Capabilities of Police and Military Forces in Central America -- A Comparative Analysis of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras an d Nicaragua

A difficult transition to a new paradigm of Democratic Security and the subsequent process of military restructuring during the nineties led El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua to re-consider their old structures and functions of their armed forces and police agencies. This study compares the institutions in the four countries mentioned above to assess their current condition and response capacity in view of the contemporary security challenges in Central America. This report reveals that the original intention of limiting armies to defend and protect borders has been threatened by the increasing participation of armies in public security. While the strength of armies has been consolidated in terms of numbers, air and naval forces have failed to become strengthened or sufficiently developed to effectively combat organized crime and drug trafficking and are barely able to conduct air and sea operations. Honduras has been the only country that has maintained a proportional distribution of its armed forces. However, security has been in the hands of a Judicial Police, supervised by the Public Ministry. The Honduran Judicial Police has been limited to exercising preventive police duties, prohibited from carrying out criminal investigations. Nicaragua, meanwhile, possesses a successful police force, socially recognized for maintaining satisfactory levels of security surpassing the Guatemalan and El Salvadoran police, which have not achieved similar results despite of having set up a civilian police force separate from the military. El Salvador meanwhile, has excelled in promoting a Police Academy and career professional education, even while not having military attachés in other countries. Regarding budgetary issues, the four countries allocate almost twice the amount of funding on their security budgets in comparison to what is allocated to their defense budgets. However, spending in both areas is low when taking into account each country's GDP as well as their high crime rates. Regional security challenges must be accompanied by a professionalization of the regional armies focused on protecting and defending borders. Therefore, strong institutional frameworks to support the fight against crime and drug trafficking are required. It will require the strengthening of customs, greater control of illicit arms trafficking, investment in education initiatives, creating employment opportunities and facilitating significant improvements in the judicial system, as well as its accessibility to the average citizen.

Latin America and the Caribbean in 2011 and Beyond: A conversation among Latin America and Caribbean Specialists.

For the first time in more than fifty years, the domestic and external conflicts in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) are not primarily ideological in nature. Democracy continues to thrive and its promise still inspires hope. In contrast, the illegal production, consumption, and trading of drugs – and its links to criminal gangs and organizations – represent major challenges to the region, undermining several States’ already weak capacity to govern. While LAC macroeconomic stability has remained resilient, illegal economies fill the region, often offering what some States have not historically been able to provide – elements of human security, opportunities for social mobility, and basic survival. Areas controlled by drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) are now found in Central America, Mexico, and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, reflecting their competition for land routes and production areas. Cartels such as La Familia, Los Zetas, and Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC-Brazil), among others, operate like trade and financial enterprises that manage millions of dollars and resources, demonstrating significant business skills in adapting to changing circumstances. They are also merciless in their application of violence to preserve their lucrative enterprises. The El Salvador-Guatemala-Honduras triangle in Central America is now the most violent region in the world, surpassing regions in Africa that have been torn by civil strife for years. In Brazil’s favelas and Guatemala’s Petén region, the military is leaving the barracks again; not to rule, however, but to supplement and even replace the law enforcement capacity of weak and discredited police forces. This will challenge the military to apply lessons learned during the course of their experience in government, or from the civil wars that plagued the region for nearly 50 years during the Cold War. Will they be able to conduct themselves according to the professional ethics that have been inculcated over the past 20 years without incurring violations of human rights? Belief in their potential to do good is high according to many polls as the Armed Forces still enjoy a favorable perception in most societies, despite frequent involvement in corruption. Calling them to fight DTOs, however, may bring them too close to the illegal activities they are being asked to resist, or even rekindle the view that only a “strong hand” can resolve national troubles. The challenge of governance is occurring as contrasts within the region are becoming sharper. There is an increasing gap between nations positioned to surpass their “developing nation” status and those that are practically imploding as the judicial, political and enforcement institutions fall further into the quagmire of illicit activities. Several South American nations are advancing their political and economic development. Brazil in particular has realized macro-economic stability, made impressive gains in poverty reduction, and is on track to potentially become a significant oil producer. It is also an increasingly influential power, much closer to the heralded “emerging power” category that it aspired to for most of the 20th century. In contrast, several Central American States have become so structurally deficient, and have garnered such limited legitimacy, that their countries have devolved into patches of State controlled and non-State-controlled territory, becoming increasingly vulnerable to DTO entrenchment. In the Caribbean, the drug and human trafficking business also thrives. Small and larger countries are experiencing the growing impact of illicit economies and accompanying crime and violence. Among these, Guyana and Suriname face greater uncertainty, as they juggle both their internal affairs and their relations with Brazil and Venezuela. Cuba also faces new challenges as it continues focusing on internal rather than external affairs and attempts to ensure a stable leadership succession while simultaneously trying to reform its economy. Loosening the regime’s tight grip on the economy while continuing to curtail citizen’s civil rights will test the leadership’s ability to manage change and prevent a potential socio-economic crisis from turning into an existential threat. Cuba’s past ideological zest is now in the hands of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, who continues his attempts to bring the region together under Venezuelan leadership ideologically based on a “Bolivarian” anti-U.S. banner, without much success. The environment and natural disasters will merit more attention in the coming years. Natural events will produce increasing scales of destruction as the States in the region fail to maintain and expand existing infrastructure to withstand such calamities and respond to their effects. Prospects for earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes are high, particularly in the Caribbean. In addition, there are growing rates of deforestation in nearly every country, along with a potential increase in cross-sector competition for resources. The losers might be small farmers, due to their inability to produce quantities commensurate to larger conglomerates. Regulations that could mitigate these types of situations are lacking or openly violated with near impunity. Indigenous and other vulnerable populations, including African descendants, in several Andean countries, are particularly affected by the increasing extraction of natural resources taking place amongst their terrain. This has led to protests against extraction activities that negatively affect their livelihoods, and in the process, these historically underprivileged groups have transitioned from agenda-based organization to one that is bringing its claims and grievances to the national political agenda, becoming more politically engaged. Symptomatic of these social issues is the region’s chronically poor quality of education that has consistently failed to reduce inequality and prepare new generations for jobs in the competitive global economy, particularly the more vulnerable populations. Simultaneously, the educational deficit is also exacerbated by the erosion of access to information and freedom of the press. The international panorama is also in flux. New security entities are challenging the old establishment. The Union of South American Nations, The South American Defense Council, the socialist Bolivarian Alliance, and other entities seem to be defying the Organization of American States and its own defense mechanisms, and excluding the U.S. And the U.S.’s attention to areas in conflict, namely Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan – rather than to the more stable Latin America and Caribbean – has left ample room for other actors to elbow in. China is now the top trading partner for Brazil. Russian and Iran are also finding new partnerships in the region, yet their links appear more politically inclined than those of China. Finally, the aforementioned increasing commercial ties by LAC States with China have accelerated a return to the preponderance of commodities as sources of income for their economies. The increased extraction of raw material for export will produce greater concern over the environmental impact that is created by the exploitation of natural resources. These expanded trade opportunities may prove counterproductive economically for countries in the region, particularly for Brazil and Chile, two countries whose economic policies have long sought diversification from dependence on commodities to the development of service and technology based industries.

Job Perceptions of Citizenship Behavior and Deviance: Musings from Behind the Bar

The purpose of this research was to examine bartender workplace behavior. This study begins with a review of the literature pertaining to the job of bartending, and positive work behavior (citizenship) and negative (deviant) workplace behavior. Data was collected by semi-structured interview. The bartenders expressed instances of both behaviors and showed support for a newly termed citizenship behavior, norm avoidance.

The Prison System and the Media: How “Orange Is The New Black” Engages with the Prison as a Normalizing Agent

The purpose of this project is to ascertain the ways in which Orange is the New Black uses its platform to either complicate or reify narratives about the prison system, prisoners and their relationship to the state. This research uses the works of Giorgio Agamben, Colin Dayan, Michelle Alexander and Lisa Guenther to situate the ways the state uses the prison and social narratives about the prison to extend its control on certain populations beyond prison walls through police presence, parole, the war on drugs and prison fees. From that basis, this work argues that while Orange does challenge some narratives about race and sexuality, because of its reliance on “bad choices” as a humanizing trope and its reliance on certain racialized stereotypes for entertainment, the show ultimately does more to reify existing narratives that support state interests.

Copyright and the creative commons

News, Crime and Law: Copyright and the creative commons

Mitigate DoS and DDoS Attack in Ad Hoc Networks

This paper proposes a technique to defeat Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in Ad Hoc Networks. The technique is divided into two main parts and with game theory and cryptographic puzzles. Introduced first is a new client puzzle to prevent DoS attacks in such networks. The second part presents a multiplayer game that takes place between the nodes of an ad hoc network and based on fundamental principles of game theory. By combining computational problems with puzzles, improvement occurs in the efficiency and latency of the communicating nodes and resistance in DoS and DDoS attacks. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the approach for devices with limited resources and for environments like ad hoc networks where nodes must exchange information quickly.

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.

Women, Drug use and Imprisonment. Intersectional Approach

Research on women prisoners and drug use is scarce in our context and needs theoretical tools to understand their life paths. In this article, I introduce an intersectional perspective on the experiences of women in prison, with particular focus on drug use. To illustrate this, I draw on the life story of one of the women interviewed in prison, in order to explore the axes of inequality in the lives of women in prison. These are usually presented as accumulated and articulated in complex and diverse ways. The theoretical tool of intersectionality allows us to gain an understanding of the phenomenon of women prisoners who have used drugs. This includes both the structural constraints in which they were embedded and the decisions they made, considering the circumstances of disadvantage in which they were immersed. This is a perspective which has already been intuitively present since the dawn of feminist criminology in the English-speaking world and can now be developed further due to new contributions in this field of gender studies.

Desistance from Sexual Offending: A Policy and Research Agenda Whose Time Has Come

For the past three decades or so, criminal justice policies have been enacted under the assumption that individuals who have been convicted of a sex offense are life course persistent sex offenders. In that context, research has been heavily focused on the assessment of risk and the prediction of sexual recidivism.Simultaneously, little to no attention has been given to the majority of individuals convicted of sex offenses who are not arrested or convicted again.Researchers have witnessed a growing gap between scientific knowledge and the sociolegal response to sexual violence and abuse. The current legal landscapecarries important social implications and significant life course impact for a growing number of individuals. More recently, theoretical and research breakthroughs in the study of desistance from crime and delinquency have been made that can help shed some light on desistance from sex offending. Desistance research, in the context of sex offending, however, represents serious theoretical, ethical, legal, and methodological challenges. To that end, this article introduces a special issue exploring current themes in desistance research by examining the life course of individuals convicted of a sexual offense while contextualizing their experiences of desistance.

Machine learning and data decompositions for complex networked dynamical systems

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-08

Counting Crime: an explanation of falling crime rates

The current crime decrease is defying traditional criminological theories such as those espoused by Bonger (1916) who researched the relationship between crime and economic conditions and stated that when unemployment rises so does crime. In both the USA and the UK crime has dropped dramatically while unemployment has risen. Both the USA and the UK have been in a deep recession since 2008 but the crime rate has decreased dramatically in both countries. Over the past 20 years it has halved in England and Wales. So how do we explain this phenomenon? Crime is down across the West but more so in Britain (see Figure 1). In England and Wales crime has decreased by 8% in a single year (2013). Vandalism is down by 14% and burglaries and vehicle crime by 11%. The murder rate in the UK is at its lowest since 1978; in 2013, 540 people were killed. Some less serious offences are vanishing too; antisocial behaviour has fallen from just under 4million incidents in 2007-08 to 2.4million. (The Economist 20/4/13). According to the most recent annual results from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), crime is at its lowest level since the survey began in 1981; the most recent annual figures from the survey, Latest figures from the CSEW show there were an estimated 7.3 million incidents of crime against households and resident adults (aged 16 and over) in England and Wales for the year ending March 2014. This represents a 14% decrease compared with the previous year’s survey, and is the lowest estimate since the survey began in 1981.

Clydebank in the inter-war years: a study in economic and social change

The main theme of this thesis is the social, economic and political response of a single community to economic dislocation in the interwar years. The community under consideration is Clydebank., The thesis is divided into several parts. Part I establishes the development of the burgh and considers the physical framework of the community, mainly in the years before 1919. The town's characteristics are examined in terms of population structure and development between the world wars. In the last part of this section there is a review of the economic structure of the burgh and changes occurring in it between 1919 and 1939. In Part II consideration is given to the actual extent and form of the unemployment affecting Clydebank at this time, and comparison is made with other communities and geographic/economic areas. Attention is then focussed more narrowly on the actual individuals suffering unemployment in the burgh during the 1930s, in an attempt to personalise the experience of the unemployed. Part III reviews central and local government responses to the situation in which Clydebank found itself oetween 1919 and 1939. Central government policies discussed include unemployment insurance, public works, the Special Areas legislation, assistance in the construction of the 534 "Queen Mary" and the direction of financial support to areas of particular need. Amongst local authority actions described are additional local support for the poor, public works, efforts to attract new industry to the town, attempts to deal with the housing problem which was particularly acute at times of high unemployment and measures to maintain health standards in the community. In Part IV the responses of the community to unemployment and government policies are detailed. The burgh's commercial sector is surveyed as are developments in leisure provision, religion, temperance and crime, and local politics. A number of individual responses are also given consideration such as migration, commuting, changes in birth and marriage rates and suicide.

The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 or the Health and Safety (Offences) Act 2008: corporate killing and the law

This thesis examines the regulatory and legislative approach taken in the United Kingdom to deal with deaths arising from work related activities and, in particular, deaths that can be directly attributed to the behaviour of corporations and other organisations. Workplace health and safety has traditionally been seen in the United Kingdom as a regulatory function which can be traced to the very earliest days of the Industrial Revolution. With an emphasis on preventing workplace accidents and ill-health through guidance, advice and support, the health and safety legislation and enforcement regime which had evolved over the best part of two centuries was considered inadequate to effectively punish corporations considered responsible for deaths caused by their activities following a series of disasters in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. To address this apparent inadequacy, the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 was introduced creating the offence of corporate manslaughter and corporate homicide. Based on a gross breach of a relevant duty of care resulting in the death of a person, the Act effectively changed what had previously considered a matter of regulation, an approach that had obvious weaknesses and shortcomings, to one of crime and criminal law. Whether this is the best approach to dealing with deaths caused by an organisation is challenged in this thesis and the apparent distinction between ‘criminal’ and ‘regulatory’ offences is also examined. It was found that an amended Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 to include a specific offence of corporate killing, in conjunction with the Health and Safety (Offences) Act 2008 would almost certainly have resulted in a more effective approach to dealing with organisations responsible for causing deaths as consequence of their activities. It was also found that there was no substantive difference between ‘regulatory’ and ‘criminal’ law other than the stigma associated with the latter, and that distinction would almost certainly disappear, at least in the context of worker safety, as a consequence of the penalties available following the introduction of the Health and Safety (Offences) Act 2008.

The Blame Game: Perceptions of Blame, Responsibility and Seriousness in Cyberbullying

Cyberbullying is gaining increasing media attention. Victims may be reluctant to report such bullying due to the perception by others that these victims somehow play a role in their own victimization. This perception, often referred to as victim blame, has been commonly researched in child sexual abuse, rape and hate crime cases, but it has not really been examined in cases of cyberbullying. To assess victim blame, 241 participants were recruited and asked to read a scenario of cyberbullying that involved either a 14-year-old or a 20-year old victim. Perpetrator gender and victim gender were also manipulated. It was found that perceptions regarding the scenario were influenced by the gender of the perpetrator and the age of the victim. This was particularly the case when perceptions of the seriousness of the crime and the necessity for legal action were assessed.