the credit of first establishing a force for the prevention of crime and the protection of the inhabitants belongs to Gerald Aungier, who was appointed Governor of he Island in 1669 and filled that office with conspicuous ability until his death in Surat in 1677.” Oxford University Press (1923) 240.

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By Philip Zimbardo

Renowned social psychologist and creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment Philip Zimbardo explores the mechanisms that make good people do bad things, how moral people can be seduced into acting immorally, and what this says about the line separating good from evil.. The Lucifer Effect explains how—and the myriad reasons why—we are all susceptible to the lure of “the dark side.” Drawing on examples from history as well as his own trailblazing research, Zimbardo details how situational forces and group dynamics can work in concert to make monsters out of decent men and women.

Here, for the first time and in detail, Zimbardo tells the full story of the Stanford Prison Experiment, the landmark study in which a group of college-student volunteers was randomly divided into “guards” and “inmates” and then placed in a mock prison environment. Within a week the study was abandoned, as ordinary college students were transformed into either brutal, sadistic guards or emotionally broken prisoners.

By illuminating the psychological causes behind such disturbing metamorphoses, Zimbardo enables us to better understand a variety of harrowing phenomena, from corporate malfeasance to organized genocide to how once upstanding American soldiers came to abuse and torture Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib. He replaces the long-held notion of the “bad apple” with that of the “bad barrel”—the idea that the social setting and the system contaminate the individual, rather than the other way around.

New York: Random House, 2008. 576p.

By Deborah Puccio-Den

“The Mafia? What is the Mafia? Something you eat? Something you drink? I don’t know the Mafia. I’ve never seen it.” Mafiosi have often reacted this way to questions from journalists and law enforcement. Social scientists who study the Mafia usually try to pin down what it “really is,” thus fusing their work with their object. In Mafiacraft, Deborah Puccio-Den undertakes a new form of ethnographic inquiry that focuses not on answering “What is the Mafia?” but on the ontological, moral, and political effects of posing the question itself. Her starting point is that Mafia is not a readily nameable social fact but a problem of thought produced by the absence of words. Puccio-Den approaches covert activities using a model of “Mafiacraft,” which inverts the logic of witchcraft. If witchcraft revolves on the lethal power of speech, Mafiacraft depends on the deadly strength of silence. How do we write an ethnography of phenomena that cannot be named? Puccio-Den approaches this task with a fascinating anthropology of silence, breaking new ground for the study of the world’s most famous criminal organization.

Chicago: HAU Books, 2021. 295p.

By Bruce A. Jacobs and Richard Wright

Street Justice: Retaliation in the Criminal Underworld is the first systematic exploration of the phenomenon of modern-day retaliation to be written from the perspective of currently active criminals who have experienced it firsthand – as offenders, victims, or both. Retaliation lies at the heart of much of the violence that plagues inner-city neighborhoods across the United States. Street criminals, who live in a dangerous world, realistically cannot rely on the criminal justice system to protect them from attacks by fellow lawbreakers. They are on their own when it comes to dealing with crimes perpetrated against them, and they often use retaliation as a mechanism for deterring and responding to victimization. Against this background, Bruce Jacobs and Richard Wright draw extensively on their candid interviews with active street criminals to shine a penetrating spotlight on the structure, process, and forms of retaliation in the real-world setting of urban America – a way of life that up to now has been poorly understood.

Cambridge, UK: New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 154p.

By Lindsey Sank Davis

Despite significant progress towards equal protection under the law for women, LGBT individuals, and people of color in the United States, hate crime remains a pervasive problem, and rates appear to have increased in recent years. Bias-motivated homicide – arguably the most serious form of hate crime – is statistically rare but may have far-reaching consequences for marginalized communities. Data from the Uniform Crime Reports and the National Crime Victimization Survey have suggested that, on average, fewer than 10 bias-motivated homicides occur in the United States per year; however, data from open sources indicate that the rate of bias-motivated homicide is much higher when utilizing different criteria. In addition to this lack of clarity about prevalence, the dynamics of bias-motivated homicide remain understudied. The present study explores a non-random U.S. sample of 58 closed, adjudicated case files provided by the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit for research purposes. The utility of the leading hate crime typology by McDevitt, Levin, and Bennett (2002) is examined by applying the typology to this sample of bias-motivated homicides, and interrater reliability of the typology is considered. To address weaknesses in the typology, this study explores observable expressive and instrumental crime scene behaviors and their relationship to victim identity group membership, provocation, and victim-offender relationship. Results provide preliminary support for a biasmotivated homicide typology based on victim identity and victim-offender interaction preceding the offense. Implications for prevention, offender rehabilitation, and law enforcement are discussed.

New York: City University of New York, 2018. 172p.

Edited by Anna-Maria Getoš Kalac Hans-Jörg Albrecht Michael Kilchling

For the first time, this volume brings together experts in the fields of criminology, criminal law and criminal justice from across the Balkans, to discuss the state of the art of criminology and current crime trends in a region that has thus far largely been neglected by European criminological research. The first chapter analytically describes and defines the Balkan region, not only as a unique historical region, but also as a religious and legal territory, as well as a region of migration and violence and a criminological region sui generis. These facts are used to explore and promote the likely benefits of a coherent regional criminological research approach – with the long-term goal of creating a sustainable ›crimiological landscape‹. Contributions from all members of the Balkan Criminology Network provide an in-depth overview of facts and background information about criminological education and research and data about crime, general crime trends, and current crime and criminal justice challenges. The final chapter presents selected research projects from the actual research agenda of the Max Planck Partner Group for Balkan Criminology (MPPG). This selection makes the book an essential reader for anyone interested in the current criminological setting of the Balkans and an excellent starting point for regional or country specific crime research.

Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2014. 554p.

Soraya Giaccardi, Shawn Van Valkenburgh, Erica L. Rosenthal, Erica Watson-Currie.

On average, 110 people are killed by guns every day in the United States, with Black Americans disproportionately impacted. Young Black men are 20 times more likely to be killed by a gun than young white men, and between 2019 and 2020, deaths by guns increased by 39.5% among Black people. In 2021, for the first time, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared gun violence a “serious public threat.”

Firearms are the leading cause of death among children and teens, increasing by 29% from 2019 to 2020 alone. School shootings receive disproportionate media and policy attention and are a major source of fear, but 85% of child victims of gun homicide die in their homes, and over 80% of child gun suicides involve a gun owned by a family member. In addition, myths persist, such as the belief that gun violence is primarily caused by mental illness, or that a civilian “good guy” can intervene in an active shooting and save lives if they are allowed to carry a loaded gun.

New York: Everytown for Gun Safety, 2022.

By Jerome Hall

From the introduction: “Theories of social science, especially those concerning methodology, are often presented very abstractly and in technical vocabularies which seem remote from the actual problems of research. This does not imply that theory should be abandoned or subordinated to practical guidance on research. What is involved is precisely the question of cogent, critical, realistic social theory. Under the circumstances, it occurred to me that a report and discussion of methods and theories employed in this research on theft might be of Interest. The general approach to the problems studied was simply one of curiosity about many phases of law, an attitude conditioned by strong intellectual currents in the social sciences.

New York. Bobbs-Merrill. (1992) 1995. 409p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

By Marc-André Lagrange and Thierry Vircoulon

The current rise in insecurity in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), is often attributed to urban youth gangs – the Kulunas. Embedded in Kinshasa’s neighbourhood life and partnered with local political parties and law enforcement agencies, these gangs threaten urban security in the city. This paper examines the rise of the Kulunas from a historical and sociological perspective, and analyzes the state’s security responses to address it.

Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Crime, 2021. 24p.

By Jean-Michel Rabaté

The decade since the publication of Jean-Michel Rabaté's controversial manifesto The Future of Theory saw important changes in the field. The demise of most of the visible French or German philosophers, who had produced texts that would trigger new debates, then to be processed by Theory, has led to drastic revisions and starker assessments.

Globalization has been the most obvious factor to modify the selection of texts studied. During the twentieth century, Theory incorporated poetics, rhetorics, aesthetics and linguistics, while also opening itself to continental philosophy. What has changed today? The knowledge that we live in a de-centered world has destabilized the primacy granted to a purely Western canon. Moreover, much of contemporary theory remains highly allusive and this is often baffling for students. Theory keeps recycling itself, producing authentic returns of basic theses, terms and concepts. Canonical modern theorists often return to classical texts, as those of Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche.

New York: London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 250p.

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By Bob Halloran

In August 2013, “Bac Guai" John Willis, also known as the “White Devil" because of his notorious ferocity, was sentenced to 20 years for drug trafficking and money laundering. Willis, according to prosecutors, was “the kingpin, organizer and leader of a vast conspiracy," all within the legendarily insular and vicious Chinese mafia.

It started when John Willis was 16 years old . . . his life seemed hopeless. His father had abandoned his family years earlier, his older brother had just died of a heart attack, and his mother was dying. John was alone, sleeping on the floor of his deceased brother's home. Desperate, John reached out to Woping, a young Chinese man Willis had rescued from a bar fight weeks before. Woping literally picks him up off the street, taking him home to live among his own brothers and sisters.

White Devil explores the workings of the Chinese mafia, and he speaks frankly about his relationships with other gang members, the crimes he committed, and why he’ll never rat out any of his brothers to the cops.

Dallas: BenBella Books, 2016. 320p.

Crime Statistics by Type and Outcome, HTML AND XLSL formats.

2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1996 to 1999.

Police-reported crime statistics in Canada, 2021. DOWNLOAD

Police-reported crime statistics in Canada, 2020. DOWNLOAD

Justice Statistics Web Site (English) - Go There

Justice Statistics Web Site( Portuguese) - Go There

By RAND Europe

This document is the final report of a study commissioned by the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) in November 2019 to examine Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based capabilities for border and coast guard applications. This report presents the main findings of the study, including:  A characterisation of the evolving landscape of AI-based capabilities in border security and mapping of the technology, capability areas and border security functions to which AI may be applied;  Mapping of the current and desired capability levels for nine selected technology areas, as well as pathways to their adoption;  Discussion of cross-cutting enablers and barriers for adoption of AI-based capabilities in border security; and  Reflections on the implications for Frontex.

Warsaw, Poland: Frontex – European Border and Coast Guard Agency, 2020. 167p.

Edited by Sandra M. Bucerius and Michael Tonry

Social tensions between majority and minority populations often center on claims that minorities are largely responsible for crime and disorder. Members of some disadvantaged groups in all developed countries, sometimes long-standing residents and other times recent immigrants, experience unwarranted disparities in their dealings with the criminal justice system. Accusations of unfair treatment by police and courts are common. The Oxford Handbook of Ethnicity, Crime, and Immigration provides comprehensive analyses of current knowledge about these and a host of related subjects. Topics include legal and illegal immigration, ethnic and race relations, and discrimination and exclusion, and their links to crime in the United States and elsewhere. Leading scholars from sociology, criminology, law, psychology, geography, and political science document and explore relations among race, ethnicity, immigration, and crime.

Individual chapters provide in-depth critical overviews of key issues, controversies, and research. Contributors present the historical backdrops of their subjects, describe population characteristics, and summarize relevant data and research findings. Most articles provide synopses of racial, ethnic, immigration, and justice-related concerns and offer policy recommendations and proposals for future research. Some articles are case studies of particular problems in particular places, including juvenile incarceration, homicide, urban violence, social exclusion, and other issues disproportionately affecting disadvantaged minority groups. The Oxford Handbook of Ethnicity, Crime, and Immigration is the first major effort to examine and synthesize knowledge concerning immigration and crime, ethnicity and crime, and race and crime in one volume, and does so both for the United States and for many other countries.

Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 960p.

By Jacob I. Stowell

Stowell examines the impact of immigration on violent crime. Crimiological theory, and particularly social disorganization theory, has held that immigration is inextricably linked to crime. Stowell tests whether patterns of neighborhood-level violence are partially attributable to the population characteristics of an area, and, in particular, to its nativity composition. His analyses offer both support for and challenges to social disorganization theory. Consistent with theoretical expectations, immigration is found to be indirectly associated with levels of violence. Little support, however, is found for the notion that immigrants are a largely homogeneous population, or that immigration is positively associated with property crime. The results call for a refinement of the disorganization theory, one that is sensitive to the differences among the foreign-born population and one that does not assume a negative impact of immigration on neighborhood social structure and violence.

New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2017. 184p.

Edited by Ilias Bantekas and Emmanouela Mylonaki

This volume is one of the few books to explain in-depth the international crimes behind the scenes of substantive or procedural law. The contributors place a particular focus on what motivates participation in international crime, how perpetrators, witnesses and victims see their predicament and how international crimes should be investigated at local and international level, with an emphasis on context. The book engages these questions with a broad interdisciplinary approach that is accessible to both lawyers and non-lawyers alike. It discusses international crime through the lens of anthropology, neuroscience, psychology, state crime theory and information systems theory and draws upon relevant investigative experience from experts in international and domestic law prosecutions.

Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 336p.