Introduction – transnational organised crime and terrorism:different peas, same pod

The nexus between terrorism and organised crime consists in a strategic alliance between two non-state actors, able to exploit illegal markets, threaten the security of individuals, and influence policy-making on a global level. Recent Europol reports have pointed towards the importance of studying the links between organised crime and terrorist groups, and have underlined that the nature and extent of these connections have seldom been addressed from an academic perspective. Considering the degree of dangerousness that both organised crime and terrorism currently represent in the world, the collusion between these two phenomena is of urgent contemporary interest. Basing itself on geographical case-studies, this edited volume aims at contributing to the existing literature in three ways: by enriching the empirical knowledge on the nature of the crime-terror nexus and its evolution; by exploring the impact of the nexus within different economic, political and societal contexts; and by expanding on its theoretical conceptualization.

Measuring effectiveness in international financial crime prevention: Can we agree on a performance metric?

The attempts at carrying out terrorist attacks have become more prevalent. As a result, an increasing number of countries have become particularly vigilant against the means by which terrorists raise funds to finance their draconian acts against human life and property. Among the many counter-terrorism agencies in operation, governments have set up financial intelligence units (FIUs) within their borders for the purpose of tracking down terrorists’ funds. By investigating reported suspicious transactions, FIUs attempt to weed out financial criminals who use these illegal funds to finance terrorist activity. The prominent role played by FIUs means that their performance is always under the spotlight. By interviewing experts and conducting surveys of those associated with the fight against financial crime, this study investigated perceptions of FIU performance on a comparative basis between American and non-American FIUs. The target group of experts included financial institution personnel, civilian agents, law enforcement personnel, academicians, and consultants. Questions for the interview and surveys were based on the Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard (BSC) methodology. One of the objectives of this study was to help determine the suitability of the BSC to this arena. While FIUs in this study have concentrated on performance by measuring outputs such as the number of suspicious transaction reports investigated, this study calls for a focus on outcomes involving all the parties responsible for financial criminal investigations. It is only through such an integrated approach that these various entities will be able to improve performance in solving financial crime. Experts in financial intelligence strongly believed that the quality and timeliness of intelligence was more important than keeping track of the number of suspicious transaction reports. Finally, this study concluded that the BSC could be appropriately applied to the arena of financial crime prevention even though the emphasis is markedly different from that in the private sector. While priority in the private sector is given to financial outcomes, in this arena employee growth and internal processes were perceived as most important in achieving a satisfactory outcome.

The development of optimized high performance liquid chromatography systems for the analysis of improvised explosives

Existing instrumental techniques must be adaptable to the analysis of novel explosives if science is to keep up with the practices of terrorists and criminals. The focus of this work has been the development of analytical techniques for the analysis of two types of novel explosives: ascorbic acid-based propellants, and improvised mixtures of concentrated hydrogen peroxide/fuel. In recent years, the use of these explosives in improvised explosive devices (IEDs) has increased. It is therefore important to develop methods which permit the identification of the nature of the original explosive from post-blast residues. Ascorbic acid-based propellants are low explosives which employ an ascorbic acid fuel source with a nitrate/perchlorate oxidizer. A method which utilized ion chromatography with indirect photometric detection was optimized for the analysis of intact propellants. Post-burn and post-blast residues if these propellants were analyzed. It was determined that the ascorbic acid fuel and nitrate oxidizer could be detected in intact propellants, as well as in the post-burn and post-blast residues. Degradation products of the nitrate and perchlorate oxidizers were also detected. With a quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometer (QToFMS), exact mass measurements are possible. When an HPLC instrument is coupled to a QToFMS, the combination of retention time with accurate mass measurements, mass spectral fragmentation information, and isotopic abundance patterns allows for the unequivocal identification of a target analyte. An optimized HPLC-ESI-QToFMS method was applied to the analysis of ascorbic acid-based propellants. Exact mass measurements were collected for the fuel and oxidizer anions, and their degradation products. Ascorbic acid was detected in the intact samples and half of the propellants subjected to open burning; the intact fuel molecule was not detected in any of the post-blast residue. Two methods were optimized for the analysis of trace levels of hydrogen peroxide: HPLC with fluorescence detection (HPLC-FD), and HPLC with electrochemical detection (HPLC-ED). Both techniques were extremely selective for hydrogen peroxide. Both methods were applied to the analysis of post-blast debris from improvised mixtures of concentrated hydrogen peroxide/fuel; hydrogen peroxide was detected on variety of substrates. Hydrogen peroxide was detected in the post-blast residues of the improvised explosives TATP and HMTD.

Law Enforcement Actions in Urban Spaces Governed by Violent Non-State Entities: Lessons from Latin America

In response to a crime epidemic afflicting Latin America since the early 1990s, several countries in the region have resorted to using heavy-force police or military units to physically retake territories de facto controlled by non-State criminal or insurgent groups. After a period of territory control, the heavy forces hand law enforcement functions in the retaken territories to regular police officers, with the hope that the territories and their populations will remain under the control of the state. To a varying degree, intensity, and consistency, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Jamaica have adopted such policies since the mid-1990s. During such operations, governments need to pursue two interrelated objectives: to better establish the state’s physical presence and to realign the allegiance of the population in those areas toward the state and away from the non-State criminal entities. From the perspective of law enforcement, such operations entail several critical decisions and junctions, such as: Whether or not to announce the force insertion in advance. The decision trades off the element of surprise and the ability to capture key leaders of the criminal organizations against the ability to minimize civilian casualties and force levels. The latter, however, may allow criminals to go to ground and escape capture. Governments thus must decide whether they merely seek to displace criminal groups to other areas or maximize their decapitation capacity. Intelligence flows rarely come from the population. Often, rival criminal groups are the best source of intelligence. However, cooperation between the State and such groups that goes beyond using vetted intelligence provided by the groups, such as a State tolerance for militias, compromises the rule-of-law integrity of the State and ultimately can eviscerate even public safety gains. Sustaining security after initial clearing operations is at times even more challenging than conducting the initial operations. Although unlike the heavy forces, traditional police forces, especially if designed as community police, have the capacity to develop trust of the community and ultimately focus on crime prevention, developing such trust often takes a long time. To develop the community’s trust, regular police forces need to conduct frequent on-foot patrols with intensive nonthreatening interactions with the population and minimize the use of force. Moreover, sufficiently robust patrol units need to be placed in designated beats for substantial amount of time, often at least over a year. Establishing oversight mechanisms, including joint police-citizens’ boards, further facilities building trust in the police among the community. After disruption of the established criminal order, street crime often significantly rises and both the heavy-force and community-police units often struggle to contain it. The increase in street crime alienates the population of the retaken territory from the State. Thus developing a capacity to address street crime is critical. Moreover, the community police units tend to be vulnerable (especially initially) to efforts by displaced criminals to reoccupy the cleared territories. Losing a cleared territory back to criminal groups is extremely costly in terms of losing any established trust and being able to recover it. Rather than operating on a priori determined handover schedule, a careful assessment of the relative strength of regular police and criminal groups post-clearing operations is likely to be a better guide for timing the handover from heavy forces to regular police units. Cleared territories often experience not only a peace dividend, but also a peace deficit – in the rise new serious crime (in addition to street crime). Newly – valuable land and other previously-inaccessible resources can lead to land speculation and forced displacement; various other forms of new crime can also significantly rise. Community police forces often struggle to cope with such crime, especially as it is frequently linked to legal business. Such new crime often receives little to no attention in the design of the operations to retake territories from criminal groups. But without developing an effective response to such new crime, the public safety gains of the clearing operations can be altogether lost.

The Development of High Performance Liquid Chromatography Systems for the Analysis of Improvised Explosives

Existing instrumental techniques must be adaptable to the analysis of novel explosives if science is to keep up with the practices of terrorists and criminals. The focus of this work has been the development of analytical techniques for the analysis of two types of novel explosives: ascorbic acid-based propellants, and improvised mixtures of concentrated hydrogen peroxide/fuel. In recent years, the use of these explosives in improvised explosive devices (IEDs) has increased. It is therefore important to develop methods which permit the identification of the nature of the original explosive from post-blast residues. Ascorbic acid-based propellants are low explosives which employ an ascorbic acid fuel source with a nitrate/perchlorate oxidizer. A method which utilized ion chromatography with indirect photometric detection was optimized for the analysis of intact propellants. Post-burn and post-blast residues if these propellants were analyzed. It was determined that the ascorbic acid fuel and nitrate oxidizer could be detected in intact propellants, as well as in the post-burn and post-blast residues. Degradation products of the nitrate and perchlorate oxidizers were also detected. With a quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometer (QToFMS), exact mass measurements are possible. When an HPLC instrument is coupled to a QToFMS, the combination of retention time with accurate mass measurements, mass spectral fragmentation information, and isotopic abundance patterns allows for the unequivocal identification of a target analyte. An optimized HPLC-ESI-QToFMS method was applied to the analysis of ascorbic acid-based propellants. Exact mass measurements were collected for the fuel and oxidizer anions, and their degradation products. Ascorbic acid was detected in the intact samples and half of the propellants subjected to open burning; the intact fuel molecule was not detected in any of the post-blast residue. Two methods were optimized for the analysis of trace levels of hydrogen peroxide: HPLC with fluorescence detection (HPLC-FD), and HPLC with electrochemical detection (HPLC-ED). Both techniques were extremely selective for hydrogen peroxide. Both methods were applied to the analysis of post-blast debris from improvised mixtures of concentrated hydrogen peroxide/fuel; hydrogen peroxide was detected on variety of substrates. Hydrogen peroxide was detected in the post-blast residues of the improvised explosives TATP and HMTD.

Representações discursivas sobre lampião e seu bando em notícias de jornais mossoroenses (1927): “O mais audaz e miserável de todos os bandidos” e o seu “grupo de asseclas”

In this doctoral thesis analyzed the discursive representations of the bandit Lampião, the Lantern and his bandits gang in news mossoroenses newspapers published in the twenties of the last century (1927), when the gang invasion of the city of Mossoro in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, on June 13 of that year. To this end, we take as basis the theoretical assumptions of linguistics Textual, especially the narrower context of what is known today as Textual Analysis of the Discourses (ADT), theoretical and descriptive approach to linguistic studies of the text proposed by the French linguist Jean-Michel Adam. In this approach, we are interested in, specifically, the semantic level of the text, highlighting the notion of discursive representation, studied based on benchmarking operations, predication, modification, spatial location and temporal connection and analogy (ADAM, 2011; CASTILHO, 2010; KOCH, 2002, 2006; MARCUSCHI, 1998, 2008; NEVES, 2007; RODRIGUES, PASSEGGI & SILVA NETO, 2010). The corpus of this research consists of three reports in the twenties of the last century in newspapers The Mossoroense, Correio do Povo and the Northeast, and reconstituted through the collection held in the Municipal Museum Lauro Scotland files, Memorial Resistance Mossoro, both located in Natal, and in the news collection of Lampião newspapers in Natal, north of Rio Grande Raimundo Nonato historian. The discursive representations are built from the use of semantic analysis operations. Lampião to, the following representations are built: bandit, head of bandits, briber, defeated, Captain and Lord. To the outlaws of Lampião bunch of the following discursive representations were built: group, gang, gangsters, mates, bloodthirsty pack, brigands, bandits, criminals, burglar horde, and wild beasts. These representations reveal mainly the views of the newspapers of that time, which represented mainly the interests of traders, politicians, the government itself and generally Mossoró population.

Histories and Historiographies of Juvenile Delinquency in Nineteenth-Century England

This thesis explores the history of juvenile delinquency in England during the decades bracketing the nineteenth century’s turn and how modern historians have analyzed this period. The purported birth of juvenile delinquency during this tumultuous period is widely attributed by both historians and Victorians to the explosive growth in England’s urban population. Contemporary statistics of criminal prosecutions confirmed emergent literary tropes that viewed childhoods spent on city streets as inevitably corrupting. Public policy and private charity for more than a century thereafter would recommend removal from the city’s corrupting cultural influences to a highly romanticized vision of rural space as healing innocence. This thesis challenges the juxtaposition of country and city on which such explanations of juvenile delinquency rest. Utilizing the neglected testimony of magistrates, constables, rural residents, and juvenile criminals themselves, it will demonstrate that rural England also suffered from increasing juvenile crime in this period. It will illuminate the complex social, economic, and political dynamics responsible for the oft-cited statistical gap between rural and urban arrest rates, showing that the latter were in neither case transparent measures of criminal activity. Crime was on the rise in English rural counties as transformed by industrial capitalism as were England’s booming cities, suggesting that historians who continue to emphasize the dichotomy between the city and the country have not only recycled a Victorian narrative but also limited their own understandings of the time.

Intergenerational effects of parental substance-related convictions and adult drug treatment court participation on children's school performance.

This study examined the intergenerational effects of parental conviction of a substance-related charge on children's academic performance and, conditional on a conviction, whether completion of an adult drug treatment court (DTC) program was associated with improved school performance. State administrative data from North Carolina courts, birth records, and school records were linked for 2005-2012. Math and reading end-of-grade test scores and absenteeism were examined for 5 groups of children, those with parents who: were not convicted on any criminal charge, were convicted on a substance-related charge and not referred by a court to a DTC, were referred to a DTC but did not enroll, enrolled in a DTC but did not complete, and completed a DTC program. Accounting for demographic and socioeconomic factors, the school performance of children whose parents were convicted of a substance-related offense was worse than that of children whose parents were not convicted on any charge. These differences were statistically significant but substantially reduced after controlling for socioeconomic characteristics; for example, mother's educational attainment. We found no evidence that parent participation in an adult DTC program led to improved school performance of their children. While the children of convicted parents fared worse on average, much--but not all--of this difference was attributed to socioeconomic factors, with the result that parental conviction remained a risk factor for poorer school performance. Even though adult DTCs have been shown to have other benefits, we could detect no intergenerational benefit in improved school performance of their children.

Too beautiful for thieves and pickpockets: a history of the Victorian convict prison on Spike Island

Spike Island holds a unique place among the world’s prisons: a welcome necessity for the prison authorities of Ireland, a remote and dangerous posting for its staff, a grand hell for those convicted to stay behind its walls. For almost four decades the Victorian prison on Spike Island was home to Ireland’s most serious and notorious criminals. Established in the midst of one of the worst famines in global history, this huge facility became the largest prison in what was then the United Kingdom, dwarfing institutions like Dartmoor, Pentonville, Mountjoy and Kilmainham. High death rates during its formative years meant that many of its malnourished inmates were laid to rest beneath its sod. Yet Spike Island was to become a beacon of penal reform, influencing modern correctional systems in countries as far apart as the USA and Germany. The story told in this book is one that is, in turn, dramatic, shocking, touching and humorous. The life of the prison was vibrant, peopled by the unfortunate of the society alongside those who committed serious, sometimes gruesome, crimes. This is the story of the establishment and evolution of the prison over 36 years, the often fascinating lives of prisoners and staff and of a time when a renowned Irish fortress of British military power entered the annals of penal infamy.

Speed and Accuracy of People's Trustworthiness Judgment across Cultures

Previous research on person perception has shown that people form first impressions with remarkable speed and accuracy, but relatively little is known about the speed and accuracy of trustworthiness judgments across cultures. The present research examined these by asking Chinese and Canadians to infer trustworthiness from faces of criminals and non-criminals from different cultural backgrounds across two domains (i.e., financial crime in Study 1 and violent crime in Study 2). Across both studies, we found that when participants were given time and opportunity, Chinese tended to take a longer time than Canadians to make trustworthiness judgments (although this difference did not reach statistical significance in Study 2). In Study 1, we found that perceivers from both cultures were accurate at judging European North Americans (ENA) corporate criminals as less trustworthy than ENA non-criminal executives, although they did not differentiate Asian corporate criminals from Asian non-criminal executives. In Study 2, we found that perceivers from both cultures were accurate at judging both Asian and ENA violent criminals as less trustworthy than Asian and ENA non-criminals. Chinese were also accurate at rating Middle Eastern violent criminals as less trustworthy than Middle Eastern non-criminals, but Canadians did not differentiate them in terms of their trustworthiness ratings. In terms of their crime likelihood ratings, however, both Chinese and Canadians accurately rated all the criminals as more likely to commit violent crimes than the non-criminals, regardless of the targets’ ethnicities. Finally, we discussed some of the practical implications of our findings on detection of deception, as well as how providing a context for trustworthiness judgments might have played an important role in people’s judgmental accuracy.

The Online Romance Scam: A Serious Cybercrime

The Online Romance Scam is a relatively new form of fraud that became apparent in about 2008. In this crime, criminals pretend to initiate a relationship through online dating sites then defraud their victims of large sums of money. This paper presents some descriptive statistics about knowledge and victimization of the online dating romance scam in Great Britain. Our study found that despite its newness, an estimated 230,000 British citizens may have fallen victim to this crime. We conclude that there needs to be some rethinking about providing avenues for victims to report the crime or at least making them more comfortable when doing so.

Understandings of transnational families in debates on Migration and development

International migration sets in motion a range of significant transnational processes that connect countries and people. How migration interacts with development and how policies might promote and enhance such interactions have, since the turn of the millennium, gained attention on the international agenda. The recognition that transnational practices connect migrants and their families across sending and receiving societies forms part of this debate. The ways in which policy debate employs and understands transnational family ties nevertheless remain underexplored. This article sets out to discern the understandings of the family in two (often intermingled) debates concerned with transnational interactions: The largely state and policydriven discourse on the potential benefits of migration on economic development, and the largely academic transnational family literature focusing on issues of care and the micro-politics of gender and generation. Emphasizing the relation between diverse migration-development dynamics and specific family positions, we ask whether an analytical point of departure in respective transnational motherhood, fatherhood or childhood is linked to emphasizing certain outcomes. We conclude by sketching important strands of inclusions and exclusions of family matters in policy discourse and suggest ways to better integrate a transnational family perspective in global migration-development policy.

Bullying in primary school.

This chapter is focussed on the bullying of, and by, Dutch students below age 13. The first questions to be answered are what is 'bullying', and how can it be distinguished from other types of disruptive behaviours? The answers to these questions are given by means of conceptual definitions, based on empirical research and the use of precise instrumentation to measure relevant bullying behaviours. Second, how common is bullying and being bullied among students aged 4-12 in preschools and primary schools? Third, what are the characteristics or variables that function either as correlates or as causes of bullying behaviour? Many risk and promotive factors may be relevant and are mentioned in intervention research to reduce bullying. The final, and probably most important question, focuses on systemic or sustainable prevention of bullying behaviour. Here I sketch a systemic multilevel prevention approach in preschool and primary schools in the Netherlands.

Trafficking in human beings for for forced labour in domestic and international law: a comparative legal study of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom

This thesis examines the effect of combating of human trafficking as a crime. Special emphasis has been placed on forced labour and the rights of trafficked victims and their protection. The study explores various legislations undertaken at regional, national and international levels and considers rights of trafficked victims under international human rights and Islamic rights. The aim of the thesis is to provide a critical and comparative analysis of the legal systems of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and the United Kingdom (UK) in terms of human trafficking. The thesis consists of eight chapter; each covering a different aspect of the study. It begins by providing background information regarding the issue of human trafficking and proceeds to examine developments of legal frameworks across the two jurisdictions to combat this crime and penalize the criminals. It seeks to examine the legal system pertaining to human trafficking for forced labour and analyse the three distinct platforms, that is, prevention, protection, and punishment, by comparing the legal systems of the KSA and the UK. The examination of both countries aims to identify the strength and weaknesses of the KSA system as compared to the UK system. Thus, it concludes that the KSA can improve its ranking from Tier 2 watch list to Tier 1 if reforms are introduced in the legislation and enforcement domains. The study also demonstrates how the UK and the KSA portray ‘human trafficking’ in their regional laws. A problem often faced during the information-gathering and investigation stages is the lack of available evidence against traffickers, a particular issue in the KSA. The thesis concludes that the transnational aspect of this phenomenon makes it necessary to establish a thorough and comprehensive legal framework to cover all matters pertaining to this crime, including the protection of victims and punishment of criminals in the KSA and the UK, including immigration and ‘kafala’ strategies that may be of value in future researches.

Las circunstancias de agravación punitiva en el derecho penal colombiano. Una propuesta interpretativa a la luz del principio de non bis in ídem

Este texto pretende desarrollar una propuesta de interpretación restrictiva de la aplicación del sistema de circunstancias de agravación de la responsabilidad en el Derecho penal colombiano, con especial acento en las circunstancias genéricas de agravación punitiva, teniendo como referente interpretativo el principio constitucional de non bis in ídem