By John G. Bellamy

Murder in the sixteenth century, which to English men and women of that time meant planned slaying, usually with an element of stealth or with the victim taken unawares, was not then a common crime; rather the reverse. For example, Sir Thomas Smith, the knowledgeable Tudor legal commentator, tells us that murder by poisoning was virtually unknown in his day. Also writing in the reign of Elizabeth I was William Harrison, who, in a contribution to Holinshed's Chronicles that dealt with the criminal law, its penalties and its impact on society, stated that, although manslaughter and "bloudie robberies" occurred "now and then," "we do not often heare of horrible, merciless, and wilfull murthers."1 Nor do other writers of the period who touch on criminal law or on crime and public order indicate anything different. These brief indications of a relatively low murder rate are borne out by statistics to be garnered from the extant assize records of the late sixteenth century. Because of the existence of victims' corpses, murder may well have been among the most reported of felonies (that is, reported to officers of the law), yet in Sussex and Cheshire in Elizabeth's reign only about 5 percent of all persons put on trial for felony were suspected murderers, while the relatively high rate of 8 percent in Kent has to be set against the trivial 1 percent in Essex. The overall impression is that probably about 1 in every 20 indicted felons was believed to be a murderer.

History Press Limited, Dec 1, 2008, 212 pages

By Francesco Bruno M.D.

Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Japan, Jordan, Italy, Malaysia, the United States (State of New York), Singapore, Sweden, and the United Kingdom participated. In each country, local researchers conducted the study following a plan developed for the whole project. The multidisciplinary methodology included four phases: a comparative analysis of antidrug legislation, preliminary national reports, eight vignettes administered to different groups to gain information on the perceptions of the justice system, and guided interviews conducted with drug addicts. The data were quantified, and evaluation scales were constructed for purposes of comparison. Binary automatic scoring was applied to data from the vignettes and interviews. The data are shown graphically in 97 tables. Three conclusions are emphasized. First, drug abuse is apparently both quantitatively and qualitatively more serious where the system is perceived as less harsh and more permissive. Second, a significant correlation exists between knowledge of the law and the efficacy of the system. Third, a close association exists between the abuse of drugs and criminal behavior. These points are important for policymakers to consider. The studies in New York, Sweden, and the United Kingdom are outlined. Attachments include a 560-item bibliography and a list of experts and researchers involved in the study. Other publications from the United Nations Social Defense Research Institute are also listed.

United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute, 1984, 246p.

By Alan Dower

Hutchinson of Australia, 1979, 322p.

By Elisabeth Duban,

The OSCE participating States have agreed to several commitments that specifically mandate the Organization’s structures to assist participating States with developing programmes aimed at preventing all forms of gender-based violence, as outlined in the 2004 Action Plan for the Promotion of Gender Equality, and OSCE Ministerial Council decisions from 2005, 2014 and 2018 which emphasize the importance of collecting and disseminating reliable, disaggregated data on violence against women, alongside efforts to criminalize gender-based violence. Femicide, the gender-related killing of women and girls, is a global phenomenon and represents the most extreme manifestation of violence against women. This report aims to assess the response to femicide across the 57 OSCE participating States, focusing on three key areas: the criminal justice response, the collection of comparable data, and the reporting and analysis of femicide.

Prague: The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), 2025. 50p.

By Human Rights Watch

Following the July 2024 presidential elections, electoral authorities in Venezuela announced that Nicolas Maduro had been re-elected president, despite substantial evidence to the contrary. When people took to the streets to demand a fair counting of votes, Venezuelan authorities responded with brutal repression. At least 24 protesters and bystanders were killed and over 2,000 people were detained in connection with post-electoral protests. Punished for Seeking Change documents human rights violations committed against protesters, bystanders, opposition leaders, and critics in the post-electoral protests and the months that followed. It implicates Venezuelan authorities and pro-government armed groups, known as “colectivos,” in widespread abuses, including the killing of protesters and bystanders, enforced disappearances of opposition party members and foreign nationals, arbitrary detention and prosecution of children and others, and torture and ill-treatment of detainees. With 8 million Venezuelans abroad, the rights crisis in Venezuela remains arguably the most consequential in the Western Hemisphere. Governments should support accountability efforts for these grave human rights violations, call for the release of people arbitrarily detained, and expand access to asylum and other forms of international protection for Venezuelans fleeing repression.

New York: HRW, 2025. 109p.

By Gilbert Munoz Cornejo

This study investigates the incidence and characteristics of cybersecurity data breaches across U.S. rural and urban hospitals from 2016 to 2022, employing a two-stage design. Stage 1 used logistic regression to determine whether a hospital had a breach, controlling for key variables. Stage 2 analyzed the subset of 212 hospitals that experienced a breach, focusing on breach type, and breach location. The results revealed that 3.46% of hospitals experienced a breach, with urban facilities showing a slightly higher rate (3.84%) than rural ones (2.64%). Larger, non profit, and non-affiliated hospitals and those in the Northeast faced higher breach odds. Once breached, no significant rural–urban differences emerged regarding breach characteristics, but year of breach, ownership type, and membership affiliation played key roles in how incidents manifested. These findings underscore the importance of targeted cybersecurity strategies, informing healthcare administrators, policymakers, and cybersecurity professionals in safeguarding patient data across diverse hospital settings.    

Security Journal, 2025, 21p.

By  Talia A. Dunyak 

Over the past several decades, travel and tourism have become both more accessible and cheaper for people. Until the Covid-19 pandemic, tourism was projected to continue growing rapidly in popularity, with estimates that by 2030 more than 1.8 billion people would travel internationally every year. 2 The increase in international and domestic travel and tourism brings benefits such as expanded cultural understanding, economic growth, and preservation of local monuments and traditions. However, despite the benefits of tourism, there is a dark side to the industry: human trafficking. This report seeks to map out the intersections between human trafficking and tourism and focuses primarily on sex trafficking and labor trafficking’s presence within the tourism sector. The discussion of sex trafficking will include sex tourism, child sex tourism, and the use of hotels in the sex trade. The discussion of labor exploitation will include child labor and beggars, hospitality staff, construction staff, and labor trafficking in the supply chain. The report will also touch on how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected and changed modern slavery in the tourism industry. The report will conclude with mapping the current interventions and recommendations for combatting instances of human trafficking within the tourism industry. 

Human Trafficking Search,  2021 28p.

By Brian G. Knight and Ana Tribin 

This paper investigates the link between violent crime and immigration using data from Colombian municipalities during the recent episode of immigration from Venezuela. The key finding is that, following the closing and then re-opening of the border in 2016, which precipitated a massive immigration wave, homicides in Colombia increased in areas close to the border with Venezuela. Using information on the nationality of the victim, we find that this increase was driven by homicides involving Venezuelan victims, with no evidence of a statistically significant increase in homicides in which Colombians were victimized. Thus, in contrast to xenophobic fears that migrants might victimize natives, it was migrants, rather than natives, who faced risks associated with immigration. Using arrests data, there is no corresponding increase in arrests for homicides in these areas. Taken together, these results suggest that the increase in homicides close to the border documented here are driven by crimes against migrants and have occurred without a corresponding increase in arrests, suggesting that some of these crimes have gone unsolved.  

Working Paper 27620

Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2020. 34p.

By Dinu Ostavciuc, Gina Aurora Necula

The Art. in question is dedicated to the specificity of detecting the evidence of an offence and its prosecution, particularly referring to the organised illegal migration, both from the point of view of criminal science and from the point of view of the criminal lawsuit. The subject under investigation here is both practically and legislatively sensitive. The aim of the research is to establish and elucidate the legal interactions, as well as to develop a practical algorithm for law enforcement authorities to detect evidence of organised illegal migration. The study comes with recommendations for law enforcement and prosecution bodies applicable both to the stage of establishing reasonable suspicion of committing the crime of organised illegal migration and to the stage of criminal prosecution initiation. At the same time, we aim at pointing out those features of the initial actions of the law enforcement bodies to which attention should be drawn and the indicated actions should be carried out in order to decide whether or not the conditions of the specified crime are met. The research comes up with findings, recommendations and proposals of lex ferenda, in order to reach the top effectiveness of the organised illegal migration investigation, implicitly that the investigating and prosecuting authorities detect the evidence of organised illegal migration crime within a reasonable extend of time and expeditiously start the prosecution, with respect to the principle of formality of the criminal process.

Fiat Iustitia, Issue Year: 2/2023, 16p.

By Dany Bahar; Meagan Dooley; Andrew Selee

The sudden, large-scale movement of nearly 5.2 million Venezuelans out of their country, most since 2014, with more than 4.2 million of them settling in other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, has raised concerns about how this is affecting receiving communities, with some politicians and pundits claiming that these new arrivals are leading to a rise in crime. Yet few studies have been conducted in the region that examine whether and what type of link may exist between immigration and crime, in part because immigration at this scale is a relatively new phenomenon in most Latin American countries, and this particular mass migration is so recent.1 This issue brief explores data in the three countries with the largest number of Venezuelan migrants and refugees as of 2020—Colombia, Peru, and Chile, which together host more than 2 million Venezuelan nationals—to better understand whether and what sort of relationship exists between this immigration and crime rates. Some of the datasets used are publicly available, while others were obtained by the authors through direct requests to government agencies. For each country, this study analyzes crime data, when possible disaggregated by nationality, and data on the presence of Venezuelans at the subnational level (though the available data do not allow for this to be done in exactly the same way in all three countries). For the most part, analysis of data from 2019 suggests that Venezuelan immigrants commit substantially fewer crimes than the native born, relative to their share in the overall population, signaling that public perceptions on newcomers driving up crime rates are misleading. In Chile, for example, only 0.7 percent of people indicted for crimes in 2019 were Venezuelan nationals, even though Venezuelans made up 2.4 percent of the population. Similarly, in Peru, where this analysis uses imprisonment data as a proxy for crime rates, 1.3 percent of those in prison were foreign born—of any nationality—as of 2019, whereas Venezuelan nationals make up 2.9 percent of the country’s overall population. For the most part, analysis of data from 2019 suggests that Venezuelan immigrants commit substantially fewer crimes than the native born. In Colombia this relationship holds true for violent crimes, as Venezuelan nationals comprised 2.3 percent of arrests for violent crimes in 2019, while they represent 3.2 percent of the population. For crimes overall, however, the picture is more mixed, as 5.4 percent of all arrests were of Venezuelans, a rate higher than their share of the population. Most of these crimes were reported in border regions, perhaps a reflection of the illicit smuggling networks that operate across the Colombian-Venezuelan border. In exploring plausible explanations for crime rates in different parts of the country, it appears that the regions in which Venezuelans were responsible for higher shares of crimes are also those where Venezuelans face higher rates of unemployment. This finding is consistent with the literature that suggests granting migrants and refugees formal labor market access can reduce the incidence of crime among this population. The data in this study provide strong evidence that the presence of Venezuelan immigrants is not leading to increased crime in the region—certainly not in the three countries that have received the largest number of Venezuelan migrants and refugees. Indeed, in most cases they tend to commit a smaller share of crimes than their proportion of the population. Even in the one case where the results are more ambiguous—Colombia—they are more involved in minor crimes and far less involved in major crimes than their population share. These results suggest that fears about Venezuelan newcomers driving up crime are simply misplaced. Sudden mass migration certainly presents challenges to receiving societies, but, at least in this case, a major crime wave is not one of them. 

Washington, DC; Brookings Institute, 2020. 27p.

By Joshua D. Freilitch and Graeme R. Newman

The first series of the International Library of Criminology, Criminal Justice and Penology has established itself as a major research resource by bringing together the most significant journal essays in contemporary criminology, criminal justice and penology. The series made available to researchers, teachers and students an extensive range of essays which are indispensable for obtaining an overview of the latest theories and findings in this fast changing subject. Indeed the rapid growth of interesting scholarly work in the field has created a demand for a second series which like the first consists of volumes dealing with criminological schools and theories as well as with approaches to particular areas of crime criminal justice and penology. Each volume is edited by a recognised authority who has selected twenty or so of the best journal articles in the field of their special competence and provided an informative introduction giving a summary of the field and the relevance of the articles chosen. The original pagination is retained for ease of reference. The difficulties of keeping on top of the steadily growing literature in criminology are complicated by the many disciplines from which its theories and findings are drawn (sociology, law, sociology of law, psychology, psychiatry, philosophy and economics are the most obvious). The development of new specialisms with their own journals (policing, victimology, mediation) as well as the debates between rival schools of thought (feminist criminology, left realism, critical criminology, abolitionism etc.) make necessary overviews that offer syntheses of the state of the art.

Ashgate, 2007, 510p.

By Jeese O. Stutman

It was only after an active experience of eighteen years in research and correctional work, in more or less intimate contact with not less than 50,000 convicts of all classes, young and old, male and female, felons and misdemeanants, of many races, mental conditions and degrees of criminality, that the writer was willing to compile his findings on the nature of the work he has been attempting to perform. Many able and comprehensive articles have appeared from time to time on sporadic phases of criminology and correctional methods; but seldom has any prison manager undertaken to present a concise statement of the philosophy and practice of modern methods.

Macmillan, 1926, 419 pages